Syrian Crackdown: One Year Later, 8,000 Dead, 230,000 Displaced - East Idaho News
World

Syrian Crackdown: One Year Later, 8,000 Dead, 230,000 Displaced

  Published at

Getty W 042511 SyriaProtest?  SQUARESPACE CACHEVERSION=1331809920172KARIM SAHIB/AFP/Getty Images(DAMASCUS, Syria) — On March, 15, 2011, protests sprang up in the southern Syrian city of Daraa over the arrest and torture of local children who had written on a school wall, “The people want the downfall of the regime.”  The protests sparked an uprising that has now lasted longer than any other in the Arab Spring, claiming more than 8,000 lives and displacing some 230,000 people, according to the United Nations.

One year later, there is no doubt that Bashar al-Assad’s regime has the upper hand, and there’s little sign it’s losing grip — at least for now.

[SLIDESHOW: Syria Marks the One-Year Anniversary of its Uprising]

Assad “is very much in charge,” senior U.S. intelligence officials told the Washington Post last week.  “That leadership is going to fight very hard…the odds are against them…but they are going to fight very hard.”

The growing number of soldiers defecting to the woefully ill-equipped Free Syrian Army (FSA) is still just a small fraction of the overall forces, and the vast majority of those defecting are conscripts.  The almost entirely Sunni FSA is at most 20,000 strong — mostly civilians — against an Assad force commanded by Alawites that the U.S. believes is around 330,000. 

Meanwhile, the Syrian political opposition is still a fractured mess.  The Syrian National Council (SNC) has not been able to present a unified front, as it has been urged to by its supporters in the international community.

“There is no council, it’s an illusion,” said one top SNC member who quit this week.

But it’s not all bleak for the regime’s opponents.

There is certainly a pervading sense that the country’s senior leadership is jittery, and that it’s only a matter of time before a “big dog” — as a U.S. official recently put it to ABC News — from a top ministry, the military or the security apparatus defects.  If that were to happen, a cascade of defections could follow.

The FSA is also getting bigger by the day.  They’ve doubled the use of improvised explosive devices since December, the Pentagon says, which could help them block roads and carve out regions of the country, like what was seen in eastern Libya.  They’re also getting support from Qatar and Saudi Arabia that could grow.

And economic sanctions are hitting hard.  The Syrian pound has dropped by around 90 percent against the dollar in the past few months, the electricity goes off every day in Damascus for six hours, food prices have doubled, and there are gas shortages and long lines.

Could Assad survive this?  It remains to be seen, but with each passing day, this conflict looks increasingly like a civil war with strong sectarian divides.

Copyright 2012 ABC News Radio

SUBMIT A CORRECTION