Syrian security and progress are set to disintegrate even, or rather especially, after the government falls.

THE swift succession of sorry events in Syria over the past week testifies to the country’s rapid descent into the pit of a full-blown failed state.

Last Monday the government of President Bashar al-Assad warned its Palestinian refugee population against siding with the rebels. Traditionally, the several hundred thousand Palestinians living in Syria have supported Assad, but the community has lately seen a shift in support to rebel militants.

Many of the Palestinians live in the Yarmouk district of Damascus. As fighting flared, the Syrian air force for the first time bombed Yarmouk last Sunday.

The government warning came the next day, at the same time three Westerners were reportedly abducted. Syria has seen escalating violence for more than a year now, but events in the past week have taken mass chaos to a new level.

Palestinian families have thus taken to packing up and leaving for neighbouring Lebanon. “Replacing” them are armed Lebanese Shi’ite and Sunni groups entering Syria just to fight each other there.

Shi’ite (Hezbollah) fighters support Assad’s Alawi clan rule, while Sunnis oppose it and fight on behalf of the opposition and the Free Syrian Army (FSA). Within Lebanon they refrain from fighting because they have no serious issue between them, but in Syria they use the insurgency as a catalyst and Assad as the fulcrum.

All of this adds to the violence between government and opposition forces in Syria. Compounding the confusion are repeated denials from all Lebanese groups that they are fighting at all in Syria.

By the middle of the week, the United Nations had projected that Syria’s growing refugee population would reach one million within six months and require US$1.5bil (RM4.5bil) in aid. This was the fourth and bleakest UN refugee finding on Syria in under two years, with even worse expectations to come.

More than half a million Syrian refugees are already scattered around Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey. Syria’s worsening civil war is producing social, economic and political problems throughout the region by the day.

The Assad government, ensconced in the eye of this full-scale storm, is as anxious as any other government in the region. Last week it reportedly committed another “first”: firing Scud missiles at rebel positions near Aleppo.

US officials have since said another round of Scuds was fired, along with the use of lethal cluster bombs on homes in Marea. It confirmed that the deteriorating conflict had struck a new low, although cluster munitions had reportedly been used before.

Most countries ban cluster bombs because, like landmines, they tend to be indiscriminate. Each “bomb” contains dozens of small bomblets with immediate or delayed detonation scattered over a wide area, being particularly deadly in densely populated neighbourhoods.

Cluster bombs have reportedly been used repeatedly, both in “conventional blast” and incendiary versions. Other heavy weapons Assad has deployed against rebels include mortars, artillery, tanks and helicopter gunships, with Cruise missiles still to be used.

Rebel fighters complain of being under-armed compared with Assad’s conventional military forces. All this has raised the stakes for foreign backers of both government and insurgent forces to supply ever more deadly weapons.

International concern lingers over the possibility of Assad’s use of chemical weapons. However, there are no confirmed reports that Syria even has them, while Damascus has not admitted possessing them.

Meanwhile, no less alarming is the infusion of al-Qaeda fighters into Syria. Government officials have typically dismissed rebel campaigns as al-Qaeda’s opportunism, while the opposition has in turn dismissed such claims outright.

The reality is not so simple. The political opposition is much more than a foreign terrorist adventure in disguise, and there are terrorist elements among rebel ranks.

To blur the distinctions further, rebel fighters include the local al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra (Front) as well as others allied or sympathetic to al-Qaeda. At the same time, to maintain their pedigree, al-Nusra Front members also operate outside the FSA’s command structure.

The purpose is the same: forcibly ousting Assad to establish an extremist Islamist Caliphate. The fuzzy nature of rebel alliances makes it harder for government efforts to focus on and neutralise them, while also limiting intended Western military support for the rebels.

But as Assad’s forces pile on the pressure with increasing violence, victims caught in the middle are pushed towards the FSA, the al-Mujahideen brigade, Ahrar al-Sham, Liwa al-Tawhid and al-Nusra. The extreme nature of the latter’s methods, which include suicide bombings, thereby become less unpalatable relative to overpowering state violence.

The comparative secularism of Assad’s Syria, not unlike that of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya, thus becomes less savoury. Islamist movements like Hizb ut-Tahrir appear more appealing, and after that al-Nusra, as people in dire straits seek solace in a shared faith.

The discipline and self-sacrifice of party religiosity is seen as bracing, energising and inspiring. But they also serve as gateways to religious extremism, with al-Nusra leaders comprising a shadowy mix of Syrians and foreigners.

Amid this chaotic and prolonged melee, Russia as longtime Syrian ally has had to recalibrate developments and review its stand. After announcing that Assad’s Syria is in terminal decline, Russian leaders clarified their position to state their interests more baldly.

On Thursday Russian President Vladimir Putin declared that Moscow’s primary interest is Syrian and regional stability, not continued Assad rule. That is as close to the reality of big power politics as any major power has come.

More specifically, a major power’s fundamental interest in another country lies in minimising threats to its continued influence, control or security there while maximising the opportunities and reach it can exercise. For Russia it had been Assad’s Syria, just as for the US it had been Mubarak’s Egypt.

For two generations however, Syria was unquestionably an Assad Syria – even if for not much longer. As Assad’s moorings slip, that version of Syria is also coming apart at the seams.

Putin thus made clear that Russia’s basic concern is a stable and reliable Syria it can work with. While still insisting that Moscow had not parted ways with Assad, he shifted the emphasis from Syria’s current leader to Syria the country.

Yet however powerful or influential a major power like Russia or the US may be, at times like this it is the internal workings of the Syrian polity that is decisive. It is here that the latest UN human rights report on Syria makes for disturbing reading.

Apart from recounting the number of casualties so far and confirming the influx of foreign militants, the report notes that the conflict is becoming increasingly sectarian. Commissioned by the UN Human Rights Council, it says the Sunni-Shi’ite divide is pulling other sectarian groups into the conflict.

The result is a conflict that is deeply embedded because it is both wide and deep. Worsening violence can be expected even after Assad is ousted, as internecine warfare becomes the norm.

And because Syria has already begun to attract foreign militants in droves, the conflict is set to spill beyond its borders.

Very soon now, idealists who had celebrated Syria’s version of the “Arab Spring” will be declaring openly their disappointment with an anti-Assad movement supposedly about more democracy and human rights.

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