WHEN a man as patient and pragmatic as Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN’s special envoy on Syria, sounds close to despair, it is a sign of how bad things are. Nobody had high hopes of success for the talks in Geneva convened to find a political settlement to the Syrian civil war. But when a second session folded acrimoniously on February 15th with no plans for the talks to resume, the gloom was palpable. As a downcast Mr Brahimi was apologising to the Syrian people for failing to make progress even on humanitarian aid, speculation was mounting that the Obama administration might finally be rethinking its minimalist Syrian strategy.
The refusal of the Assad regime’s negotiating team to enter into discussions for setting up a transitional governing body (supposedly the conference’s main purpose), combined with the support of Russia for its intransigence, confirmed the worst for America’s secretary of state, John Kerry. America’s policy of limited engagement with the Syrian crisis had left it without leverage or influence. With the backing of Iran and Russia, and faced with divided and increasingly unsavoury rebel forces, Bashar Assad believes that he can survive.
On February 17th, Mr Kerry gave vent to his frustration: “The regime stonewalled. They did nothing except continue to drop barrel bombs on their own people and continue to destroy their own country. And I regret to say they are doing so with increased support from Iran, from Hizbullah and from Russia.”
Backed by Hizbullah, the Lebanese Shia movement, Mr Assad’s army has stepped up offensives in Qalamoun and Yabrud, close to the border with Lebanon. Barrel bombs have become the regime’s favoured terror weapon. These are old oil drums or storage tanks packed with explosives, fuel and scrap metal that are pushed off the back of (Russian-made) helicopters on to rebel-held civilian areas. Crude and indiscriminate, they explode on impact, destroying buildings and killing and maiming people over a large radius. One landed on February 18th next to a school in the village of Mzairib, south of Damascus, killing 18 people, 15 of them Palestinian refugees. Their use in Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, has emptied entire neighbourhoods of people.
UN aid workers say that as many as 500,000 desperate people have fled from Aleppo in recent weeks, flooding into small towns in the surrounding countryside and across the border into Turkey or Lebanon. Mr Assad’s strategy seems to be to take back control of territory by the simple expedient of clearing it of the people who live there.
Mr Assad is also trying to make sure he is seen by Western powers as essential to the future of his country. Diplomats suspect he is delaying the shipment of chemical weapons out of the country, agreed under a deal in September, as a way of ensuring that he keeps a role. He also wants to persuade the West that his regime is the only partner able to tackle al-Qaeda-linked militants in Syria.
The West appears less tempted to buy that line than it was a month or so ago. Mr Kerry’s apparent determination to persuade Barack Obama into greater activism was bolstered by a meeting in Washington, DC last week attended by intelligence chiefs from an informal coalition of 11 countries, known as the Friends of Syria, all of whom want to see the back of Mr Assad. The intelligence officials, from, among others, France, Britain, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, concluded that diplomacy would be useless until Mr Assad’s confidence in a favourable military outcome was dented.
To that end, there was reportedly much discussion about how lethal aid to rebel groups, including the supply of heavy weapons and shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles, known as MANPADs, could be boosted. The MANPADs are needed to shoot down the regime’s helicopters, but America has resisted sending any to Syria for fear they would end up in the hands of rebels with al-Qaeda ties. In an attempt to persuade them that that won’t happen, the Western-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) replaced its head, General Salim Idriss, on February 16th, purportedly because of his failure to unite disparate rebel groups and be a trusted channel for the distribution of weapons.
Is Mr Obama really about to shed his aversion to intervening in a way that would alter the military balance and convince Mr Assad and his backers that they are under threat? Past promises have come to nothing much. But following the diplomatic train crash in Geneva, Mr Obama is said to want Mr Kerry and his military advisers to come up with something bolder. Perhaps abject policy failure concentrates the mind.
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