Regional shifts pile pressure on the Assads

Bashar al-Assad's regime is once again starting to lose ground in the multi-sided war of attrition in Syria, now entering its fifth year. Though the Syrian battlefield is still clouded and confusing, there is recognisable movement in what has long been a dynamic stalemate. The regime's alliance with Iran, vital to its survival, may also be put to the test, especially if the Islamic Republic formalises the framework nuclear deal it recently reached with the US and five other international powers.

The Assads had seemed complacent and secure inside their rump state, from Damascus up to the northwest Mediterranean coast. Their power structure - with its nervous system in the security services and backbone in their quasi-Shia minority Alawite sect - can rely only on a fraction of the regular army. But Iran's revolutionary guards and Hizbollah, their powerful Lebanese paramilitary proxy, have built up a network of militia to fill the gap. With a monopoly of the skies, and the unrestrained use of everything from barrel bombs to ballistic missiles, the regime has resisted the rebellion that emerged from the 2011 uprising.

The rebels, for their part, never received the support they felt they had been promised from the US and Europeans, or regional powers such as Saudi Arabia and Turkey, which were operating at cross purposes. Jihadi extremists, notably the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, known as Isis, stepped into the vacuum, largely unmolested by an Assad regime concentrating its fire on mainstream rebel groups. But the pattern may be changing.

In recent weeks, the regime has lost the northwestern city of Idlib to a rebel coalition, built around Jabhat al-Nusra. Nusra is tied to al-Qaeda, but there are reports that the gas-rich emirate of Qatar is making aid to the group conditional on its breaking that alliance and moving towards other Islamist and mainstream rebels. Last week, the pivotal town of Jisr al-Sughour - between Idlib and the coastal heartland of the Alawites - also fell to the rebels. In the south, meanwhile, a regime counter-offensive has faltered, and mainstream rebels are threatening Deraa.

Three main changes account for this renewed pressure on the Assads. They have taken place gradually since last summer when Isis surged into Iraq, which the Syrian regime assumed would force the west to at least relax its pariah status if not seek its help.

First, Saudi Arabia and Jordan seem to have overcome some of their differences with Turkey and Qatar, which had backed the Muslim Brotherhood across the region. The Brotherhood has imploded, from Egypt to Syria. Isis, by contrast, is on the march, and Tehran's decision to back the Shia Houthi movement in Yemen has united the Sunni camp and also, regional analysts say, brought some order to predominantly Sunni mainstream and Islamist rebels in Syria.

Second, this has translated into more active assistance to rebels in the south by Jordan, and in the north by Turkey, ahead of delayed US plans to train fighters from groups it has vetted. Recent rebel successes, moreover, have been helped by their access to modern anti-tank weapons, sparingly provided in the past by the US and now more plentifully, some western officials say, through Saudi Arabia.

Third, Syrian rebels may also be benefiting from relatively less pressure from both their antagonists: the Assads and Isis. Last summer's spectacular seizure by the jihadis of swaths of Iraq triggered the sudden departure from Syria of Iran-trained Iraqi Shia militia urgently needed at home. This year's jihadi reverses in Iraq - such as the recapture from Isis of Tikrit by forces allied to the Baghdad government - is forcing Isis to concentrate more on Iraq.

The repercussions of Iraq on Syria might go further. When Isis swarmed into Iraq from Syria last year, Iranian leaders concluded they had to withdraw support for Nouri al-Maliki, the Shia Islamist prime minister whose sectarian policies alienated Sunnis and Kurds and hollowed out the Iraqi army. Tehran may eventually question whether Bashar al-Assad, a very expensive ward of an overstretched Iranian state, is similarly dispensable.

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