CrabbedOne
Walking sideways snippily
On Informed Comment More districts of East Aleppo fall to Regime & Militia Allies
He gives a pretty good account of the back and forth of the war centring on trying to starve Damascus by interrupting supply from Latakia port but there's a basic misapprehension that if successful this would have led to rebel victory. Despite easy rebel supply and lavish support from Turkey Aleppo like most of the big urban centres proved rather hostile to the rebels. They only took parts of it often near areas where they did have support. Damascus has a population of about 1.7 million about the same as Aleppo. It's is perhaps 20% Alawite and 15% Christian with many of the majority Sunni being regime supporters. The rebels would have faced years of fighting and then if the regime collapsed had to violently sort out their own considerable differences.
The main rebel strategy was really not of elegant manoeuvre. By their own accounts it was one of attrition based on the conceit that their recruitment base was bigger than the regime's. They made a fair dent in that killing over 100K of regime forces, mostly hapless SAA conscripts. The regime does have severe manpower problems. However Ford points out upthread this was undermined when the IRGC started pouring in militiamen. The Shia-Sunni split in the region from Persia to the Levant is about 45%-55% and shrinking. In Syria the Sunni are mostly of the Shafi'i school and often quite lax. The Salafists prominent in the revolt are in fact a regional minority population. The hard fighting Salafi-Jihadis brought with them their usual fratricidal tendencies and are a limited pool. The Iraqi Sunni Arabs made a similar mistake firmly believing themselves the majority when being about 18% of the population.
Analysts often talk in terms of territory percentages in Syria which is a pretty meaningless metric. Prof Cole having some math problems using the more useful measure of population unless he's counting IS as "rebels". IS still rule more population than the rebels do. I've seen estimates that "moderate" rebels controlled about 5% of the Syrian population. That's how weak their political grasp is.
He gives a pretty good account of the back and forth of the war centring on trying to starve Damascus by interrupting supply from Latakia port but there's a basic misapprehension that if successful this would have led to rebel victory. Despite easy rebel supply and lavish support from Turkey Aleppo like most of the big urban centres proved rather hostile to the rebels. They only took parts of it often near areas where they did have support. Damascus has a population of about 1.7 million about the same as Aleppo. It's is perhaps 20% Alawite and 15% Christian with many of the majority Sunni being regime supporters. The rebels would have faced years of fighting and then if the regime collapsed had to violently sort out their own considerable differences.
The main rebel strategy was really not of elegant manoeuvre. By their own accounts it was one of attrition based on the conceit that their recruitment base was bigger than the regime's. They made a fair dent in that killing over 100K of regime forces, mostly hapless SAA conscripts. The regime does have severe manpower problems. However Ford points out upthread this was undermined when the IRGC started pouring in militiamen. The Shia-Sunni split in the region from Persia to the Levant is about 45%-55% and shrinking. In Syria the Sunni are mostly of the Shafi'i school and often quite lax. The Salafists prominent in the revolt are in fact a regional minority population. The hard fighting Salafi-Jihadis brought with them their usual fratricidal tendencies and are a limited pool. The Iraqi Sunni Arabs made a similar mistake firmly believing themselves the majority when being about 18% of the population.
