Practical steps to save Syria from desperate Assad

As his regime and his country crumble around him, Bashar al-Assad looks to have overreached. While claims that he has used chemical weapons against rebels trying to overthrow him have not been wholly verified, close observers of Syria’s conflict are convinced he has – as he tentatively tests how far the world will allow him to slaughter his way to survival.

In the past, when faced with the credible threat of force, President Assad, like the late Hafez al-Assad, the father from whom he inherited Syria, has tended to back off. But for the Assads this battle, which they have struggled and failed to win for two years, is existential. That has long been evident in the brutality of the Assad clan in reasserting its dynastic right to rule, prepared to break Syria and its people if it cannot possess them, and scatter the pieces across a combustible region it keeps threatening to set on fire.

If the US and its allies shrug off what so far appears to be his limited use of sarin nerve gas, the regime will bring more chemical shells into the fight. On the other hand, if its western and Arab opponents look as though they intend to intervene more robustly, the Assads may choose chemical weapons as their last line of resistance.

There were never going to be any sure-fire solutions in this tragic conflict, but there are still options. As western intervention in Syria starts to look likely, the first question is: why is the regime taking these risks?

President Barack Obama’s reluctance to get embroiled in another Middle Eastern war must be part of the Assad calculus, along with divisions in the UN Security Council where Russia, in particular, has stood by him. Yet the viciousness of regime tactics, even before the nerve gas allegations, suggests more than a degree of desperation. The Assads’ “security solution” is not working.

After two years, the Assads have lost control of half the country. They are struggling to secure a perimeter in central Damascus, where persistent reports say the president, after his security cabinet was shredded by a bombing last July, relies on Iranians to protect him.

The Assads have used every weapon in their arsenal in serial offensives. They no longer think as a state, but as a mega-militia, which must keep open the road through Homs to the northwestern coastal and mountain heartland of the Alawites – the quasi-Shia minority sect around which they have built their security state.

The regime still has two mainly Alawite elite divisions, but it no longer trusts the army, whose might exists on paper. Why, for example, does a well-armed air force use helicopters to drop oil barrels full of explosives on rebel areas? Because it suspects the loyalty of its pilots, most of whom belong to Syria’s Sunni majority.

The army is being superseded by a national network of local, mostly Alawite militia, presenting other minorities such as the Christians, nervous about the rise of Islamist radicals among the Sunni majority, with a stark “with us or against us” choice. And it is Hizbollah, the Lebanese Shia paramilitary movement allied with Iran and Syria, that is now fighting alongside Assad militia to clear the corridor between Homs and the Lebanese border.

If none of that works, the regime might use chemical shells to terrorise the population into emptying the area. A leader of one big Alawite tribe says loyalist forces near Homs have chemical weapons, and will use them.

Equivocation about Syria (by the US and its allies) or power politics (by Russia) must now give way to a three-pronged offensive involving both camps. Their supposedly stand-back policies so far have fed extremism: the rise of al-Qaeda-linked jihadism in insurgent ranks; and an Iranian push, not just on behalf of the Assads but in Lebanon, Iraq and elsewhere.

The US and Europe need to move fast to give mainstream Syrian rebels – still a large majority – arms to counter the Assads’ jets and armour, and to establish a provisional government in liberated territory. That will eventually mean destroying Syria’s air force and air defences, and perhaps committing special forces to secure or destroy the regime’s chemical arsenals.

There must also be an “intelligence offensive”, using tactics employed against other ostensibly unassailable tyrants such as Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia and Muammer Gaddafi in Libya: carrots and sticks to play mind games with wobbling loyalists. Alongside this, the Syrian opposition and its international backers will need to make credible guarantees on the security of minorities – especially against Sunni jihadis in rebel ranks.

Last but not least, Russia must be diplomatically confronted. While in Vladimir Putin’s eyes the rubble of Aleppo or Homs must look much like Grozny after the second Chechen war – the price of reasserting central authority and checking Islamist advance – using chemical weapons is supposedly a red line for the Russian as well as the US president. If the UN Security Council does not return to this urgently, it may as well fold its tent.

david.gardner@ft.com