PRESS RELEASE
The Defeat of the Jihadis in Syria Is Inevitable
Dec. 2, 2016 (EIRNS)—Aron Lund, a nonresident fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Program who has written extensively on the Syrian opposition, writes, in his latest posting on Carnegie’s Syria In Crisis blog, that the battle for Aleppo, and therefore the war, is essentially over. The fighting isn’t over, by any means, but there’s no way, now, that the armed opposition can succeed in overthrowing Assad and their defeat in the remaining parts of Aleppo that they control is inevitable. Beyond that, Lund writes, "developments in Aleppo could well change the parameters of the Syrian conflict."
"A defeat in Aleppo will leave the Syrian opposition at a dead end not just because it will have lost its most important piece of real estate, but because the remaining rebel strongholds are of little use as platforms to reverse the tide of war,"
Lund writes. The opposition still pins its hopes on Turkish President Tayyip Recep Erdogan, but
"For all of Erdogan’s loathing of Assad, it doesn’t come close to his hatred of the PKK. Indeed, if Erdogan’s primary concern had been to overthrow the Syrian president, he wouldn’t have diverted thousands of Syrian rebel combatants to help him clean up the border region when they were so desperately needed in Aleppo."
Turkey still strongly backs the opposition in Idlib province, which is still a threat to Syrian President Bashar al Assad’s government, but it’s dominated by hardline Islamists such as Ahrar al-Sham and Jabhat Fatah al-Sham (the former Jabhat al Nusra), which, Lund says, are "too toxic" to gain Western endorsement, and the Idlib region, therefore, "is unlikely to serve as the springboard for a foreign-backed strategy to end Assad’s rule." Things are not much better for the Southern Front, which is little more than a proxy for the U.S. and Jordan, while government forces are mopping the opposition in the Damascus region.
A lot still depends on the Assad government which, Lund says, has real weaknesses. "And yet, at the end of the day, this is a war, and Assad’s military gains on the ground will sooner or later translate into political advantage," he concludes.
Further evaluation of the most recent developments in Syria will be available in a forthcoming 40-minute LaRouche PAC interview with Virginia State Senator Richard Black, which will soon be posted in part and then in full on www.larouchepac.com. It includes an excellent discussion of the implications for international peace and progress, of strategic developments around the Syria war on terrorism.
