Civil War in Syria

[Torie]

What is the risk that further arming the insurgents will just escalate the thing into a full fledged civil war, and a massively high body count. I mean, if you are going to do this, one should parse the odds that it will bring the thing to an end, rather than just make it more sanguinary, no?  And has anyone thought about if Assad is bounced and offed, what the new regime will look like, and what it will do? If one is going to do a switch out, it is generally a good idea to know about not only about the switchor, but also the switchee isn't it?  Maybe they are all just mad dogs and should just be quarantined as it were.

[Torie]

*bump*

So, is this conflict going to continue forever?  Can any side be said to have "momentum" right now?

"Momentum"? No, not really. The Kurds made big gains recently, but the Arab population around Tal Abyad doesn't seem particularly happy to be added to the Kurdish confederation; there appears to be an ongoing ISIS insurgency in that area. And if Turkey actually follows through and invades the strip from Jarablus to the Afrin border, that would most certainly halt Kurdish momentum, and be a great boost to Al Qaeda (Al-Nusra and Friends) and the other paramilitary groups we call "the rebels" fighting in the Aleppo region.

If I had to make a prediction, I'd guess that Assad will abandon his "four corners" strategy and pull back to a more easily defensible line from Damascus to Latakia, leaving the rebels to squabble over interior Syria. But interior Syria and western Iraq will probably be a hellhole of one kind or another for years to come.

This is a rather good analyse, Assad are loking like he's beginning to focus on his core territories, and leaving "government" areas outside this to loyalist Sunni tribes and the random religious minority (mostly Druzes, as the Assyrians outside the core territories have mostly joined the Kurds). So what we're de facto seeing are a split up of Syria into several state-like structures. From a Druze run As-Suwayda Governorate, the Kurdish areas (who seem to be in alliance with the last "moderate" FSA units and the Assyrians), Al Nusra (Al Qaeda) around Aleppo and ISIS. With areas near the Iraqi border being fought over by Sunni tribal loyalist and ISIS and Daara being a cluster fought over by a ISIS, Al Nusra (includes FSA), the Druzes, local Shias etc.

How you put up all of the above text without a map?

[Torie]

Is the way out of the box here some sort of de facto partition of Syria? That seems to be where Iraq is going. Everybody seems to hate everybody in the Middle East.