Destruction of Assad’s chemical weapons continues to run on schedule. Fisher welcomes the news:
Complying with the inspectors may well be in Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad’s interest, which is also a good explanation for why it’s succeeding. Sarin gas will not win or lose him the war; military support from Iran and diplomatic cover from Russia are far more important. So is keeping out the United States. Working with the U.N. inspectors accomplishes all of this for Assad, even if it means he has to give up his chemical weapons.
In this sense, yes, the deal probably helps Assad stay in power. But it also makes it far less likely, and perhaps someday soon makes it impossible, for him to use chemical weapons against his own people. That’s good for Syrians, although ending the war would be better. More to the point of both the deal and of the initial U.S. plan to strike Syria, it helps uphold the international norm against the use of chemical weapons. That, and not ending the war, was Obama’s clearly stated mission all along. That’s not a mission that does a whole lot to help Syrians, or much of anything to resolve Syria’s civil war, but it does at least appear to be so far achievable. And that’s something.
But security is still tenuous:
Syria is now the most dangerous country in the world for reporters:
According to the Doha Centre for Media Freedom, at least 114 journalists have died there since the spring of 2011. Among the dead are seasoned correspondents like the American Marie Colvin, who was killed in Homs in 2012, and freelancers like the Frenchman Olivier Voisin, who was wounded in February near Idlib and later died in Turkey. Meanwhile, 16 foreign journalists are officially missing, along with an untold number of fixers and translators. Because of voluntary media blackouts—enforced to avoid encouraging would-be kidnappers—the real number is almost certainly higher.
As the conflict continues, Syria is becoming more dangerous still. By one estimate, there are now more than 1,000 rebel groups operating in the country, some secular and some—such as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIS—decidedly jihadist. Regime forces have pushed back the rebels in key areas, and the Free Syrian Army, or FSA, is often unable to protect reporters as it once did, or ensure safe passage through rebel-held areas. These days, most foreign journalists do only short stints inside Syria—“get in under the radar, get what you need, and get the fuck out before you get kidnapped” is how one photographer put it.
One reporter in the region is Joshua Hersh, who has this dispatch on the Alawite community:
What motivates the staunch Alawite support for the regime remains poorly understood, but it is typically characterized in monolithic and myopic terms: the Alawites, it is said, back the regime because they are the regime; its demise would be their own. But the Alawites’ support for Assad is much more complex—and harder to break. … “When we talk about the Alawites, the first thing we naturally think of is the regime, and that Bashar Assad is an Alawite, and so the fight must be about solidarity with the regime,” Aziz Nakkash, a Syrian researcher who recently published a paper about the Alawites for the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, told me when we spoke in Beirut. “But when you look inside the community, what you see is a series of personal choices. People fight because they lost a family member, or because they need the money, or—even if they don’t like fighting or the regime—because they are afraid for their own survival. It’s all about survival—for themselves and for their family, not for the sect.”
The Dish 