The war in Syria is kind of sort of over. But the people Assad rules haven't gotten a peace dividend.
Will the multi-war ever really be over?
The Assad government is bankrupt because of lost Iranian subsidies and the need to concentrate on paying its security forces rather than rebuilding infrastructure to restore electricity and improve the roads damaged and neglected since 2011. As the Assads seek to regain control over more territory, improving standards of living has low priority. The Assads currently rule sixty percent of pre-war territory and an even higher percentage of the population. Unfortunately for Syrians, the Assads are skilled at running a police state, not an economically strong one.
Most of Syria's military power is concentrated in the northwest, which is the rump Syria that backs Assad. Outside of that area where the Russians are also located at their bases, there are Sunni jihadis, Turks, Iranians and their local allies, ISIL, Kurds and allies, and even an American-led coalition dominating the rest. I see no mention of Iran's proxy Hezbollah, which bled heavily to keep Assad in power. Perhaps they finally went home to Lebanon.
The multi-war--it is too complicated to call a civil war in my opinion--lives on.
The economic situation is getting worse. Neither the Russians nor the Iranians want to pay to fix that.
God help us, but I assume Assad, Russia, and Iran expect the West to pay to restore the viability of the brutal Assad regime. The suffering people of Syria are just human shields to tug at the hearts of Westerners while the Axis of Assholes keeps their wallets in their pockets.
And I can't say they are delusional.
UPDATE: You may wonder if Syrians won much of anything in their long and ruinous multi-war, but have no doubt that Assad and his closest inner circle supporters who did not die on the battlefields won the war:
He faces no serious rival, and the Syrian opposition and Western nations view the election as a farce to rubber-stamp his grip on power.
Assad's years as president are defined by the conflict that began in 2011 with peaceful protests before spiralling into a multi-sided conflict that has fractured the Middle East country and drawn in foreign friends and enemies alike.
His allies who kept him in power, Russia and Iran, only care about his survival which allows them to station military forces inside Syria for their own purposes. Neither will pay to rebuild Syria beyond their own bases and Assad's personal security.
Still, nearly a decade, untold destruction, and 500,000+ casualties later, thank God we didn't "militarize" the conflict by decisively supporting rebels as the Obama administration warned against doing.
