Syria’s Assad is confronting the toughest challenges of the 9-year war - The Washington Post

The rebels now squeezed into one last corner of Syria no longer pose any threat, and there are no other serious contenders for the presidency of a country that has been ruled by the Assad family for the past 50 years.

Neither Russia nor Iran is in a position to inject the billions of dollars Syria needs to rebuild and revive, yet Assad continues to reject the political reforms that might open the doors to Western and Gulf Arab funding.

“Assad has become highly reliant on Iranian and Russian support.

The targeting of Makhlouf coincides with a broader effort to force the newly powerful Syrian business elites who have profited from the war to hand over cash to support the struggling economy.

More than that, Assad appears to be trying to recoup some of the influence that has become dispersed among the warlord-like businessmen, many of whom, including Makhlouf, run militias alongside their commercial enterprises, Khatib said.

Makhlouf poses no threat to Assad’s presidency, he said.

He has also publicly defied the president, something not normally tolerated in Syria, said Danny Makki, a Syrian journalist and political analyst.

“What we’re seeing now is not just dissent but open dissent to the president and the institution of the presidency by a businessman,” Makki said.

For ordinary Syrians, Makki said, the rift is above all a reminder that Syria’s shrunken wealth has been concentrated in the hands of an ever-smaller circle of people at the same time much of the population is becoming impoverished.

and European Union sanctions, intended to pressure Assad into making compromises with the opposition, preclude the kind of investment or reconstruction funding needed to kick-start growth.

sanctions will go into effect under a law known as the Caesar Act targeting any individual or entity in the world that offers support to the Syrian regime.

Though the entire government has been weakened by the war, Assad remains “the strongest among the weak ones,” said Bassam Barabandi, a former Syrian diplomat who defected from the Syrian Embassy in Washington in 2012.

Several recent articles in Russian news outlets have criticized his regime for its intransigence and corruption, triggering speculation that Russia’s support for his presidency may be waning.

“Of course Assad is dependent on Russian support, but politically Russia is also dependent on him,” Lukyanov said.

Such reforms, which would dilute Assad’s absolute power, “are viewed as an essential condition for true and lasting reconciliation,” he said.

Exactly who is behind the violence isn’t clear, but it appears that a new insurgency is in the making, said Abdo Jabassini, a researcher at the European University Institute in Florence.

It is clear, said Lukyanov, that Assad cannot take territory without Russian support

None of this contributes to the sense that Assad is as much in control of the country as he likes to portray, said Makki, the political analyst

“This is more dangerous and more challenging than any period in the entire war,” he said