Byzantine, Brutal Syria

"For a rebel commander seeking to convince his fighters that cooperation with Washington is in the rebellion's best interest, American strikes that ignore the Assad regime while hitting (Islamist rebels in) Ahrar al-Sham are extremely difficult to explain."
Noah Bonsey, International Crisis Group

"The forces that the U.S. has nominally been backing have suffered losses at the hands of the Islamic State, Jabhat al-Nusra (al Qaeda's Syrian franchise) and the regime. [The current trajectory means] the moderate opposition remains marginal and incapable of shaping the battlefield in any material way."Kimberly Kagan, president, Institute for the Study of War

"American policy freed up the regime to step up bombings of its own civilians, which we are seeing in areas across Syria such as Jobar, Hama and Homs."
Kristen Gillespie, founder, Syria Direct website

"You can't end terrorism with aerial strikes. Troops on the ground that know the land and can react are essential. That is why there haven't been any tangible results in the two months of strikes led by the coalition."
"It isn't true that the strikes are helpful. They would, of course, have helped had they been serious and efficient. We are running the ground battles, and we have noticed no change."
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad

A Syrian opposition fighter fires at Bashar al-Assad Regime forces in the Handarat district of Aleppo on Thursday, November 20

"Our commitment will be measured most likely in years, but our efforts are already having a significant impact. The roughly 1,000 coalition air missions we have flown have reduced Daesh's [Islamic State of Iraq and al Sham] leadership and inflicted damage on its logistical and operational capabilities."
"It is much harder now than when we started for Daesh to assemble forces in strength, to travel in convoys and to launch concerted attacks. No large Daesh unit can move forward aggressively without worrying what will come down on it from the skies."
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry

That much is certainly true; Islamic State militias swiftly learned to take measures to camouflage themselves from detection from the air; no longer do they travel the roads in Iraq and Syria in their former convoys with confidence and the aplomb of knowing that there are few military resources that would be eager to confront them in battle, given the fearsome reputation they have managed to propagate resulting from their swift maneuverability, fighting skills and love of mounting atrocities.

Their propaganda machine, unleashing videos for the fascination of world consumption to earn them the credit of representing the world's currently most feared and abhorred fighting force was a tour de force of technical and social media manipulation. Their appetite for ethnic cleansing, their enthusiastic engagement in mass slaughter of soldiers and minorities alike cemented that repute.

And here is none other than the head of the Syrian Alawite regime teaching the U.S. and its allies how to suck eggs; who would know better than he that enforced starvation and privation, cluster bombs, chemical warfare attacks, helicopter gunship fire on preferred targets only do half the work, the other requires a combination of a military machine following the orders of a friendly advising regime such as Iran's al-Quds mentoring along with the seasoned fighters of Hezbollah, required to do the job right?

And they're still working at it, their victories yet few and far between. Yes, the Syrian Free Army is completely demoralized, no longer fit to fight with the fury that first impelled them to bring down the Shiite regime which targeted their initial peaceful protests with the hostile force of abductions, torture and murder. Those whom the Syrian Sunni rebels felt would aid in their struggle, the foreign jihadists who knew how to fight and who were well armed, had their own agenda, and turned against them.

Syrian boys play in the ruins of a destroyed building in Aleppo on Tuesday, November 18
And now, the U.S. and its allies, fighting from the skies no longer have an effective rebel fighting force to train and equip; too long in the hesitant making. On the other hand, in Iraq, Kurdish forces have been enabled by the airstrikes to hold their own against the advances of the Islamic State, and even retake territory that had been lost to the jihadists.

In Syria, with the Islamic State capital and stronghold of Raqqa, no airstrikes can take place because the city is full of civilians living under the ISIS rule of the caliphate's sharia law. And in that region the Islamic State continues to gain advantages and seize more territory, as far as Homs province, even though they are constrained from their former lightning-strike tactics.

The temporary truce between al-Qaeda's affiliate Al Nusra and the Islamic State renders them an advantage in jointly taking on the rebels, the Kurds and the Syrian regime; a formidable Islamist fighting force joining in a tandem of jihad against the desperate, the good and the ugly.