Syria's government trumpeted the fall of Qusayr:
The Syrian army triumphantly announced Wednesday the capture of a strategic town near the Lebanese border, telling the nation it has "cleansed" the rebel-held Qusair of "terrorists" fighting President Bashar Assad's troops. ...
On the ground in the past two months, the Syrian army has moved steadily against rebels in key battleground areas, making advances near the border with Lebanon and considerably lowering the threat to Damascus, the seat of Assad's government. A wide offensive on Qusair was launched on May 19.
The fall of Qusair deals a huge blow to the opposition. The overwhelmingly Sunni town has served as a conduit for shipments of weapons, fighters and supplies smuggled from Lebanon to the rebels inside Syria.
As Assad contracted his perimeter by abandoning large chunks of eastern Syria, formed Iranian-trained militias to replace Assad's depleted infantry (they suffered heavy losses and the survivors just can't be eager to die), and received Hezbollah reinforcements who are fresh enough to be willing cannon fodder, Assad has been able to regain the initiative in his smaller realm.
I suspect that Assad's losses will mount over the coming months and that Syrian morale will drop if the rebels can hang on and start to reverse Assad's recent gains and inflict more losses that the Assad side can ill afford to endure. If rebels can also bypass Qusayr for their supply lines to Homs, then the Battle for Qusayr won't be as important. And if the rebels can infiltrate the city and resume the fight, the Assad side won't gain a lasting psychological advantage from this battle.
But for now, Assad has a local victory. Will he use it for a better deal in negotiations or wrongly think he has turned the entire tide of war?
UPDATE: Amazingly, a lot of rebels escaped to fight another day:
Another fighter said he was going home to rest after four sleepless nights. "We went in, there was some fighting and then (the rebels) withdrew," he said. "We saw them leaving in about 400 cars."
Four hundred cars (with at least 400 rebels in them) escaped? That's not a hard count, of course, but hundreds of rebels escaped. They could revert to irregular warfare rather than trying to hold terrain. If a lot of pro-Assad forces go home to get some sleep, that doesn't speak highly of discipline in the ranks.
How many of the Syrian forces are irregulars who may or may not be able to hold the town now?
Some had the ability to carry on the fight, but tankers moving toward an enemy-held village, 6 were mentioned in the article, are clearly regulars. Just how many of the Qusayr attackers are pursuing the defeated rebels and how many are looting or sleeping?
UPDATE: Strategypage writes of the battle:
The Assad soldiers and their Hezbollah allies managed to defeat their fanatic opponents. However, the first lesson from this battle was that the Assad/Hezbollah alliance could not blitz (hit hard, demoralize and roll over) the rebels, at least not when the defenders have some of these fanatics among them. Hezbollah and the Assad troops, guided by their Iranian advisors, learned quickly how to deal with the rebel resistance. Hezbollah gunmen were used when the ground fighting got tough, with Syrian army infantry largely withdrawn to provide security elsewhere around the town. Syrian army artillery and air power were still present, mostly killing civilians (most of the 30,000 inhabitants fled during the battle). It was a bloody battle, by the standards of this war, with several thousand casualties, including over a hundred dead Hezbollah men.
Hezbollah had to bear the brunt of the fighting. So their casualties had to be really high when you toss in wounded and consider that Hezbollah has a few thousand gunmen on active duty right now. How many of them are in Syria to fight? And how long can they endure 400 casualties (assuming wounded at three times the killed rate) per victorious battle? Sure, Assad would love to fight to the last Hezbollah fighter, but how long will Hezbollah go along with that?
