Iranian security advisors continue to push for greater efforts to find and kill the rebel leaders. The problem with that solution (which has worked in Iran) is that the Syrian revolution is too widespread and lacks strong central leaders. In other words, there are too many leaders to go after. Thus the Assads are moving towards just using as much terror as possible. The only problem there is the dubious loyalty of most of the troops (who are Sunnis). The Assads may have to abandon parts of the country in order to concentrate sufficient loyal troops to run these terror operations (which mean sending a lot of troops into a town or city neighborhood to find weapons and rebels and shoot anyone who does not cooperate.) So far, the Assads have been losing slowly.
This fits with my impression that the Syrian regime is being ground away with the insufficient assets they have to fight the resistance and that they might have to decide between losing everything and holding on to less than a full Syria.
That would be a real problem for us. We keep saying Assad has to go and the assumption is that Assad will lose and someone else will take over all of Syria. Isn't it incredibly black and white to assume either Assad wins or the resistance wins?
What if our failure to really push Assad just means Assad retreats to his core areas where the resistance is incapable of defeating Assad's now concentrated forces while the outer areas become a no-man's zone of liberated zones--some of which might be controlled by al Qaeda or other terrorists? This isn't how nuance was supposed to work, I know. But this is what we might get.
