The Avalanche Accelerates

When political systems begin to crumble, you can read about the big vectors of change in the news. Syria is all about the government and its operatives shelling, strafing and murdering its own people, the battles in Homs, Aleppo and Damascus, the hundreds of thousands of fleeing refugees, high level defections and the rough estimates of the casualties. We know about the majority Sunnis and their resentment for the 7% of the Alawites (Shiite-affiliates) who ran the country under the Assad regime. But what we don’t really see on an ongoing basis, and what really tells you that the Assad regime must fall, is that the country as a whole just doesn’t function anymore.

So many government workers have stopped doing some pretty ordinary jobs. Running the power grid and repairing damaged equipment and infrastructure. Street repair. Medical emergency services. Police and fire services. The criminal justice system. For those places where workers remain, understaffing is chronic and getting worse. For criminals, despite the overall risks of living in this country at all, the disintegration of these basic services is a time of unparalleled opportunity. It is the anarchy before the fall.

“[M]any Syrians describe something … that has them cowering with fear: a wave of lawlessness not unlike the crime wave Iraq experienced during the conflict there. From Dara’a, near the Jordanian border, to Homs, Damascus and… in the commercial capital [Aleppo] — the fighting has essentially collapsed much of the civilian state. Even in neighborhoods where skirmishes are rare, residents say thieves prey on the weak, and police stations no longer function because the officers have fled… Kidnapping, rare before, is now rampant…

“[A]s bloody ground battles rage throughout the city, rebel control is limited. Syrians in Aleppo and elsewhere now say they bury their jewelry and other valuables inside their furniture. Some people no longer keep money in their pockets when they venture outside; residents and business owners across the country are padlocking their property to protect against armed opportunists mingling with combatants…

“Aleppo’s slide toward something resembling anarchy began months ago. Factory owners here in the country’s industrial capital said the roads outside the city went first, as armed bandits seized whatever they wanted from passing vehicles. One of Syria’s main automobile exporters recently told a Lebanese friend that he had to start sending vehicles to Iraq by boat from Lebanon because of the insecurity… Then more reports of kidnappings started surfacing. By the end of March, as the government claimed to have retaken control of nearby cities, ransom demands were a daily occurrence in Aleppo, said Amal Hanano, a Syrian writer and analyst living in the United States. Usually, she said, the kidnappers asked for around $75,000 and then dropped their price to a fifth of that after tough negotiations.” New York Times, August 9^th.

The problem with this seemingly inevitable regime change is the snail’s pace we are witnessing. We don’t have the rapid falls we saw in Tunisia and Egypt during the early days of the Arab Spring, and there are too many vested interests blindly clinging to a belief that the Assad regime will somehow survive. Nobody is seriously helping the rebels with the kind of arms and munitions that they need to bring this bloodfest to a close. Russia, with huge investments in Syria, a long-standing status as premier supplier of military hardware and home to a powerful Orthodox Christian prelate fearful of the harm that might come to Syria’s 10% Christian minority, has been the been blocking power for effective aid to the rebels. China hates the notion that outsiders have the right to help dissents topple authoritarian regimes. Iran envisions increasing isolation as if its Alawite ally in the region collapses.

The net impact is that this particular avalanche is a very slow one. The government dismisses the recent high level defections, and the Syrian Free Army responds that the only way that they have been effective is that large cadres of sympathizers – people the SFA says they have requested to stay at their government positions rather than defect – have been shoveling critical information to the rebels from the belly of the beast. But will the Alawite elite eventually retreat to the mountains as a band of irregulars conducting longer-term guerrilla warfare on the victors? Who will the victors be? Fundamentalist Sunnis with no tolerance for freedom, other religions and a predilection for Sharia law? Secularists? Some complex coalition? Or will there be a bloody civil war that sends Syria in the abyss into the foreseeable future?

I’m Peter Dekom, and the situation seems to be going from bad to more bad every day.