Le Monde: Bashar al-Assad is a prisoner of his own stubbornness and the collapse of his regime

Le Monde newspaper said that the Syrian government is paying the price for its refusal to make concessions, its inability to reform and break out of its isolation. The rebellion that regained control of Aleppo in a lightning attack has revived, without the army and its Iranian allies and the Lebanese Hezbollah showing any resistance.

The newspaper reported - in a report by Laure Stephan from Beirut - that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who was aware of the weakness of his army, abandoned in 2015, at the height of the advance of what it described as rebels, areas that he considered secondary, such as Idlib, to strengthen his control over more strategic areas.

The newspaper believed that the "rebel" fighters seized the moment, after the pro-Iranian camp was weakened by the strikes that Israel dealt it in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria, and Russia, which is preoccupied with its war in Ukraine, no longer has the same financial and human resources that it had when it deployed its aircraft to the Hmeimim base on the Syrian coast.

Deadly stubbornness

The newspaper pointed out that Bashar al-Assad, who remained an outcast in the eyes of the West because of the bloody repression he practiced against his people, was able to save his position thanks to the intervention of his powerful Russian and Iranian allies, but he was never able to regain all of the Syrian lands, and became the king of a fragmented state, deprived of resources, and unable to rebuild itself and rise again.

The newspaper believes that the decline in the regime's power is due to its refusal to make concessions and cooperate in negotiations at the regional level, and that what is happening in Aleppo now is a result of this intransigence. Researcher Reem Turkmani at the London School of Economics said that the main thing for Assad is to always remain in power, even if that does not mean that he is strong.

In the face of Ankara, which wants some form of autonomy for Idlib in order to return some of the 3 million Syrian refugees residing on its territory, and to be able to intervene whenever it wants against the Kurds, Damascus has stuck to its position that Turkish forces must withdraw from Syrian territory before any dialogue.

brinkmanship strategy

After its reintegration into the Arab League in 2023, Syria also did not provide the guarantees of good behavior that its Arab neighbors expected, whether on the issue of the return of refugees or on the smuggling of the drug Captagon, which it produces in large quantities and floods neighboring countries with, and thus the rapprochement did not go beyond quasi-normalization for Arab countries for practical reasons.

Sinan Hatahet, a specialist in Syrian affairs, points out that the "Syrian regime" has reached a degree of structural weakness that makes it fear, even if it wanted to make concessions to the opposition, that this would lead to a risk whose end it cannot know.

To get out of trouble, says Syrian economist Samir Aita, Bashar al-Assad could resort to the brinkmanship strategy practiced by his father Hafez, which is to present the international community with a fait accompli: “You want Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, not me. You will get it.” He will also challenge the rebels to provide for the needs of 4 million people in Aleppo.

The United States, France, Germany and Britain have called for “de-escalation” in Syria, and “it is astonishing,” wrote Hassan Hassan, founder of New Lines and the Syria Observer, “that world leaders are now mobilizing publicly to ensure that the Assad regime does not collapse, in the same way that they mobilized in 2011 to ensure that it would be overthrown.”

Source: Le Monde