Tony Badran  

The most recent developments in Syria indicate that Bashar al-Assad is stepping up his efforts to entwine himself with other Syrian minority groups by calling up reservists from these groups and arming communal neighborhood militias. This tactic is perhaps less of a military nature than of a political one.
 
Assad is still playing to win, but with his already limited manpower constantly shrinking, the president is exploiting Syria’s fissures to embed the regime in as many communal pockets as possible in order to ensure he remains a non-circumventable interlocutor in any future negotiation. If he cannot win the military battle, this, Assad perhaps calculates, will be the inevitable outcome of a stalemated conflict.
 
Assad had begun this strategy with his core base, the Alawites. He systematically implicated the Alawites in the regime’s sectarian mass killings against Sunnis, thereby seeking to widen the target for the rebels’ retaliation beyond the regime. Assad’s policy has moved past mere employment of the shabiha paramilitaries to the establishment of new, local Alawite militias. Whether such groups—some of which call themselves the Syrian “muqawama”—are the ones Iran is helping Assad form, is unclear. What’s more, the regime is even seeking recruits among the Arab Alawites of the Turkish Hatay province, using the services of an old associate by the name of Mihraç Ural, who also once worked closely with the PKK.
 
I have previously described Assad’s attempt to draw the Kurds into an alliance. The full nature of his possible understanding with the PYD, the PKK’s Syrian affiliate, is still unclear. However, Kurdish areas remain off limits to the Free Syrian Army (FSA) or to any armed Kurdish defectors (including those who fled to Iraqi Kurdistan). Moreover, in recent days, the regime has launched raids in Kurdish cities to forcefully drag military-aged male Kurds back to active service. And last week, the PYD detained Kurdish activists and conscripts as they tried to cross into Turkey, then proceeded to attack demonstrators in Amude who protested the abductions.  
 
The regime always sought to cast as wide a net as possible to drag in the country's minority communities. Not satisfied with the tacit support of minority groups like the Christians and the Druze, Assad is trying to engineer an explicit minoritarian alignment behind him, one that actively implicates these groups against the Sunnis.
 
There were already various incidents indicating a measure of cooperation—voluntary or not—between the regime and some Christians in providing intelligence tips or using certain Christian villages as staging grounds for assaults against Sunni towns. In late July, The Wall Street Journal reported that the regime actively armed male loyalists in the Christian and Druze quarters of the capital. The paper also noted that a Christian family in the Wadi al-Nasara region took up arms “alongside Alawite loyalists,” a trend the regime is surely encouraging.
 
The same is happening in Aleppo, where regime-supported Christian militias are setting up checkpoints and conducting house searches. Some Armenian Christians are also reportedly following suit. Late last month, the Higher Council for the Syrian Revolution issued a statement urging Armenians not to take up arms alongside the regime. It noted that in Aleppo and Kasab—north of Lattakia—some Armenians were manning checkpoints, and their houses were being used by Assad’s paramilitaries.
 
Similarly, some Druze factions are also taking part of this regime-supported effort. In the Damascus suburb of Sahnaya, for instance, Druze men are also reportedly manning checkpoints in order keep out rebel units. There had long been rumors that Assad loyalists, like Lebanese Druze figure Wiam Wahhab, have been working to arm and mobilize Syrian Druze on the side of the regime.
 
This phenomenon pushed Lebanese Druze chief Walid Jumblatt to attack those “shortsighted” Druze factions, who, “in collusion with some notables in [the Druze] Jabal al-Arab, are seeking to drag the Druze, after arming them, into a confrontation with the revolution, for the benefit of the regime.” Jumblatt saw in this drive to arm the minorities, as well as the recent bombing in the Jermana suburb, an effort to instigate them to fight the Sunnis on behalf of the regime.
 
Assad’s ploy, however, is unlikely to solve the problem of his continuously dwindling manpower. None of these minorities is eager to enlist in Assad’s army, and most choose to flea the country instead. Nor is it clear that the disparate, small-scale formations of Druze and Christian neighborhood militias will be sufficient to embroil the FSA and limit its increasing expansion. In other words, the military significance of this strategy is highly questionable.
 
Rather, the move is primarily political. Assad seeks to assemble the minorities around him in order to present himself as the sole and unavoidable interlocutor on behalf of these segments of Syrian society, where he has cultivated loyal patches.
 
Realistically, Assad’s only viable strategy is to maintain his hold on loyal, but contracted territory, mainly in the coastal mountains, and secure Damascus and parts of Aleppo for as long as possible, in the hope that such a prolonged stalemate would force a negotiated, power-sharing settlement with him.
 
Iran supports this endgame, as evident from its recent call for a contact group on Syria, as well as from the statement by Hezbollah MP Nawaf Musawi that the solution in Syria can only be a Lebanon-style “no victor, no vanquished” compromise settlement.
 
The endgame for the US and its regional and international allies, however, should remain unchanged: the total eradication of the Assad regime. As for Syria’s minorities, one can only hope they don’t foolishly choose to allow Assad to ride on their backs. Either way, tailoring policy to their contours is not the way to go.
 
Tony Badran is a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He tweets @AcrossTheBay.