An article about how great the Syria intervention has been for Hezbollah's combat effectiveness just seemed like a propaganda ploy to me:
Lebanon's Hezbollah movement is gaining new combat experience in Syria, shedding its guerrilla tactics to fight alongside an army, and shifting its narrative to explain the battle against "Sunni extremists". ...
Hezbollah is believed to have about 5,000 fighters in Syria at any given time, with thousands more preparing to deploy.
Their officials say so many men signed up last year that they are no longer actively recruiting for the Syria front. ...
Syria's conflict, wrote former US defence intelligence official Jeffrey White this January, is giving Hezbollah "valuable knowledge of irregular warfare and actual combat experience".
Interestingly enough, Hezbollah says the Syrian troops are pretty poorly trained.
But while Hezbollah is surely getting combat experience, the idea that Hezbollah has no problems recruiting people to go to
What makes this worse is that Hezbollah has been spending a lot more cash on the Syrian war than it expected to. The problem is that Hezbollah had to use cash to maintain morale among the Hezbollah men who “volunteered” to fight in Syria. Hezbollah does not have many full time fighters and most of those sent to Syria are “reservists” who have received military training but are basically full time civilians. Over 2,000 of those “volunteers” have been killed or wounded so far. To keep the families of these casualties happy Hezbollah has paid large sums in death benefits as well as disability payments for the wounded in addition to all their medical expenses. While Hezbollah only sends its fighters to Syria for a few months at a time, the high casualty rate and having to fight fellow Arabs is demoralizing for many of them. There is growing resistance when these men are asked to go back to Syria for another combat tour. Over the last year Hezbollah has found itself running out of money and popular support among Lebanese Shia.
The posts note the drop in Iranian financial support.
So boasts that Hezbollah is confident that Assad will win is hope masquerading as confidence:
Echoing recent bullish talk coming out of Damascus, Sheikh Naim Qassem, deputy leader of the Iranian-backed Shi'ite militia which is supporting Assad in combat, told Reuters that the president retained popular support among many of Syria's diverse religious communities and would shortly be re-elected.
"There is a practical Syrian reality that the West should deal with - not with its wishes and dreams, which proved to be false," Qassem said during a meeting with Reuters journalists at a Hezbollah office in the group's southern Beirut stronghold.
Ah, wishes and dreams. The man is right that Western policy has been confused. But increasingly it seems like the West is starting to realize that Assad is no partner and that his defeat will require efforts by the West rather than just reaping the benefits of a cheap win after stating that "Assad must go."
Amusingly enough, Putin's people are the source of reports about Assad's confidence:
President Bashar al-Assad has forecast that much of the fighting in the Syrian civil war will be over by the end of the year, a former Russian prime minister was quoted on Monday as saying.
"This is what he told me: 'This year the active phase of military action in Syria will be ended. After that we will have to shift to what we have been doing all the time - fighting terrorists'," Itar-Tass news agency quoted Sergei Stepashin as saying.
Stepashin, an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin and former head of Russia's FSB security service, portrayed Assad as secure, in control and in "excellent athletic shape" after a meeting in Damascus last week.
This part is kind of funny. Hezbollah didn't get the full talking points, it seems:
Stepashin, who served as prime minister in 1999 under President Boris Yeltsin and now heads a charitable organisation called the Imperial Orthodox Palestine Society, added that "the fighting spirit of the Syrian army is extremely high".
Yeah, the fighting spirit is fine. That's why Iran needs to pay for Hezbollah and a largely Iraqi Shia foreign legion to be the spearheads of any Syrian government offensives.
After the autumn 2013 Lavrov-Kerry deal about chemical weapons ensuring Assad's survival, Assad promised victory in six months. With that promised relief date approaching, Assad needs to extend that promise to the end of the year.
After that it will just be mopping up, Assad says.
But Assad's forces are taking a beating in casualties and in financial losses. With so few Syrians part of his base of support, these losses mean that they need to see a light at the end of the tunnel. But there isn't. Assad's best case scenario is a Pyrrhic Victory.
Hopefully, we make sure that the light is actually the headlight of a coherent policy that seeks to defeat Assad.
UPDATE: Some push back on the Assad ascendant theme:
[The] Syrian army is overstretched and drained by relentless combat, high casualty rates, and desertions. It was only able to retake tracts of western Syria because of help from Hezbollah and Iraqi paramilitary forces, as well as Russian and Iranian logistical support, analysts say.
If the Assad regime decides to make a push for Daraa province in the south, part of which is held by the rebels, or Idlib and Aleppo provinces in the north, dominated by rebel and foreign extremists, it could leave insufficient troops to garrison Qalamoun and the coast and prevent rebel forces from slipping back into the area.
“It may well be that the war Iran is interested in pursuing – the one that secures for itself and its Syrian vassal that part of Syria important to Iran – is the war Assad thinks may be over by the year's end,” says Mr. Hof. “I'm not sure that Assad would want to expend the time or effort to reconquer those parts of Syria whose inhabitants he largely holds in contempt.”
These are themes I've been stressing. Syria's ground forces are hurting, reliant on outside forces for offensive punch, and may have problems holding what the spearheads capture, and that Assad is really only winning--and that control seems tenuous--in a Core Syria stretching from Damascus to the coast.
It's good to see some analysis that pushes back against the Russian propaganda effort.
