I disagree with this assessment about Syria:
Forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad are beginning to turn the tide of the country’s war, bolstered by a new strategy, the support of Iran and Russia and the assistance of fighters with Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement.
A series of modest, scattered gains by government forces in recent weeks has produced no decisive breakthrough. But the advances have been made in strategically important locations and point to a new level of direction and energy previously unseen in the army’s performance, military analysts, rebels and Syrians close to the government say.
Assad is able to mass more forces because one, he has more troops available, as the article notes:
Pro-Assad analysts credit a major restructuring of government forces that has better equipped them to confront the insurgency. The ranks of the conventional Syrian army — weary, depleted and demoralized by defections, casualties and more than a year of continuous fighting — are being swelled by the deployment of some 60,000 militia irregulars trained at least in part by Hezbollah and Iranian advisers.
Most of the members of the National Defense Force are drawn from Assad’s minority Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam, and they are regarded as more reliably loyal to Assad than the rank and file of the majority Sunni army, government supporters say.
And two:
Perhaps most significantly, the government has recalibrated its approach to the war raging nationwide. Instead of stretching its forces thin by trying to fight on multiple fronts across the country, the regime is focusing on what it calls a few key “nodes” considered essential to sustaining its hold on power, according to Syrians and Lebanese familiar with the strategy.
They include the Damascus suburbs, along with an arc of territory stretching from the coastal ports of Latakia and Tartus in the northwest to the capital — the urban backbone of the country, embracing its most important supply routes.
This is exactly what I said Assad had to do back in December. Indeed, I've called for this "nodes" strategy since January 2012.
But there are a couple problems with concluding that Assad has turned the tide and that he is now winning.
One, Assad is doing better in a smaller war. Assad has given up on Syria outside that arc of territory he is now fighting for. Unless Assad can build up his ground troops to field many hundreds of thousands of loyal and reasonably effective troops to spread out and retake the outer portions of the country, he isn't going to win the war for all of Syria.
Two, I don't assume that his tired forces can keep up their fight with their small base of support for recruiting. Losses have been horrendous for Assad's troops. And while the infusion of militias has given Assad the mass to go on offense within a smaller theater, I suspect that those ill-trained militias are being burned up at a rate even faster than the burn rate that decimated Assad's infantry.
Air power has been mostly spent and sortie rates are pretty low. So he can't count on that for too much. When those militias are used up, and nobody comes forward to be more cannon fodder, Assad will start losing his smaller war, too. And given that, I still say Assad is losing the war.
I will say that there are a lot more of the militias than I thought. But recall all the debates we had here about how well trained Iraqi and Afghan troops are. Assad's militias could only dream of being drilled to the standards that we set for Iraqi and Afghan government troops. The militia burn rate will be really high being used to retake territory held by rebels. We'll see how militia recruiting goes as the summer heats up and the caskets flow back to the villages and neighborhoods where the militias are recruited.
And even if Assad can hold his own in a fight for that small portion of Syria he has staked out, I don't see how Assad can expand his ground forces sufficiently to reclaim all of Syria. But I don't see this "turning of the tide" as more than a temporary advantage for Assad's forces. It only works if the rebels think the advantage is permanent and they negotiate a deal that keeps Assad in power.
