9 July 2019

What Is the Endgame in Syria?


After more than seven years of civil war that gutted Syria, the endgame is here. But there are more questions than ever. Download your FREE copy of What Is the Endgame in Syria? to learn more today.

What does victory on President Bashar al-Assad’s brutal terms look like? How has the rise and fall of the Islamic State changed Syria’s political map? And what about reconstruction, let alone reconciliation? This WPR report provides a comprehensive look at those questions and several others that will determine what’s to come in Syria, with impacts far beyond the Middle East.

Download What is the Endgame in Syria? today to take a deeper look at these conflicts and get a glimpse at what the future may hold. 

In this report, you will learn about a variety of issues, including:

What a post-ISIS order in Syria will actually look like.

America's incoherent Syria policy.

How the country will recover from the war.

Whether there will be justice in Assad's "Victorious Syria."

How the wider Jihadi movement could take over where the Islamic State left off.

The Shape of Syria to ComeAfter seven years of war in Syria, the endgame is here. All major frontlines have been frozen by foreign intervention, and military action now hinges on externally brokered political deals. The result could be a de facto division of the country.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s Russian-backed forces spent the past two years taking out isolated rebel strongholds, like Eastern Aleppo and Ghouta, and recaptured the area along the border with Jordan andterritory near the Golan Heights—but at that point, they ran out of low-hanging fruit.

The sight of Russian diplomats shuttling between Israelis, Syrians, Iranians and Americans to ease Assad’s return to the 1967 cease-fire line in the Golan was a sign of things to come. Israel finally relented, accepting a Russian-monitoredrestoration of the pre-2011 status quo, but it’s not clear things will be as easy in the rest of Syria.Download What Is the Endgame in Syria? for FREE today, and discover how three remaining areas outside Assad’s control are shielded by soldiers from NATO member states and wrapped up in complex diplomacy.

Talk of the Endgame in Syria Dodges the Question of RecoveryWhen you download What Is the Endgame in Syria? you'll learn how half of the children in Syria today have grown up only knowing war. “Every 8-year-old in Syria has been growing up amidst danger, destruction and death,” Henrietta Fore, the executive director of UNICEF, said after a five-day visit to the country. Since the government first crushed a popular uprising and precipitated the civil war that still shows little sign of ending, a third of the schools in Syria have been destroyed or damaged, or they have been turned into shelters for displaced families.

It is details like this that are lost in most headlines about Syria, especially those generated by President Donald Trump’s abrupt announcement to withdraw American forces, which are filling the void in a third of the country. This harsh but hardly new reality is happening in a part of the world which is right on Europe's border. Learn more when you download What Is the Endgame in Syria?

Why WPR can help you better understand the situation in Syria:

World Politics Review is produced by a vast network of leading experts and influential observers on the ground; our substantive content gives you access to comprehensive and detailed perspectives that are as valuable as they are unique and rare.

Though strictly nonpartisan with regard to political affiliation or allegiance, WPR relies on a reality-based approach that recognizes the need for all the tools and instruments of statecraft—with a preference for diplomacy and multilateralism in support ofa rules- and norms-based global order.

WPR’s mission is simple—we’re committed to integrity, quality, and the principles of an intellectually honest press whose exclusive purpose is to inform and educate its readers.

WPR offers an incisive mix of substantive policy analysis and politically relevant commentary. It is one of the few outlets which is able to provide both types of writing in an incisive and engaging manner.”

- Steven Feldstein

Former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, U.S. State Department

“WPR provides piercing analysis, fresh perspectives and timely reporting on issues of immense importance to academics and practitioners alike.”

- Iyad Dakka

Fellow, Modern Turkish Studies Initiative, Carleton University

Download What Is the Endgame in Syria? for FREE today and benefit from valuable insights you can’t get anywhere else.

Learn what a post-ISIS order in Syria might actually look like

So long as Sunni-sectarian grievance persists in Syria—defined in sectarian terms, as opposed to Syrian disenfranchisement more generally—some manifestation of the Islamic State seems likely to survive. As scholars such as Hassan Abu Hanieh have pointed out, the Islamic State’s message is still the purest, most readily understandable version of Sunni revanchism among the various militant ideologies today. The Islamic State has a track record of spectacular violence and conquest, and, for angry sectarians, it promises a fairly straight line to revenge and death.

As for the actual organization of the Islamic State—not its mass membership and symbolic appeal, but its individual commanders, its structures and institutional knowledge—that too will persist in some form. The circumstances of its rapid collapse in Deir el-Zour are still unclear. It is not obvious whether the group’s cadres deliberately melted away, or if it was just terminally depleted by a multiyear war of attrition. But the group has survived underground before, and it has had time to prepare for a stretch of militant austerity. Its future in Syria is also inseparable from its prospects across the border in Iraq, its real home, which will remain restive and unsettled. Learn more when you download What Is the Endgame in Syria?for FREE today.

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