A New Strategic RealityBy Mohammad Aburumman

(MENAFN- Alghad Newspaper)

1. In reality, the Syrian Army has broken the siege on the military base in Deir al Zour, and has entered the city, taking control over parts of it.

Deir al Zour is technically ISIS's last remaining stronghold, aside to a few other cities, like Mayadin, Qaem, and Bou Kamal, and some hot-pockets around Iraq and Syria.

In Raqqa too, the terrorist organisation has lost much of its territories to the Democratic Syria forces.

On other fronts, the Syrian regime is pushing to retake the rest of the Syrian Badia, now that Jordan's affiliated factions have announced their withdrawal from the borderline territories.

Now, the Syrian opposition's only hope is that the recently established de-escalation zones in Syria are expanded.

Notably, the Russians are the ones primarily responsible for the establishment of these low tension zones.

As for the western Syrian border territories, these have completely been retaken by Assad's forces.

Meanwhile, in the central Syrian regions, the army is engaged in blood ravaging battles to restore the regime's control over the regions of Homs and Hama.

The Nusra-held city of Idlib, on the other hand, remains isolated, as the regime's forces and allies turn it into another Tora Bora, now that they've finished off Nusra's allies; Ahrar al Sham.

No one is going to miss them; the Nusra Front I mean!

2. It is too early to say whether or not Syria will ever go back to the way it was before 2011. Geographically, maybe, by about 80 per cent, for instance, but politically, culturally, and socially, a lot of it is at stake.

How will the Syrians overcome the blood events of the civil war? How will Syria overcome the displacement and migration of nearly half its people? How will they ever hope to overcome racial and sectarian identity crises?!

3. More importantly, Assad's military triumph, was not without cost; both internal and external. For the Russians and Iranians now split their dominion over Syria.

So long as the Iranians hold the deeper influence on the ground, which has a lot to do with the military, cultural, and political aspects of the situation, they will hold premise over the Russians.

4. The question which remains unanswered is: why did the Syrian revolution fail to instil the higher values of liberty, democracy, and social justice, which is why the people rebelled in the first place, in 2011?

Even now, after six war-struck years of armed conflict, the Syrians have paid an unfathomable price for their revolt; humanitarianly, politically, and economically.

Still, despite all their sacrifice and loss, the revolution has failed.

Why?

Epistemologically and politically, this question goes beyond the Syrian reality, as horrible and bitter as it is, to a grander, regional state of Arab affairs.

The triumph of the counterrevolution, and the political and symbolic defeat in Egypt, Libya, and Yemen, where similar revolts have taken place, did not support the premise of revolution in Syria.

Though Tunisia has escaped the fate drawn for it by the Arab conservative current, the country still faces immense challenges in its encompassing transition.

Hence, in order to answer this question, it needs to be generalised.

Why have we, the Arab peoples, failed to salvage our nations from the bitter grips of our terrible reality to join in with the rest of the democratic world, like other nations have?!

Are the conservative powers, which have taken over in Egypt, for instance, responsible for this failure? Or are the Islamists to blame, having proven naïve and inadequately packed to engage the political reality?

Did the Islamist current drown in its own transitions, dragging with them the people? Or is it just a question of historical dialectics; that is to say that it is all a natural phase for revolutions throughout history, to undergo triumphs and failures, as they did in Europe, for instance?

All these hypotheses are valid, and they are all worth exploring, not to mention the fact that the Syrian regime has maintained a solid alliance with the Russians and the Iranians.

However, when it came to the Syrian revolution, it lacked the backing and support of a real, solid regional, Arab agenda, save for the fundamentalist extremist project.

Mindfully, this extremist agenda was founded primarily to drain and abort the revolution, which is exactly what happened!

This article is an edited translation of the Arabic version, published by AlGhad.

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