The Syrian quagmire Wednesday, 05 October 2011 03:13

A winter of discontent is looming in Syria, six months after the uprising aimed at overthrowing the regime and ousting President Bashar Al Assad raised its head. The escalating violence, which stretched from the north of the country to the south, demonstrated the increasingly militarised nature of the uprising and heightened fears that Syria may be sliding toward civil war. Syria’s six-month opposition movement has focused on peaceful demonstrations, although recently there have been reports of protesters taking up arms to defend themselves against military attacks.

Syria’s volatile sectarian divide means that an armed conflict could rapidly escalate in scale and brutality. The Assad regime is dominated by the Alawite minority, an offshoot of Shia Islam, but the country is overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim. Assad has exploited fears of a civil war fears by portraying himself as the only power who can keep the peace. Assad has relied on Russia and China, which have major oil concessions in Syria and do not want to see Western influence in the Middle East spread, to block western proposals for United Nations Security Council sanctions on the ruling hierarchy.

The inability of unarmed civilian demonstrators to bring down Assad, or at least bring him to the negotiating table also seems distant now. The reasons are two-fold. One is the lack of a unified, well-led opposition with clear objectives. The exiled Syrian National Council faces a credibility gap at home and abroad. A second key factor is the unexpectedly brutal tactics used by Assad and his security forces. At least 2,700 civilians have been killed, according to the UN. Credible reports of arrests and torture abound. Besides the toll in human life, Syria’s turmoil has battered its economy. The tourism industry is hard hit by the turmoil. The United States and the European Union have also imposed several rounds of sanctions against Assad and his regime, including a ban on the import of Syrian oil. Most of Syria’s oil exports had gone to Europe. Now, Damascus is forced to look for buyers in the east. The country’s foreign currency reserves stand at more than $17bn.

So far, waging an overwhelmingly unarmed struggle has given the protesters a moral advantage – in terms of international perceptions – if not an advantage on the ground. But memories of the civilian uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt have now been overtaken by those of the war in Libya. The options are far more limited. From the outset the US, Britain and France made clear there would be no Iraq-style military intervention. Merely supplying arms to the Syrian opposition is likely to prolong the conflict rather than hasten its end. That raises the spectre of Lebanon next door, and its 15-year civil war.