The rebel attacks against military facilities around Damascus reportedly lasted 90 minutes,
an extraordinarily long time given how tightly the military controlled
the country as recently as a few weeks ago. Defectors are organizing
themselves into what they call the Free Syrian Army. Some leaders of the
rebel group say they are planning to ramp up a coordinated assault against the government.
While they might have some success in more rebellious towns such as
Homs and Hama, the fighters would need to take Damascus and Aleppo to
win. The leadership is based in those two cities, where it has much
tighter control; though protests in neighboring towns have been
escalating, residents of those two major cities appear too terrified --
understandably -- to follow.
As in Libya, if the rebel
opposition wants to take the country, it will have to first clear out
and hold some smaller cities so that it could have a base of operations
from which to Damascus and Aleppo. Even then, they would almost
certainly lack the same level of outside support that the Libyan rebels
enjoyed. Even if the world could find the will to intervene on their
behalf -- doubtful for now, as Russia remains absolutely opposed and
European states exhausted by the Libya mission and the eurozone crisis
-- Syria's dense geography would make an air-support campaign less
likely to succeed and more likely to cause accidental deaths, which
would turn many Syrians against the uprising. The Syrian opposition
would likely turn into a civil war that would be longer and bloodier
than the months-long conflict in Libya. And, as conflict expert Daniel Serwer notes
on Twitter, the worse that fighting gets, the less likely rebels would
have support. "It will reduce public participation, cause social
cleavage, play to regime strength," he wrote.
For an armed
uprising to succeed, then, would take more than just individual military
defectors. The regime has tanks and helicopters, after all; Syrian
rebels could resist but not defeat that kind of force. Eastern Libya
fell to the rebels not just when defectors picked up assault rifles, but
when officers in charge of bases and heavy hardware walked away from
their posts. It's not clear exactly how that might happen in Syria,
where many officers in important positions belong to the same Alawite
minority as Assad. Many Alawites are terrified
-- and probably with good reason -- that they will be targeted for
revenge if Assad, their protector, falls. For these officers to
abdicate, and thus make rebel advances possible, they'll have to believe
that they could have a future in a post-Assad Syria. It's not clear how
the Syrian opposition, which is fragmented and decentralized, could
assure Alawites that it's safe for them to talk away. Alawites and other
regime loyalists would have to take it on faith and conscience, two
things that don't appear in great supply in Syria right now.