Daily Times

BEIRUT: When President Bashar al-Assad turns from the wreckage of Aleppo to assert his authority across a fractured Syria, it will be as a figure who is virtually unassailable by rebels, but still faces great challenges in restoring the power of his state.

The expected fall of Aleppo would mean rebels have almost no chance of ousting Assad, but their revolt has left him in hock to foreign allies, resigned to the loss of swathes of his country for the time being and with tough pockets of resistance still to crush. “Certainly it is not the end of the war … But when you take Aleppo, you control 90 percent of the fertile areas of Syria, the regions that hold the cities and markets, the populated regions,” said a senior pro-Damascus official in the region.

However, the battlefield victories that seem – for now – to have secured Assad’s rule have been won in large part not by his own depleted military, but by Russian warplanes and a shock force of foreign Shi’ite militias backed by Iran.

Assad will rely on Moscow and Tehran to take back more territory, and to hold and secure it, meaning he will have to balance his own ambitions with theirs.

At the same time, as the insurgents lose ground and as the jihadists among them grow more dominant, conventional warfare may give way to an era of guerrilla attacks and suicide bombings within areas held by the government.

Aggravating this, the war has taken on sectarian dimensions that will resonate for generations; the uprising identifies itself with the Sunni Muslim majority, and the state led by a minority Alawite draws on the backing of Shi’ite Islamists.

Worst of all, nearly six years of war have killed hundreds of thousands of Syrians, displaced around 11 million, of whom nearly half have fled the country, and laid waste to much of the infrastructure needed to resurrect a shattered economy.

In rebuilding, Assad will also have to contend with Western sanctions on much of his government and with isolation from some of his main previous trading partners – the European Union, Turkey, Gulf monarchies and Jordan. The Gulf states in particular may also continue to fund insurgents.

“Syria has suffered such wounds that there will always be, in my expectation, a day of reckoning,” said Nikolaos Van Dam, a former Dutch diplomat and author of a book about Syrian history and politics, speaking about the future of Assad’s state.

To his supporters, Assad is the one, indispensable figure standing between his country and absolute chaos, the resolute leader of a war against foreign-backed jihadists who wish to slaughter minorities and launch attacks on other states.

Without him, they say, what remains of the Syrian armed forces and security services will crumble, rendering the country a failed state and a danger to the world for decades to come.

Convincing enough allies – including Moscow and Tehran – to see him in that light has been Assad’s “political masterpiece”, said Rolf Holmboe, research fellow at the Canadian Global Affairs Institute and a former Danish ambassador to Syria.