What we're getting is a big sorting out, and the minorities are only 20% in Syria, but they have military power in the form of the Syrian army, which has largely become an Alawite militia today, and they have centralized government, and they have help from Iran and Russia. They have significant advantages for not being pushed out of power.
Although Sunni Arabs are 70% of Syria, they are very divided. There are probably over 1,000 militias working in Syria today, but there are several big umbrella groups of militias. The main one, the Islamic Front, which formed in November and encompasses a bunch of militias, is a very loose group, but it's largely Salafist. It advocates that it does not want democracy. Its leaders have spoken out against democracy as being the tyranny of the powerful. It says it wants an Islamic form of government, where imams would play an important role in deciding how constitutional issues are worked out. It's mostly non-democrats.
The Syrian opposition we see in Geneva today—it's speaking, a Syrian opposition coalition—is pro-democratic, largely made up of people who have been in exile for years and have been educated in the west. They are a minority in Syria in terms of power on the ground. On the militias on the ground, you have the right-wing militias which are al-Qaeda connected, you have the Islamic State of Iraq, and Syria which is now divorced from al-Qaeda because it's too violent even for al-Qaeda. They have Nusra, another major militia. They own a big hunk of Syria.
If you go to the map of Syria of who owns what, which is beyond the Kurdish.... It's quite far advanced. It's beyond the various different militias. You will see in the rebel-controlled north of Syria and the east there are big swaths that are various militias, mostly Islamic Front, and big swaths that are the al-Qaeda-linked groups, or previously al-Qaeda-linked.
The Free Syrian Army, the moderate groups that America might have tried to arm up to kill the more Islamist groups and then to destroy Assad, are a minority. They are weak on the ground, and even they have denounced the politicians who are in Geneva.
This is the very difficult situation in which John Kerry arrives in Syria. The regime owns the south. It owns the west. It has destroyed large sections of the three major cities that it owns, Damascus, Homs, and Hama—three of the four largest cities of Syria—because they are mostly Sunni cities. It has pacified them to a degree, but will never pacify them very easily. This government is powerful. It has an air force, it has tanks, and it has artillery, things the opposition does not have.
We are looking at a terrible, grinding war which at its base has become a sectarian and ethnic war in Syria.
What should the west do? Kerry arrived in Geneva a month ago, and he said, “Assad is the problem. We need regime change, first and foremost. We have to have Assad step down,” which is tantamount to regime change. A ceasefire and negotiating wider humanitarian issues are secondary. The first issue is regime change. Why? Because Assad is the supermagnet for jihadism. As long as he's there, jihadists from around the world are going to come to Syria, infest it, and we're never going to end this jihadist issue.
The Russians of course take issue with this. The Russians want Syria and the Assad regime to survive. They have said they don't care about Assad in person, and that's probably true, but they want a Syrian army, which is really a reflection of Assad and Alawite power, to survive because they are hoping it will destroy what they see as the Islamist and jihadist problem that bedevils them in Russia. They're trying to convince the United States that Assad is going to remain, and that the U.S. should side with them and with the Assad regime to destroy jihadists in Syria and retake Syria.
I don't believe that Assad can retake all of Syria. There are just not enough forces, and 70% Sunni Arabs don't like him. Many are still working with him because they don't know if he's going to win or not. Some don't like the Islamists at all and are sticking with Assad, but the majority find his government tyrannical, destructive, and evil. This leads to—