Hussain Abdul-Hussain

If it took the United States a surge in troops, immense resources and winning over the local population to turn the tide against a raging insurgency in Iraq, what makes Bashar al-Assad—with his exhausted elite units, depleted resources and a hostile population—think that he can prevail in Syria?

Since the outbreak of the Syrian uprising 15 months ago, the Assad regime has been in a hurry to bring it to an end, often through the use of lethal force, not only to kill, but to show a brutality that should dissuade others from joining the revolt. The regime has also arrested anti-Assad activists, tortured and raped them in a sadistic ceremony of "rehabilitation" aimed at reminding the population why they have remained silent all these years and why they should continue to do so. Finally, neighborhoods showing solidarity with the victims have been collectively punished through large-scale bombardment.
 
Since the early days of the uprising, Assad's propaganda machine has been announcing victories over insurgents. While many were real, the regime's military successes—without winning the population—have rendered the confrontation a game of cat-and-mouse.

Assad knew that he could not kill all of his opponents, only enough to convince the rest to give up. He was hoping the number would remain small to keep the international community muted.

But Syrian rage against Assad proved deep and thus invited unprecedented brutality. Rage and brutality then started feeding off of each other, both rising sharply. A shamefully shy world fell short of forcing Assad to change course and only succeeded in isolating his regime to an extent.

Assad reasoned that he could kill his opponents now and deal with the political consequences later. According to his then-ambassador to the US, Imad Mustafa, Damascus would hunker down for a decade or so, lean on capitals like Beijing—where Mustafa is now representing Assad—and work slowly to mend political ties with the rest of the world after having killed the uprising.
 
Yet even stopping the revolt proved complicated for Assad. Despite the resilience of his killing machine, scores of army personnel turned their guns against his loyalists. This forced the regime to rely more on its elite forces, which became thinly stretched and unable to subdue insurgents in more than one city simultaneously, as seen in February when they arranged for a truce with insurgents in Zabadani until they could finish up in Homs. Only after decimating Homs did Assad’s forces turn their attention back to Zabadani.
 
Retaking land, whether in Homs, Zabadani or elsewhere, proved no victory. "The rebels who withdrew from the Baba Amr neighborhood [of Homs] [in] March 2012 demonstrated the tactical wherewithal to retreat in order to preserve combat power," according to a paper by Joseph Holiday, of the Institute for the Study of War.
 
US forces faced a similar problem while fighting al-Qaeda in Iraq. "Being fluid, the enemy can control his loss rate and therefore cannot be eradicated by purely enemy-centric tactics," wrote David Kilcullen, the Australian architect of the surge in Iraq, in his book “The Accidental Guerilla,” a manual on how armies can win asymmetric wars.
 
On Iraq, Kilcullen concluded that "an insurgent enemy needs the people to act," which made America focus on winning over the Iraqi population. In Syria, to Assad's detriment, popular support of the anti-Assad Free Syria Army (FSA) has no doubt given the rebels resiliency that, according to Holiday, "will make the Assad regime’s endurance difficult."

Perhaps realizing his shortcomings, Assad reasoned he could depend on something the Americans did not have in Iraq: The loyalty of Alawites and other minorities. Such a tactic that drives wedges between the different Syrian communities, however, transformed Assad from a president to a factional leader.
 
Desperate to show the population how strong it is, Assad provoked sectarian animosities to garner some support. This will further complicate his effort to remain president when the fighting stops, if it even does in the near future. Sectarianism is guaranteed to take the country into civil war, but not enough to turn the tide of the anti-Assad insurgency.
 
And if Syria goes into a full-fledged civil war, Assad's chances of emerging as a winner will be slim because those who start such conflicts are rarely the ones who preside over their end.
 
The Assad regime was founded on the premise of always being ready to swiftly defeat domestic challenges, whether coups, insurgencies or rebellions. But times have changed, and the template of the founder, Hafez al-Assad, is proving inadequate for his son Bashar, who over the past 15 months has been trying desperately to kill the Syrian revolution, but has so far only killed time.
 
Hussain Abdul-Hussain is the Washington Bureau Chief of Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Rai