Analysts: Regime turning into militia after losing 75 pct of Syria
Era of united Syria is something of the past, Syrian analysts say
ANKARA
Analysts estimate that the Syrian regime has lost control of more than 75 percent of the country to different opposition forces and Daesh, after a military advance on a number of fronts, especially over the course of the last two months.
Samir al-Taqi, a Syrian political and strategic analyst, told Anadolu Agency that Damascus “will falter soon as the real fighting moves to the center and west of the country in the coming period.”
He also predicted that the Syrian state will turn into “highly armed and organized militias.”
Taqi is the general-secretary of the Orient Research Center, an independent think tank based in Dubai.
He said that Damascus “will not return to being a functional capital for the state. Syrian sovereignty has dissapitated, the economy has broken apart, and the administrative nature of the state has become weak and limited to Damascus only.”
“The country will be ruled in the future in a decentralized way through agreements between warlords and the dominant forces which the conflict has brought about,” he added.
Ibrahim al-Jabawy, a former lieutenant in the Syrian regime’s army before defecting in March 2011 at the start of the revolution, said that the Assad regime “fell in reality in 2012.”
“The only disputes now are around the fate of its remnants and the time of its departure,” Jabawy said. “With increased numbers of fighters from Hezbollah and the Revolutionary Guards… and the entrance of Iraqi Shia militias, all these groups now control the events on the ground.”
“The Syrian regime and its president Bashar al-Assad have become simply a front, and its army is getting closer to becoming a militia in looks and actions. It has entered the country into a stage of occupation.”
