Thread by @AlexGSimon

As events in Syria unfold at dizzying speed, I find three slow-moving trends help grapple with the current moment.

First is the extreme decrepitude of Syria’s army, which for years has functioned more as a large prison than as a professional fighting force. 🧵

Barely paid, barely fed, press-ganged into open-ended service to fight and die for a regime that offers them nothing in return: no living wage, no dignity, no future.

The best most can hope for is opportunities to extract bribes from fellow Syrians at checkpoints.

Thus, while the pace of recent events is head-spinning, it is no surprise that the Syrian army would melt in the face of a major offensive.

It evokes the ISIS blitz of 2014, when Iraq’s army crumbled under the weight of its’ leaders corruption and sectarianism.

The regime’s manpower deficit—and its distrust of conscripted troops—goes back to the early days of Syria’s uprising-turned-war.

In the past, Damascus plugged the gap by empowering a mix of local and foreign paramilitaries.

It’s unclear if those forces can be revived. The Alawi communities that funneled their young men into pro-regime militias have hollowed out by death and disability. And militias from Lebanon, Iraq, and Iran are busy elsewhere.

If Iraq in 2014 illuminates one side of this moment, Gaza sheds light on another.

In Idlib, as in Gaza, millions of people—mostly civilians, but also hardened fighters—were locked in an open-air prison, deprived of all but the bare necessities and racked by spasms of violence.

The world decided that this worked well enough as an open-ended status quo. Western states supplied a trickle of aid, while sanctioning the militias running the respective enclaves. None espoused any vision for a way out of the impasse.

Again, little surprise this eventually snapped.

So that’s the second trend: suffocation.

Damascus suffocates its society and economy with corruption and plunder, while Western states suffocate the country with pointless sanctions. Idlib was an extreme example.

The third, related trend is an absolute lack of any structuring policy other than suffocation. Officials in Washington don’t even pretend to have a vision, or to care about the lack of one. What’s left is a rump military deployment and blanket sanctions.

European states are equally aimless, although they dress up their aimlessness in frantic motion: endless hand-wringing about “early recovery,” machinations to appoint a special envoy with no discernible purpose, shallow scheming about how to encourage “voluntary” refugee returns.

Arab states are no better, having welcomed Bashar al-Assad back into the fold in exchange for strictly nothing, based on fanciful notions of rolling back Iranian influence, curbing the Captagon trade, or facilitating refugee returns.

As Syria veers once more into the violent unknown, we might hope that our leaders would realize the folly of imagining an entire country can be beaten and blockaded into quiet submission, or that pundits might find some humility as we wait and see how this plays out.

With that, a friendly reminder to listen to Syrians, and to distrust anyone who claims to know where this ends—all the more so if they're the type to put Bashar al-Assad on an anti-imperial pedestal.