Analysts Thomas Pierret and Emile Hokayem write for Politico:
Bad ideas never die. In recent days, as President Obama geared up for a prime-time Wednesday speech outlining his strategy for defeating the Islamic State, pundits and foreign policy mandarins have taken to op-ed pages to tell us that he should join forces with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, supposedly a lesser evil — an acceptable if unsavory ally to defeat the murderous jihadis. Realism, former ministers, ambassadors, generals and wonks say, dictates that the West hold its nose and engage Assad.
The problem is that — setting aside the morality of working with a man responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Syrians—Assad remains the worst possible partner in the fight against the Islamic State. The gains of such tactical cooperation are massively outweighed by its strategic downsides and political costs.
The truth is that Assad doesn’t have much to offer. Consider his support base: It’s tiny. Assad recruits most of his soldiers from his minority Alawite community, which makes up just 10 percent of the population, compared with a Sunni majority of some 70 percent. To be sure, he retains the support of many Sunni urbanites and minority groups like Christians and Druze, but these groups are often ambivalent, difficult to mobilize on Assad’s behalf and harder to deploy in far-away regions.
Assad’s overreliance on the Alawites for manning regular troops and auxiliary militias has not only polarized the Syrian population along sectarian lines, it has also failed to provide the regime with sufficient manpower: Witness the regime’s inability to project its forces into Raqqa Province to prevent the Islamic State’s takeover of several military bases. Around the city of Hama, overstretched loyalist forces have proved unable to protect pro-regime villages on the outskirts of the Alawite heartlands, thereby prompting the regime to temporarily interrupt military operations around Aleppo to free up reinforcements. The Syrian regime can realistically hope to keep control of the Damascus-Aleppo axis and the coastal regions—enough for Assad to maintain the pretense that he is running a state, but not enough to be a credible partner against the Islamic State.
The overrepresentation of Alawites among the massive casualties suffered at the hands of the Islamic State in recent weeks—and the videos showing hundreds of regime soldiers marched into the desert in their underwear and executed — has also generated an unprecedented wave of unrest among Assad’s core constituency. Some terrified supporters worry that the Islamic State monster is too much for Assad to take on. Several pro-government activists have reportedly been arrested for criticizing the regime and the defense minister over the abandonment and fall of the Taqba Air Base in Raqqa.
Given its lack of homegrown manpower, the regime has owed its survival to auxiliaries in the Alawite-dominated National Defense Forces — an evolved, more sophisticated version of the shabbiha militias — and foreign Shia fighters from Iraq and Lebanon. As in Iraq, this has further alienated the Sunnis, with the difference that in Iraq, at least, these militias are entirely homegrown.
This is the point of the argument where those who favor working with Assad point out that defeating the Islamic State will require deploying ground troops in large number — and in the very regions that Assad’s forces have intensively pummeled since 2011.
Here’s the rub: Local populations in these areas, crucial to the success of any counterterrorism effort, are unlikely to cooperate with their recent oppressor. Sending pro-Assad sectarian forces back into the Islamic State’s safe haven in northern and eastern Syria would only lead to more communal violence — but almost certainly not victory.
