& Conditions. Privacy Policy. Log InAs the author has noted in the past, anyone interested in the three-year-old Syrian conflict between the government and forces loyal to the Bashar al-Assad regime and those forces opposed to him—and that involvement has recently expanded into a four-year-old war—must have been relieved when the Syrian army routed the insurgents in the northern city of Aleppo on November 26.
The government now seeks to end the war by launching an offensive to take control of Raqqa, a northern Syrian city that has long been a militant hub. (See our map here.) The armed Syrian opposition is planning to take up arms there, and the FSA has been inching toward the border of Turkey and Syria in the north and south.
“The Syrian rebels are in their strongest position they’ve been in for years,” said Jeffrey White, an expert in terrorism and counterterrorism at New York University’s Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The floodgates have been opened; [the fighting] is spilling over into Lebanon and into Iraq, [and] there are some people in Damascus who are worried about their own position.”
While U.S. lawmakers have been torn over how to approach this situation, observers who study the international politics of Syria are not as concerned about Washington’s position on the conflict. They say the administration’s approach—cutting off aid, pressuring military intervention—is not working, and may in fact have backfired.
“What happened in Aleppo could not have happened without heavy weapons that were smuggled in by Turkey, which is now acting as a proxy for the U.S. and has limited but real political weight,” said Dennis J. Gartman, senior fellow at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. “We thought we were going to be able to change the game with sanctions and isolation, but it hasn’t worked. The Syrians aren’t budging. They are not going to give up.”
A popular uprising
The roots of the uprising were laid during the Arab Spring, in 2011, when protesters took to the streets to demand political reform in Syria. In that volatile year, the Syrian government responded violently, killing an estimated 15,000 demonstrators.
The uprising continued on and off until early 2012, when, according to the International Crisis Group, the Syrian army killed more than 8,000 protesters during
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