After Khalidiya, is Assad winning the Syria war?

Dramatic images of destruction in Khalidiya

Hyped media reports that the regime of President Bashar al-Assad is winning the Syria war are misplaced, according to Egyptian military and strategy expert Safwat el-Zayyat.

The reports follow the fall of Khalidiya, a neighborhood in Homs city, to Syrian government forces backed by Shiite militiamen from Lebanon, Iran and Iraq.

Seven weeks earlier, these combined forces retook Qusayr, a town some 35 kilometers from Homs city on Syria’s border with Lebanon.

Zayyat said in his live, four-minute military news analysis for Aljazeera TV channel last night:

The regime is not in a position to contend with two battlefronts at the same time.

After retaking Qusayr (on June 5), the regime turned swiftly to Aleppo.

News agencies started saying regime and Hezbollah forces were knocking on Aleppo city’s door and preparing to overrun the nearby villages of Nubul and Zahra.

Four days later, we saw regime and Hezbollah forces refocusing on Homs, instead.

Homs city has been under siege for 442 days.

It took the regime 442 days to forces its way into just one of the city’s numerous neighborhoods – namely, Khalidiya.

I believe the armed opposition’s unified command gives priority to the attrition war.

For now, it is concentrating on the Aleppo and Deraa fronts.

More thrilling perhaps is the Damascus front, where the armed opposition seems to have decided to switch its main thrust from Eastern Ghouta to try and reach Abbasid Square, (a landmark plaza) in central Damascus.

Also, three days ago, regime forces were set to swoop on Qaboun (a neighborhood of Damascus held by the rebels).

Suddenly, regime forces pulled back from around Qaboun and Jobar and started evacuating citizens from the Qassaa, Ghassani, Qusur, Fares el-Khoury and al-Tijari areas of Damascus to safer neighborhoods in the capital, including Muhajereen and Ruknuddin.

The closer the armed opposition gets to the center of Damascus, the less likely the regime’s recourse to carpet shelling and bombing of the capital’s rebel-held areas.  

On the Aleppo province front in northern Syria, the armed opposition captured the key town of Khan al-Asal six days ago.

They have since seized Dhahret Abd Rabbo and are no more than 200 meters away from the Air Force Intelligence building there.

Dhahret Abd Rabbo will allow the armed opposition to control the Aleppo-Aintab motorway, which links them to Aleppo city, Nubul, Zahra and Minnigh all the way to the border crossing (with Turkey) at Bab al-Salam.

The opposition’s advances in Deraa province are even more spectacular.

The rebels now hold the major towns of Nawa, Inkhil and Jassem there.

The entire city of Idlib will come under their control once they flush out regime forces from the neighborhood of Manshiyeh.

Mixing Aleppo and Qusayr won’t win Assad the war

Salam Hindawi reporting & Safwat el-Zayyat analyzing

“Syrian army to storm Aleppo in next to no time” was the title of my post last Tuesday.

I am copying and pasting that May 28 post’s two opening paragraphs for the one today. Here goes:

As fierce fighting rages around the Syrian capital Damascus and the strategic border town of Qusayr, Syrian troops backed by Lebanese Hezbollah fighters are preparing to storm Aleppo in next to no time.

Aleppo, Syria's largest city of three million and a former commercial center, is now split between rebel and government control.

Ms Salam Hindawi, reporting for Aljazeera from Aleppo city last night, says a mass exodus from Aleppo governorate’s rural areas followed news yesterday that between 3,000 and 5,000 of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s troops and Hezbollah fighters were positioned in the northern rural sector, where they were torching fields and preparing to blitz the city.

Nasser Shadid, another Aljazeera reporter in the area, said at least nine people were killed and many others injured Sunday by a Scud missile on the Kfar Hamra area of Aleppo.

Loveday Morris, reporting for the Washington Post from Beirut, quotes an unnamed senior Hezbollah commander as saying there were about 2,000 Hezbollah fighters in Aleppo province, largely stationed in Shiite towns north of the city.

She writes in part:

The Aleppo battle has started on a very small scale; we’ve only just entered the game,” said the Hezbollah commander in an interview in Beirut on Saturday while on leave from fighting in Qusayr, where he oversees five units. “We are going to go after strongholds where they think they are safe. They are going to fall like dominoes.”

(…) Louay al-Mekdad, political and media coordinator for the Free Syrian Army, said Hezbollah militants had gathered at a military academy in Aleppo’s western district of Hamdaniyeh on Sunday. He put the number of the Shiite movement’s soldiers in the area at 4,000, quoting rebel intelligence.

“We think they are going to engage inside Aleppo and the province,” he said.

In what appeared to be preparation for that, pro-government forces began a push to secure supply lines to the city on Sunday, activists said.

(…) The Hezbollah commander boasted about gains in Qusayr, saying that when he left the battlefield for leave a week ago, the movement controlled 70 percent of the city at the cost of 72 of its men. He said 3,000 Hezbollah fighters are in the town, among “no more than 10,000” in the whole of Syria.

(…) In a sign that Hezbollah may be under more strain than expected, the commander said that seven-days-on, seven-days-off military rotations have been changed to 20 days on before a weeklong leave.

Egyptian military and strategy expert Safwat el-Zayyat is not impressed by the buildup of regime and Hezbollah forces in Aleppo province or anywhere else.

He does not think the Damascus government is making military advances or territorial gains so far.

Zayyat told Aljazeera TV last night:

Much as government troops and Hezbollah fighters are gathering in the northern sector (of Aleppo province), the rebels are confidently moving to the center of Qusayr town – as if to say that Qusayr is Aleppo or any other spot in Syria.

This shows the regime is totally unable to cut off the rebels’ supply routes.

Hundreds of rebels were able to move freely from the north to the south of the country without being challenged by regime forces either from the air or on the ground.

The floods of rebels streaming to Qusayr were not even ambushed once because the roads are wide open.

Do you think the regime, which failed to regain control of Jobar or Qaboun or Barza, has enough troops to try and control the road between Aleppo and A’zaz?

Hezbollah’s military support can’t change much. You need between 400,000 and 500,000 troops to control the whole of Syria and the regime has no more than 60,000 left. Had it had more men, it would not have asked Iran to order Hezbollah’s intervention to try and recapture Qusayr.

By massing troops in the Aleppo area, the regime is simply trying to divert rebels in the north from joining the battles in Hama, Homs and Qusayr.