Analysis: Spreading dissent pushes Assad’s control to the limit

A surprisingly agile and fast-moving Ramadan offensive by the Syrian army has curbed the size of some street protests, but at the cost of stoking popular outrage and further testing president Bashar al-Assad’s strained authority.

Under a broadening assault, civilian demonstrations in several cities calling for Assad to quit have tended to grow smaller, but at the same time more numerous, scattering from main squares into alleyways and suburbs, as well as nearby towns hitherto unaffected by unrest, activists and analysts say.

Doubts persist about the capacity of the army constantly to deploy enough troops to several centres simultaneously, after attacks in quick succession this month in the central city of Hama, the eastern city of Deir al-Zor, the southern city of Deraa and the ancient port city of Latakia.

“The government still hopes that through continuous intimidation it can in the end stop the demonstrations. But these loyal troops cannot move all over the country indefinitely,” said Nikolaos van Dam, a Dutch scholar of Syrian politics and a former senior foreign ministry official.

“The danger is that at a certain moment, if not already, within the armed forces there will be an increasingly large number of people who will start asking themselves whether they really want to accept this,” the former diplomat said, adding: “People are getting more and more and more angry. These YouTube videos [of killings] are fuelling further demonstrations.”

Shashank Joshi, an Associate Fellow at Britain’s Royal United Services Institute, said loyalist units of the army that had been used to spearhead the repression had been extremely efficient at staging attacks on Hama and parts of the east.

“But they would not be able to succeed in containing anything significant, on the level of a Hama or a Deraa, if it occurred in Aleppo or central Damascus. They just don’t seem to have the numbers for that.”

There are no reliable reports about the exact deployments of Syria’s armed forces in the crackdown, which was stepped up on 1 August, at the start of the Muslim Ramadan fast.

Most assaults appear to be led by the mainly Alawite divisions commanded by Assad’s brother Maher, including the Republican Guard and the Fourth Armoured Division. Each of these units has about 10,000 men and often acts in liaison with secret police and pro-Assad Alawite militia called Shabbiha.

The Assads are from the Alawite minority sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam, and have ruled over this country of 23 million with a 75 per cent Sunni majority for four decades.

The vast majority of the largely conscript army, mostly Sunni, is not directly involved in the repression.

Samir Aita, editor in chief of the Arab edition of Le Monde Diplomatique, said the army was central to the calculations of all players.

“Everyone is waiting for the moment when the army wakes up and says ‘we cannot go on with this nonsensical oppression’ and will oppose the regime and gather the different political forces to go towards a political solution,” said Aita, a Syrian.

Eventually, first-hand accounts of the killings carried out by government security forces would trickle through to the military’s rank and file, he said.