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Syria Lies in Pieces and It Will Not Be Fixed
(Telegraph-UK) Shashank Joshi - The Khaldiya district of Homs resembles Stalingrad, gutted and pocked. Its streets are flattened, grey smears of dust and rubble. There are no people. Homs stands between Damascus and Alawite-dominated loyalist enclaves on the coast. This is why Assad threw his best divisions and half of his special forces at the city. Assad is indeed winning where he is fighting, but reports of his impending victory are misleading. He is fighting, meaningfully, only in a narrow strip of Syria, having diluted forces in the north and east. This patchwork Syria, torn into fiefdoms, replete with international brigades on both sides, may come to represent the "new normal" in the Levant for a long while yet. The writer is a research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute.