Losing the dam that your father built is a big deal. And losing an air base that still had planes capable of flying is a big deal:
Rebels captured a small military base near Aleppo on Tuesday and stormed another in the same area that protects a major airport, a day after seizing Syria's largest dam.
With the back-to-back blows to President Bashar Assad's regime, opposition fighters appear to be regaining some momentum, expanding their northern zone of control while at the same time pushing deeper into the heart of the capital, Damascus.
Rebels have been attacking Aleppo's civilian airport, which remains in regime hands, for weeks. They now appear to have removed the main defenses around the facility. Civilian flights stopped weeks ago because of the intensity of the fighting.
The dam is in north-central Syria.
Already, 70,000 Syrians are estimated to have died in the fighting. This is just a tremendous amount--with the toll accelerating greatly over the last year. This means that the pace of killing far exceeds Iraq even at the worst period of early 2006 to autumn 2007.
And Assad has clearly decided that garrisons outside of the Damascus region and his coastal and mountain home base are on their own to hold out as best they can. Assad will supply them when he can and provide air support when he can, but don't expect much more. Even Aleppo, which I correctly judged a bridge too far for Assad, is on its own, as Strategypage relates in an excellent post:
Aleppo is almost lost with only a few army units holding out in besieged bases.
Strategypage has useful data in that post on the armed forces fighting this war:
Most of the original security forces have been killed, captured, switched sides, or deserted. Two years ago the Syrian security forces had 450,000 personnel (50,000 secret police, 300,000 troops, and 100,000 police). But most of these, especially the lower ranking personnel, were not Alawite. Those non-Alawites have largely deserted or been confined to their bases because of questionable loyalty. Even some of the non-Sunni units have such fragile morale that the best they can be expected to do is defend their bases. That will only last as long as supplies last. As the early fighting non-Alawite troops cannot be trusted and will desert, refuse to fight, or even turn on their Alawite officers and NCOs. For this reason the government is depending more on hastily organized (with the help of Iranian and Hezbollah trainers and organizers) Alawite militias. The problem with militias is that they are poorly disciplined and tend to commit atrocities, especially when responding to attacks on their own families. These militias also tend to disintegrate if pressed too hard. Many of the militias were created to simply provide security from the growing number of bandits as well as small groups of rebels or soldiers seeking some looting opportunities. Throughout the country there are now over a million armed men organized for fighting. Less than a third of those are loyal to the government and there only about 100,000 troops and secret police that the Assads can really depend on.
So the Assad regime has about 300,000 security forces. With a population of 21 million, standard counter-insurgency doctrine says you need 420,000 troops to protect or control the population.
Assad is shy of this number, but it is even worse than the numbers since 200,000 of Assad's forces are militias useful only for securing friendly populations and worse than useless for fighting for the population centers of Sunni Arabs. And since the vast majority of the population is hostile to Assad, you can't even adjust that 2% number as I did during the Iraq War to account for policing Sunni Arab, Shia, or Kurdish areas with different threat levels to conclude we had enough to win. Winning hearts and minds doesn't just mean making people like your side--it can mean making people accept your side as the lesser of two evils. So Assad needs pretty much the full 420,000 to secure the entire country. The militias, if used in hostile areas rather than friendly areas, tend to be brutal enough to inspire resistance without being brutal enough to cow hostile people into passivity.
On the rebel side, there must be about 600,000 armed men fighting against Assad. Some of the remainder of the million cited are Kurds or Druze who may be just trying to sit out the blood bath without jumping into the fight.
I don't believe that the 600,000 figure refers to full time fighters. In Iraq, the enemy was usually counted as having 25,000 insurgents at the peak. If I recall correctly, the rule of thumb for insurgencies is that for every full-time insurgent or terrorist, there are 9 part-timers in support or mobilized for short-term, local operations.
If Syria's rebellion matches this, there are 60,000 full-time rebels in the field. If that seems too few to take on the 300,000 regime troops, secret police, and militia, keep in mind that the 60,000 rebels are probably nearly all shooters. Consider a notional army of ten infantry divisions. They'd have 30 brigades, or 90 line battalions, or 270 infantry companies, or 810 infantry platoons of about 30 men each. So a large army of ten full-strength infantry divisions would have 24,300 trigger pullers, under these assumptions. So 60,000 rebels in the field is a big deal. Again, recall that at their peak, our enemies in Iraq fielded 25,000. I often wrote that they seemed more effective because of the press coverage of every explosion and because the ample money and weapons they had access to made them more energetic than they would otherwise have been.
Obviously, the 24,300 infantry in those divisions would have scouts, and tanks, and artillery, and logistics, and engineers all in support to make them more effective man-for-man. I'm just comparing the tip-of-the-spear aspect. Which makes Assad's reliance on militias for numbers and on artillery, air power, and even ballistic missiles with conventional warheads as a replacement for his lack of numbers.
And while this isn't in the Strategypage post, I've also read that Assad really has only three divisions that are effective on his side. So I bet only about half of that 100,000 are actually army troops rather than the secret police that are at best light infantry, and likely more useful for sweeping up areas the army has secured.
At this point, I don't know what Assad could do to win this war. It seems like he is digging in around Damascus. He'll lose that battle, even if concentrating there can drag it out longer. Then the only loyal territory left will be the region in the northwest from the sea to the mountains just west of the main north-south highway. That location probably has a high proportion of the militias Strategypage cites. Then we will see how much of the loyal security forces can fight there way to this last-stand region to see if they can hang on to the Alawite homeland and avoid a blood bath of retribution over the last 2 years of slaughter and the last four decades of oppression.
And just how badly do Iran and Russia want to retain a toe-hold on the Mediterranean Sea? Would they try to save that rump Alawite state from final defeat? Would Assad use chemical weapons openly at that point to defend that region?
