DAVID GOLDMAN: SYRIA AND ASSAD
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3201/remember-you-heard-it-from-us-first
Here’s an excerpt from the Council on Foreign Relations’ Daily Summary. Compare it to our “Call” report on Monday. That helps explain why you should read Gatestone first.
“That’s why even if Assad were willing to go–and there’s no sign that he is–those who have fought for his regime and now feel their backs to the wall are likely to remain armed, organized and willing to defend their turf at all costs. But a triumphant Sunni rebellion that has buried many thousands of ‘martyrs’ would not tolerate armed enclaves of regime supporters in its midst. It’s quite conceivable that a messy sectarian war will rage long after Assad loses meaningful control of Syria as a nation-state,” writesTIME‘s Tony Karon.
“The Assad regime is mired in a grinding conflict with the Syrian opposition, in which it is steadily losing control, as the July 18 bombing in the heart of Damascus shows. Furthermore, a number of massacres by Alawite forces in Sunni villages around the cities of Homs and Hama indicate that Alawites and the regime they dominate may be attempting to clear Sunni villages in order to set up a rump Alawite enclave in their historic homeland along the Syrian coast in the event of regime collapse” writes Andrew Tabler for ForeignPolicy.com.
“The regime’s escalation of violence has produced a backlash against it. The influx of refugees into Damascus and Aleppo, Syria’s second city, has spread awareness of the regime’s brutality even among households that had long turned a blind eye to the suffering caused, according to the government’s stubborn account, by ‘terrorists,'” says the Economist.
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