Aug. 18, 2016
With so many reports circulating, we take a step back to get the whole picture and see what's really going on.
Introduction
Civil war in Syria has been raging for five years. In our 2016 annual forecast, the Islamic State was the center of gravity for the conflict in Syria, and our projections for the year revolved around them. So far those projections are on track. However, there has been a flurry of activity in the last two months that has necessitated re-examining the Syrian battlespace.
The Players
Before we can map out the conflict, we must lay out the players. The proliferation of participants is one of the reasons this war is so opaque. There are scores of militias operating in Syria. Included in these are the small and relatively ineffectual U.S.-trained and supplied fighters.
The Syrian Kurds – under the leadership of the Democratic Party of Syria (PYD) and its armed wing, the People’s Protection Units (YPG) – are the most unified. But they have committed to joining the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a U.S.-backed hodgepodge of groups containing Kurds, Christian Arabs and a small number of Sunni Arabs.
The SDF has anywhere between 30,000 and 50,000 fighters. This coalition operates mostly in western Syria, dominating Hasakah province and putting pressure on the Islamic State (IS) from the north. It recently forced IS to withdraw from Manbij.
The Syrian rebels have a sizable number of fighters. Cobbling together various estimates from open source documents, a conservative figure would be about 100,000 rebel fighters. Some of these factions have access to tanks or to U.S.-supplied weapons, but they are still at a disadvantage to the Syrian regulars, who are backed by both Syrian and Russian air support.
The main problem, however, is that the opposition remains hopelessly divided. Even in the areas where the most rebel cooperation is happening – in the opposition’s territorial core of Idlib and Aleppo provinces – there are still tribal, political, ideological and religious differences limiting these groups’ effectiveness.
On the other side, the Syrian military has seen better days but still counts 150,000 soldiers in its ranks. Besides this, there are various pro-regime militias, the largest of which is the National Defense Forces, which is estimated to have between 35,000 and 90,000 fighters. Various Iran-mobilized militias and Hezbollah fighters also number in the low thousands and help the Syrian forces maintain relative supremacy on the battlefield. The combination of greater numbers and better equipment also allows Assad loyalists to fight on multiple fronts rather than concentrate resources on a single battlefield.
Lurking behind all of this is the Islamic State. Our assessment of the Islamic State remains that it is bent but not broken, and that both its capabilities and the number of its fighters have been woefully underestimated by the U.S. government and by the mainstream media. A U.S. congressional panel said as much on Aug. 11 when it claimed that U.S. Central Command had manipulated its intelligence reports to present a “rosy” assessment of the fight against IS.
We estimated in December 2015 that IS forces numbered close to 100,000 fighters. Various losses and attrition must be taken into account, but still, IS has shown consistently that it is willing to retreat rather than sustain too many casualties. We think it is still reasonable to posit that IS’ fighting force is somewhere between 50,000 and 80,000 strong.
The Main Centers of Gravity
The Islamic State Front in Syria
In our net assessment of the Islamic State, we identified IS’ core territory as…
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