The offense of the Syrian army against the foreign insurgents continues:
The last rebel stronghold near the strategic town of Qusair, western Syria, has fallen to government forces, Syrian state TV says.
Eastern Bouweida village, which lies between Qusair and the restive city of Homs was captured by troops backed by militants from Lebanon's Hezbollah.
The Syrian army regained control of the town of Qusair on Wednesday after weeks of intense fighting with rebel forces.
The rebels have now lost a key supply route into neighbouring Lebanon.
The BBC map of areas held by the insurgents (blue) below still shows some of their pockets next to the eastern Lebanese borders. The next task is to turn these areas into government held red.
Hizbullah will be responsible for this task:
In the speech during which he announced the party’s involvement in the Syrian war, Nasrallah alluded to the direct objectives his party sought to achieve, and defined them as meant to put an end to the Syrian opposition’s military presence in three different areas: The Damascus’ countryside, which is home to the Sayyida Zaynab shrine; the Homs’ countryside, which includes the city of Qusair and surrounding villages; and the Qalamoun area, which includes the Zabadani region.
The Qalamoun area and Zabadani region is the still blue one just north of Damascus.
There is lots of talk by insurgency supporters of an alleged Hizbullah force near Aleppo. I for now doubt that such a force exists there. It makes little sense for Hizbullah to go there before the immediate tasks Nasrallah announced are achieved. The talk about the Aleppo force seems to be planted to exaggerate the Hizbullah "threat" in a renewed media campaign to get more weapons:
“If we don’t receive ammunition and weapons to change the position on the ground, to change the balance on the ground, very frankly I can say we will not go to Geneva,” Gen. Salim Idris said in a telephone interview from his headquarters in northern Syria. “There will be no Geneva.”
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In the interview, however, General Idris said that the rebels remained woefully overmatched in firepower. During the recent fighting, he said, the Assad government has made liberal use of long-range artillery, tanks, surface-to-surface missiles and warplanes. In contrast, he added, rebel forces were relying on light weapons, including AK-47s, PKC machine guns, 120-millimeter mortars and RPG-7s, a type of rocket-propelled grenade.
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The Assad government’s next target, he said, is Syria’s largest city, Aleppo, drawing on support from thousands of Hezbollah fighters, Iranian military operatives and Iraqi Shiite fighters.
(Btw – The ammunition for General Idris' 120mm mortars seem to come from Israel.)
The insurgency supporters suddenly have a lot of issues with "foreign fighters" in Syria. Are those Hizbullah soldiers who came just a month ago from Lebanon to fight near their border more "foreign" than those ten thousands who came over the last years from dozens of other countries to behead Syrian people and are still streaming in even while the original Syrian insurgency dies down?
Foreign Islamist extremists are streaming into Syria, apparently in response to the Shiite militant group Hezbollah’s more visible backing of Syrian President Bashar Assad, a development that analysts say is likely to lead to a major power struggle between foreign jihadists and Syrian rebels should the regime collapse.
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On Friday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a pro-opposition research center in London, posted a video from Aleppo on its Facebook that purportedly shows members of the Nusra Front, a fighting group manned in large part by non-Syrians, replacing a Syrian revolutionary flag with the black flag associated with their al Qaida-aligned movement. The Observatory noted that “local civil activists have voiced much anger as a result.”
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Latest figures from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which is generally regarded as the most authoritative recorder of Syrian casualty figures, showed that 2,219 foreigners have been killed fighting on the rebels’ behalf since the conflict began. That’s more than the 1,965 dead who were identified as defectors from the Syrian army.“Meanwhile, Hezbollah’s involvement was considered a foreign interference,” Nasrallah scoffed in his speech last month.
There is new confirmation that Hizbullah will indeed, for now, not engage in Aleppo:
Hizbullah will suspend its military operations in Syria after securing the Damascus suburb of Zabadani “from which rockets are being fired on Shiite villages in Baalbek and Hermel,” the Central News Agency reported on Saturday.
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“It is not in the party's interest to engage in a war in Syria's heart (against rebels) as the Syrian army is capable of winning it,” the sources added.
The Carnegie Middle East Center predicts:
If the strategic equilibrium that has emerged since November 2012 tips further, it will be a decisive shift in the regime’s favor. The political and military wings of the opposition must address their most serious shortcomings. If they do not, they will be in retreat, if not full flight, by the end of 2013.
I agree with that. But I do not agree with this conclusion:
The regime cannot win. But the opposition can lose.
Unless there is an outright U.S. intervention, for which there is no appetite, I believe, like the Hizbullah sources, that the Syrian army can win the battle for its country.
