How Assad is winning

The government, with its known record of harsh human rights abuses including torture, demonstrated more flexibility than its opponents. The state security system, armed with intelligence files amassed over generations, knew its enemies and their vulnerabilities. Discovering that no tactic worked everywhere, the regime’s negotiators dangled offers of a deal with some rebel fighters and civilians while dropping barrel bombs on others. In some neighborhoods, the government allowed the wounded out and medicine in. In others, it tightened the siege.

The means varied, but the objective was the same: pacification and restoration of control by the Assad regime. Among the negotiators for the government were army and intelligence officers as well as pro-regime residents of contested areas. They talked with militiamen from a variety of groups, as well as Muslim clergy, local mayors, and community leaders. The government promised to end its assaults if the rebel forces departed. To obtain food, water, electricity, and a respite from bombardment, the local people put pressure on their self-proclaimed defenders to leave. The process of trial and error that the government called “reconciliation” may have reconciled hardly anyone but it brought more relief to more people than did its badly divided opponents.

“Reconciliations are doing very well now,” President Assad’s political and media adviser, Dr. Bouthaina Shaaban, told me. “And there are many areas in the pipeline. We feel that this is the best way to end the war.” Bitter fighting and expansion goes on, but there is some truth to what she said.

The government established a Ministry of National Reconciliation at the beginning of the conflict in 2011, but its brief did not involve discussion with armed militias officially designated “terrorists.” Ziad Haidar, a Syrian journalist who covered the war for the Lebanese daily As-Safir until the paper closed at the end of 2016, said that negotiations with so-called terrorists began almost by accident two years after the ministry was established. “The governor of Homs, Ahmad Munir, started the reconciliation in Tal Khalak on the border with Lebanon in 2013,” he recalled. “He discussed it with the head of the militias in Tal Khalak. This was the first reconciliation process. It triggered others in Homs.”