Syria will attempt to wrest control of the area from the rebels:
Opposing sides in Syria’s grueling civil war are girding for the opening of a key battlefront in the coming weeks, with expectations that the fighting will spill over into Lebanon.
The Syrian Army, backed by militants from Lebanon's Hezbollah, is poised to launch an offensive to dislodge rebel groups from the Qalamoun region, a strategic area of arid mountains lying between Damascus and Homs, adjacent to Lebanon’s eastern border. The rebels are aware and are preparing to defend their ground, which has been an essential staging ground for attacks.
The rebels seem to be putting their disappointment about our failure to strike Assad behind them. We'll see if the Syrian armed forces (and I assume their Shia foreign legion as well as Hezbollah) can sustain a bloody attack into bad terrain filled with a lot of fanatical rebels.
Success is needed for Assad to just hold a Rump Syria let alone defeat the rebellion and hold all of Syria.
Assad's forces keep launching offensives hither and yon, whether near Lebanon, around Damascus, near Aleppo, or at Homs. So far, the only thing Assad has produced is casualties.
