Politic?

Theoretical Syrian Prospects...?

"For the U.S. and Western powers, there is a Syrian opposition that they'd like to see and that doesn't exist. The U.S. knows who it wants to back. It knows what it wants the Syrian opposition to look like. But those groups are only part of a larger, more disperse grouping of opposition."
James Fallon, Middle East Analyst, Control Risks, Dubai

"Uniting the different groups is almost an impossible task. It's going to take many months to shore up one particular part of the opposition and put it in a leadership position and make others rally around it."
Ghanem Nuseibeh, Cornerstone Global Associates, London

Ahmad Aboud/Agence France-Presse - Getty Images

The city of Deir al-Zour on Thursday. The International Committee of the Red Cross said it was projecting an extended conflict.

According to Mustapha al-Sheikh, one of the first senior officers who defected from the Syrian army, the Syrian rebels are too divided for any effectiveness. Should a Western military attack take place against the regime, the opposition would be incapable of gaining any advantage, significant or otherwise. "The strength of the regime comes from the weakness of the opposition", he explained.

A brigadier-general in the army of President Bashar al-Assad, Mr. al-Sheikh obviously knows of what he speaks. From the perspective of the professionalism of a state army, to the decidedly disadvantaged ranks of the rebels he hopefully joined, then departed from.

There are said to be something in the nature of a thousand disparate rebel groups. There is no co-ordination, no organization, no willingness to act together, no facility for dropping their tribal antagonisms for the greater good of a collective campaign to act in concert to eventually prevail over the professional organization of a well-armed military.

Together, the rebels could have the advantage; in battling the troops for their very existence, for the survival of the country, on behalf of their Sunni civilian counterparts. They lack the will, the enterprise, the vision. They are not entirely lacking assistance, however. Help they had initially acclaimed, welcomed, appreciated; the fully-armed, battle-hardened skills of the Islamists who streamed into Syria.

And who are now intent on saving Syria for themselves, for their own indelible vision of a strict, Sharia-led Salafist state, to be part of a greater concentration of other such dedicated states, and a final supreme, collaborative and dedicated Caliphate. Radical Islamist groups allied with al-Qaeda, jubilant with the creed of Sunni jihadist triumphalism.

So, should the West finally intervene and balance the situation more heavily in favour of the opposition to enable the fall of the Alawite Baathist regime, what then?

"The opposition is dominated by al-Qaeda and other extremists, so it's going to be bad, possibly worse than Assad himself", offers Richard Kemp, former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, now a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute for Defense and Security Studies, London.