Syria doesn't have the troops to wage counter-insurgency, and perhaps doesn't have the interest in being anything but brutal to the Sunni majority. But they don't even have enough troops to be brutal, and must be brutal with air power as well:
President Bashar al-Assad has resorted increasingly to devastating aerial bombardment to keep rebels fighting to overthrow him in check after they took control of residential neighborhoods and made forays into the center of Aleppo, Syria's commercial and industrial capital.
And in an example of how ineffective use of force just creates more enemies, Assad's attempt to mobilize local defense forces has degenerated into local death squads that inflame the Sunni majority rather than cow it:
The pro-Assad "shabbiha" militias, which the opposition accuse of massacring Sunnis, grew out of neighborhood watch groups in other cities like Homs and Aleppo. They eventually began roaming provinces with security forces, joining raids and looting homes.
Shabbiha have so far been made up mostly of the Alawite minority, an offshoot of Shi'ite Islam, whose members fear bloody retribution should the 17-month-old uprising succeed.
Residents say lijan from other minorities are now carrying out extra-judicial executions, creating a cycle of revenge killings in a conflict that has killed 20,000 people already.
Now consider that so many war supporters during the worst of the Iraq War wanted us to "take off the gloves" and kill our way to victory. I argued against it. Not that killing enemy combatants wasn't a necessary part of the fight. But keeping the population from supporting the insurgencies and terrorists was the way home.
And we did it. Despite destroying the Sunni Arab regime of Saddam Hussein, turning over power to the Shias and Kurds, and then fighting the Sunni insurgents and terrorists hammer and tong--with perhaps half the Sunni Arab population fleeing Iraq--in the end the Sunni Arab community defected to our side to fight the al Qaeda-Baathist alliance that nearly plunged Iraq into full civil war.
And Syria supposedly has the cultural sensitivity and local knowledge that we lacked in Iraq as a foreign "occupier!"
Our military won a pretty impressive victory in Iraq, all things considered. It's a damn shame that we couldn't stay to defend what we achieved.
