No Decisive Outcome on Syrian Horizon

Palestine Studies Fellow Mouin Rabbani

Assad believes he has reversed the conventional wisdom of guerrilla warfare, and that rather than losing because he has not won, he is winning because he has not been defeated. Yet, for all its conviction that it has survived the worst and is no longer at existential risk, the pertinent reality is that, in the words of Syria analyst Bassam Haddad, "the regime's territorial losses are mostly irreversible". Given the implications, this suggests that the Assad regime's very survival will eventually hang in the balance.