We need to talk about Syria

There can be little doubt that Britain is edging towards intervening in Syria. President Bashar Assad’s bloody ruthlessness seems to be paying off: his forces are retaking former rebel strongholds (the strategic town of Qusair was reclaimed this week) and the more he believes he can win, the less likely he is to negotiate.

From a distance, there seems to be a case for the West to move quickly to help the rebels, and create a more level playing field. The aim would not be to prolong the conflict, but to make a negotiated peace settlement more likely.

The Prime Minister made the case in the Commons this week. ‘Unless we do more to support the official opposition,’ he said, ‘the humanitarian crisis will continue … and the political transition that we want to see will not happen and the extremists will continue to flourish.’ Cameron says he is also fairly confident that the Assad regime is using chemical weapons — which is Washington’s test for whether or not to intervene. Superficially there seems to be a fairly clear case for action. But the closer you look, the less clear any part of the Syrian civil war becomes.

This would be an easier problem to solve if the conflict was between the Assad government forces and ‘the official opposition’. It is not. The Syrian ‘opposition’ consists of dozens of warring factions, who may well turn their newly acquired arms on each other when (and if) Assad is toppled. There are secular and Christian groups — but also al-Qa’eda, and Jabhat al-Nusra, whose leader has pledged allegiance to al-Qa’eda and has 10,000 fighters. Ahrar al-Sham, a homegrown jihadi group, want Islamist rule without al-Qa’eda, and then there are the 20,000 devout Muslims in the al-Farouk Battalions who say they don’t want an Islamist state, but it’s unclear how much they’d object to one.