Assad forces appear to gain ground in Syria

[shaayecanaan]

A series of modest, scattered gains by government forces in recent weeks has produced no decisive breakthrough. But the advances have been made in strategically important locations and point to a new level of direction and energy previously unseen in the army's performance, military analysts, rebels and Syrians close to the government say.

Pro-Assad analysts credit a major restructuring of government forces that has better equipped them to confront the insurgency. The ranks of the conventional Syrian army -- weary, depleted and demoralized by defections, casualties and more than a year of continuous fighting -- are being swelled by the deployment of some 60,000 militia irregulars trained at least in part by Hezbollah and Iranian advisers.

Most of the members of the National Defense Force are drawn from Mr. Assad's minority Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam, and they are regarded as more reliably loyal to Mr. Assad than the rank and file of the majority Sunni army, government supporters say.

"The army is 70 percent Sunni, and so the regime kept a lot of them in their barracks," said Salem Zahran, an analyst and journalist who meets regularly with leaders of the Assad government. "The National Defense Force is made up of people who believe in the regime."

Moreover, the militias have received training in the guerrilla tactics and urban warfare at which Hezbollah excels, and which are more suited to confronting the ad hoc rebel force, said retired Lebanese Army Gen. Elias Hanna, who now teaches at the American University of Beirut.

Also, unlike the rebel force, which has received only sporadic supplies of relatively low-caliber weaponry from its reluctant Western and Arab allies, Mr. Assad's military can count on steady supplies of arms and ammunition from Iran and Russia, Mr. Hanna said.

http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/news/world/assad-forces-appear-to-gain-ground-in-syria-687251/

[bemildred]

1. At this point it's a proxy war on both sides.

Or all sides, there are more than two.

And that is bad, bad, bad.

[shaayecanaan]

2. the best lack all conviction, and the worst are full of passionate intensity

unfortunately for the rebels, their supporters are in the former camp, and the government's supporters in the latter.

[bemildred]

4. Precisely. Yeats knew what he was talking about.

Our situation here in the USA fits nicely too.

I'm starting to question the very idea that human societies have anything like self-control or free-will, or at least the course of empires seems quite fixed and predictable. I was born right before the end of WWII in Los Angeles, and I am stunned when I think back and realize what we have thrown away in pursuit of our fantasies of global hegemony.

The best you get in these late imperial stages is the occasional competent leader who manages to reverse the trends somewhat while he is in power.

Assad will not be allowed to fall, and his opponents will not be allowed to fail, and all of the other parties have fundamental interests at stake too, or think they do. (I have observed that governments tend to think everything is a fundamental intestest, they are reactive, no perceptive, and thus are often quite wrong.) So it's going to be a long war of attrition, and brutal in it's rapacity for the necessities of modern combat: fuel, weapons, cannon fodder.

We now have both Syria and Iraq falling apart, and a half-dozen others in deep trouble. Chaos looms.

I'm watching the Kurds and the Turks little dance with each other now, if they make up and decide to pursue their common interests, that could be the final blow that takes the entire post-WWII accommodation, such as it was, down.

[bemildred]

6. Iraqi Kurds 'close energy deal with Turks'

http://www.upi.com/Business_News/Energy-Resources/2013/05/14/Iraqi-Kurds-close-to-energy-deal-with-Turks/UPI-80871368556544/

ERBIL, Iraq, May 14 (UPI) -- Iraq's Kurds are reported to have reached a secret deal with Turkey under which the Kurds' semiautonomous enclave will ship oil to Turkey for export, a move that will enrage Baghdad and heighten fears of ethnic violence that could splinter the Iraqi state.

The Financial Times reports that "several Turkish officials confirm Ankara struck a secretive framework agreement this year with the Kurdish Regional Government for Turkish state energy companies to take stakes in the region's oil and gas fields.

"They add the deal is still so sensitive that it is unlikely to be acknowledged publicly until after a visit by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to Washington this week," the report said.

Washington has been unhappy with Turkey's growing links with the Kurdish enclave that spans three of Iraq's northern provinces, fearing it will encourage the independence-minded Kurds to break away altogether from the federal Iraqi republic established under U.S. tutelage after the 2003 invasion.

Turkey and the Kurds: Will Erdogan's peace process with the PKK save Turkey or destroy It?

http://shadow.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/05/14/turkey_and_the_kurds_will_erdogan_s_peace_process_with_the_pkk_save_turkey_or_destr

Something quite extraordinary -- perhaps even historic -- is afoot in Turkey. The country's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is engaged in a colossal roll of the political dice, an act of statesmanship, ambition, and hubris largely without parallel on the current world stage. At one and the same time, Erdogan appears set on a course that could result not only in redefining the very nature of the modern Turkish nation-state, but in a radical revision of the Turkish Republic's core national security tenets as well. How the gambit plays out could have momentous implications for the future of Turkey, for sure, but also for the broader Middle East region and even the United States.

At the center of Erdogan's play is an effort to resolve Turkey's "Kurdish problem" -- the chronic, often bloody conflict that has torn at the fabric of the Turkish state since its founding 90 years ago. On one side: the highly exclusive Kemalist conception of Turkish citizenship that all but denied the existence of Kurdish ethnicity (no Kurds here, only "mountain Turks&quot and effectively banned Kurdish language, history, and culture from the nation's public life. On the other: a fiercely proud and distinct people, the Kurds, whose decades-long struggle for recognition and self-determination has -- not surprisingly -- regularly found expression in demands for independent nationhood, an ever-present separatist dagger pointed at the heart of Turkey's territorial integrity and unity. Since 1984, this clash of competing nationalisms has manifested itself most virulently in the brutal war waged against the Turkish state by the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), a Leninist organization that both the United States and the European Union have officially designated as a terrorist group.

Now, in a bold and risky effort to cut through this Gordian knot, Erdogan has launched a new peace process in which his main partner is none other than Abdullah Ocalan, the infamous PKK leader who has been imprisoned on the Turkish island of Imrali since 1999. Revered by many (though by no means all) Kurds, Ocalan is reviled by the majority of ethnic Turks, condemned as a murderous enemy of the republic, a master terrorist whose hands are covered in the blood of innocents.

[shaayecanaan]

11. The Turks have danced with many, but never for long...

a year ago, the story was all about Turkish-Iranian rapprochement, you had that Turkish-Brazilian proposal on the Iranian nuclear program. The Turks then had a fracas with Israel, and then made up again. Then the Turks were about to open the border with Armenia, and then they didnt. People were saying that Turkey was no longer a Western ally, but a "frenemy" instead, but now they are not.

Having said that, it would be a good move if they could patch things up with the Kurds, economically, politically and diplomatically.

[delrem]

13. The Kurds seem to be dancing a good dance, in a situation hardly of their making.

I'm very ignorant of Kurdish aspirations, but from my light reading it seems that the end project is to carve out an independent Kurdistan in the traditional region which includes parts of Turkey, Syria, Iran and Iraq.

[bemildred]

14. I'm just watching the show, and speculation is fun.

Somewhere around here today I saw another article that said Turkey is making a big mistake. It's not too hard to construct such an argument. But I consider the withdrawal of the PKK to be a big step, and not based just on "trust". They got Ocalan to give the order, and the order is being obeyed. If they let him out, watch out.

[shaayecanaan]

3. Assad sends his feared ghost soldier militia to the battlefront

In a decision that is certain to arouse fear among the regime’s enemies, the Syrian government has decreed that thousands of volunteers loyal to President Bashar al-Assad should be recruited into uniformed and armed units under Syrian army command to fight on the front lines against anti-Assad rebels, and to control newly “liberated” towns and villages.

The “National Defence Forces” will, according to their commander – interviewed in the fiercely loyalist city of Latakia – include tens of thousands of recruits, many of them from the same Alawite branch of the Shia Islam sect to which the President belongs.


http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/opinion/columnists/robert-fisk/syria-assad-sends-his-feared-ghost-soldier-militia-squads-to-the-battlefront-29230199.html

[azurnoir]

5. I'll admit to confusion here

confusion as to what is happening, why it is happening, what the outcome is supposed to be, rwho the 'West' is supporting andnot in the least of all why the West is supporting them

most of all though -just who benefits from all of this-we already know who is losing

[bemildred]

7. Please see post #6.

[bemildred]

8. And while you are reading it, remember the Bushites blowing off Turkey,

taking it for granted, when they started this mess, when they went into Iraq.

Do you think it was coincidence that Bibi suddenly decided maybe he should hurry up and apologize for the flotilla raid?

When you have a lot of enemies, you can't make too many mistakes.

[bemildred]

9. And the fact that WE created free Kurdistan on Turkeys border, and armed it too.

Maybe we should send some more weapons in?

[bemildred]

10. And remember when Little Assad decided to autonomize the Syrian Kurds?

You want to know why Erdogan doesn't like Assad any more, that's one reason. They have two new nascent Kurdish states on their border now, and those have oil, and they are part of Turkey's most restive ethnic minority. So you have oil, and payback, and the end of a troubling internal problem, just to name a couple reasons off the top of my head, why this looks good to Turkey.

[azurnoir]

15. well our invasion of Iraq certainly helped to create a 'free' Kurdistan

and publicly the Bushites used Kurds being victimized by Saddam as part of the reasoning behind our invasion or at least to make it more palatable for the public, but behind the scene I suspect our government wasn't quite as trusting and in fact it may well have been a case of keep your friends close but your enemies ........... you know how that one goes

[bemildred]

16. I agree that that was not their/our intention, and we sure don't like this now.

But on the other hand, it is not like nobody brought it up back at the time.

And it is true that "free" is still the correct form, not free. We may or may not have a civil war over that, but I am also sure that there will be one if the Baghdad government tries to enforce it's will. I have already seen a good deal of argument about when exactly that war will start, betting on that actually. Suppose, in that case, Turkey decides to help their new Kurdish buddies out, with fending off Baghdad I mean. It makes my head hurt.

I'm such a cheerful fellow, am I not?

[shaayecanaan]

12. Well, the opposition used to be a broad church...

there were socialists and rationalists and all sorts of people with good intentions. But the Saudis and Qataris supported their people, and the Iranians supported theirs, and the sorts of people who might have liked to count on Western support stood and watched as the west hemmed and hawwed and asked "how can we be sure that our weapons will not fall into the wrong hands?". Now they no longer need worry, because the "wrong hands" have all the weapons courtesy of their supporters.

The outcome, it seems, is that Syria will be more or less partitioned into a rump Alawite/minority state along the Mediterranean coast, and a Sunni state consisting mostly of the largely inhabited and deserted interior.

The significance of these recent advances by the government is that it will be in a stronger position territorially if there are proposals regarding partition. Naturally the opposition will want control of as much coastline as they can claim. At the moment it would seem that they would only be able to lay claim to a small part of coastline in the north.

The Alawites are a small, heterodox sect that have syncretically mixed numerous Christian beliefs with Islam, in the same way that the Mormons blended Masonic and occultic beliefs with Christianity. In a way, the seizure of power by the Alawis in Syria is comparable to the Mormons taking over the United States in a coup d'etat and somehow ruling unchallenged for the next forty years. It was a stunning turnaround for a group of people who a hundred years ago were regarded as a Jim Jones outfit, a bunch of landless peasants with their strange beliefs. But these things tend to unwind eventually.