Daily Times

Weakened by years of war, Syria’s government appears ready for the country’s de facto partition, defending strategically important areas and leaving much of the country to rebels and jihadists. The strategy was in evidence recently with the Syrian army’s retreat from the ancient central city of Palmyra after an advance by Islamic State (IS). It seems that the division of Syria is inevitable. What is happening is not only the end of the Bashar al-Assad regime but the demise of Syria. Not only is Assad’s fate hard to predict, it is also unclear whether Syria will live to celebrate its 100th birthday. Assad’s shift to a defensive posture may be attributed to the dwindling forces available to the regime. Under a divided Syria, the Damascus government plans to devote its military resources to defending the strategically important territory and core area under its control. The consistent advances of extremist organisations in Syria have now pushed embattled President Bashar al-Assad to the point where military pressure on his regime is the heaviest since the beginning of the civil war four years ago. The Syrian army today has become a praetorian guard that is charged with protecting the regime’s strongholds and not the whole country.

The regime wants to control the coast, the two central cities of Hama and Homs, and the capital Damascus, maybe even a major portion of Aleppo. The red lines for the authorities are the Damascus-Beirut highway and the Damascus-Homs highway, as well as the coast with cities like Latakia and Tartus. Syria will essentially break up into a set of de facto mini-states. The Alawite state, run by the Assad regime and defended by the Syrian army and its national defence force militias, would emerge on the Mediterranean coast with control of Damascus. It also would likely control a corridor from Damascus to the Alawite provinces on the Mediterranean coast, perhaps including parts or all of the cities of Homs and Hama. A Kurdish state would emerge in the far northeast defended by Kurdish militias.

A moderate Sunni Islamist entity would control much of southern Syria, including some of the eastern Damascus suburbs and most of the area between Damascus and the Golan Heights. This entity would also control parts of the area along the Lebanese border and most of Homs province. This may be run by moderate rebels. The Salafi-jihadist emirate, run by IS (with some areas controlled by the al Qaeda-affiliated al Nusrah Front), would occupy most of northern Syria (including eastern parts of Aleppo) and virtually all of Ar Raqqah and Deir ez-Zor provinces in eastern Syria.

Let us see the division of Syria according to its demography. Syria’s 22 million people today (many of whom have become refugees in Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon), are a collection of communities under the control of armed militias. The majority of Syrians, about 12 million (60 percent of Syria), are Sunni Muslims and still subject to the rule of Assad. But from among them arose the main rebel groups led by the Nusrah Front and IS, aiming to establish an Islamic government based on a version of the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria. Another Sunni Muslim community, some two million Kurds, are concentrated in northeastern Syria where they fight against the rebels of IS. The Alawites, who originate from Shia Islam, make up three million people and are concentrated in northwest Syria and the coast. Its members form the backbone of the Syrian army and government backed militias, which are staunch supporters of the Assad regime.

Their Shia background ties them to Shia regional power Iran, and the Shia community in Lebanon. Control by Assad and his Alawites also relies on other minority communities, namely the Christians (nearly three million), and close to one million Druze who are concentrated in southern Syria. Syria, then, is being distributed among various players. The Alawite regime gets the northern coastal strip with connections to its allies, the Shias and Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Kurds get an independent entity in the northeast with connections to the Kurdish communities in Iraq and Turkey, the Druze in the south get a measure of autonomy and the Christians are leaving the country in growing numbers.

We have to recognise that Syria is now a broken, fragmented, divided state. It is going to be a hell of a job for Syrians to put their country back together, even if Assad goes. Syria must be preserved so that it can once again be a state for all of its citizens, however distant that prospect. In terms of sheer devastation, Syria today is worse off than Germany at the end of World War II. An UN-backed treaty similar to the Taif Agreement that ended Lebanon’s civil war could be a way to again reunite the Syria. In this type of arrangement meditated by the UN, a democratic form of government should have representation from Syria’s many communities.

The author is a columnist for the Middle East and Af-Pak region and is the editor of geo-political news agency Views Around. He can be reached at manishraiva@gmail.com