Baz Ratner/Reuters
Hassan Hassan, Daily Beast: Assad Is Losing His Troops
A major minority sect in Syria doesn't want to fight for an imperiled regime, and could be critical in deciding the next phase of the civil war.
A quiet insurrection against the Assad regime has been building for the past year in the Syrian province of Sweida, home to the bulk of the country’s minority Druze population. The rebellion reached a crescendo this week when a prominent religious figure declared that the Druze were no long obliged to serve in the Syrian Arab Army—a development that poses a major threat to the teetering regime of Bashar al-Assad, which has long been losing soldiers to defections and desertions and more recently been losing ground to an increasingly more organized and effective rebel force.
Over the course of the Syrian civil war, religious minorities have proved instrumental to the resilience of the regime, which used the support of Alawites, Christians and Druze to bolster its claims of legitimacy inside and outside the country. While that remains true today, Druze seem to be pushing for a different reality than the one Assad imposed on minorities for his own survival. Depending on how the regime manages the situation, a mass Druze abandonment of the regime could prove pivotal in the how the war progresses from here.
WNU Editor: The defections of still small .... but they are a sign that Assad is (slowly and surely) losing control.
1 comment:
Nice brand new flags. Not a single mention of Israel in this article. Considering Walid Jumblatt and the history of the Druze that is most interesting. Yes, it is a bad sign for Assad when various segments of the population decide to hunker down in place. With this, the leaving of the Russians, and the reports of trouble in the Bekaa valley, it can be assumed Assad is no longer in the lead on making decisions. There should be some trial balloons for negotiations start to go up pretty soon, but considering some of the parties involved they'll come to little.
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