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Syria Uprising

Hopes fade as crisis turns into proxy war

REUTERS, Damascus
Regional powers are pouring in money and guns, jihadists are joining rebels battling to overthrow Bashar al-Assad, while his own well-armed but hard-pressed forces are fighting back ruthlessly with combat aircraft and artillery.
Gruesome scenes of slaughtered civilians or executed rebel fighters provide daily snapshots of the worsening conflict in Syria. Video apparently showing rebels gunning down Assad militiamen in cold blood suggests the insurgents are capable of brutality to match their enemies.
After almost 17 months of revolt against the Assad dictatorship, Syria’s conflict is turning into a regional proxy war between Sunni and Shia Islam that could splinter the country along sectarian lines unless a unified rebel leadership emerges as a credible opposition to the beleaguered government.
Few observers of Syria see any sign of an opposition ready to run the country if or when Assad and his clan, whose power base lies in the esoteric Shia sect of Syria's Alawite minority, lose overall control.
With the Shia Islamic Republic of Iran behind Assad, and Saudi Arabia and other Sunni Muslim states backing the rebels, Syria could become the arena in which the regional Sunni-Shia cold war becomes an open-ended civil war with the potential to destabilise its neighbours - Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq and Jordan.
"We most definitely have a proxy war in Syria," says Ayham
Kamel of the Group politi-consultancy.
"Syria is an now. The day
falls you (will) have all of these different groups with different agendas, with different allegiances, with different states supporting them yet unable to form a coherent leadership."
Kamel believes Syria is already fragmenting, and that the Free Syrian Army, the umbrella for a plethora of armed groups fighting to overthrow Assad, is little more than a franchise of Sunni Muslim groups.
"I don't think there is anybody to take over," said George Joffe, a Middle East expert al Gambridge University. "The really big problem is that there is no credible opposition."
On the ground, the picture is gelling darker.
It is complicated by Syria's religious divisions. The Alawites form about 12 percent of Syria's 23 million people but are reckoned to make up 40 percent of the army and the bulk of the proAssad Shabbiha militia. Sunnis, who account for the majority of the opposition, form 75 percent of the population.
As the conflict rages on without any solution, Syrians say homegrown Islamist jihadists and groups of fighters from al Qaeda have been taking an active role.
Most analysts agree that there is no "good or happy scenario" and that the chances of a negotiated settlement under the auspices of UN envoy Kofi An nan are nil.
With no Western appetite for military intervention and no prospect of an internationally mediated political resolution, many see the civil war spreading and tearing the country apart.
Lebanese columnist Rajeh Khoury predicted: "Syria could plunge into a long protracted civil war that could last years. The civil war in Lebanon, with its much smaller population of five million, lasted 15 years due to foreign interference so Syria would be much more complicated.