President Obama’s former ambassador to Syria said Monday that Bashar al-Assad, cemented by support from Iran, has essentially won the Syrian civil war and will maintain his grip on power.
“The war is winding down little by little. Assad has won and he will stay,” Robert Ford, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute who served as ambassador from 2011 to 2014, told The National in a Q & A. “He may never be held accountable, and Iran will be in Syria to stay. This is the new reality that we have to accept.”
Ford said that Iran, which with Russia has long propped up Assad, will maintain its presence in Syria. Iran backs thousands of fighters there, including militiamen and its own soldiers.
“The war has brought them closer,” he said, referring to Tehran and Damascus. “You have tens of thousands of pro-Iranian fighters, and they are not going home after this settles.”
The combatants’ lingering presence is a source of serious concern for Israel, Ford noted.
“If there is another Hezbollah-Israel war, a lot of these fighters are battle-hardened and would reinforce Hezbollah in any new war against Israel,” he said. “The shift in the dynamic in Syria has made the situation worse for Israel.”
Ford resigned as ambassador in 2014, saying that he no longer “could defend the American policy” in Syria.
Another adviser to Obama on Syria, Frederic Hof, wrote last August that the administration’s passive policy there was rooted in the fear that Iran might walk away from the nuclear deal.
“The administration’s policy toward Assad Syria (as opposed to ISIS Syria) rests on its desire to accommodate Iran—a full partner in Assad’s collective punishment survival strategy—so that the July 14, 2015 nuclear agreement can survive the Obama presidency,” he wrote.
Trump officials have made defeating the Islamic State (ISIS) in Syria a top priority. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has simultaneously said that Iran’s military forces in Syria “must leave and go home.”
The administration initially wavered on Assad’s ouster, but since the president’s retaliatory missile strikes against the Syrian regime in April, has largely maintained that Assad should eventually be removed through a political process. Tillerson suggested in early August that Russia, a key backer of the Assad regime, could help in that process.
The administration has pursued cooperation with the Kremlin on brokering ceasefires in Syria, as did the Obama administration, and on fighting ISIS there. Tillerson told reporters in July that U.S. and Russian objectives in Syria are “by and large . . . exactly the same.”
Ford said that the Assad government will likely achieve military victory in coming years regardless of brokered de-escalation zones.
“It might take two or four years, but they can’t accept other governments—local or foreign—to control these places. It is clear that the Russian-sponsored ceasefires will not end it,” he said. “While Moscow may complain in private, it won’t penalize him.”
Syrian rebels have little chance of winning against the regime, even if foreign governments provide them with arms, funding, and advisers, Ford added.
“It would be a long war that probably ends in a stalemate,” he said.
The Trump administration months ago ended a controversial Obama-era program that trained and armed rebel groups.
