AFP, Beirut :Despite Western and Arab hopes he would be consigned to the dustbin of history, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad enters his fifth year of war with an increasingly tight hold on power.Alarm over the sweeping expansion of the Islamic State (IS) jihadist group in Syria and Iraq means that international priorities have shifted away from Assad’s removal.”Assad has improved his position internationally. The US, EU states and others are no longer demanding his immediate departure,” said Volker Perthes, director of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.In the four years since the conflict erupted in March 2011, leaving more than 210,000 people dead, Assad’s forces have succeeded in halting gains by Western-backed rebels and jihadists seeking his overthrow.While rights groups still regularly accuse Assad of indiscriminately killing his own people, sending helicopters to drop crude barrel bombs, even the Syrian opposition no longer demands his resignation as a precondition for peace talks.A European diplomat who often travels to Damascus said EU states are divided on how to deal with the man described by French Prime Minister Manuel Valls just last month as a “butcher”.”Outside of France, Britain and Denmark, who reject any role for Assad in Syria’s future, many European countries think that after four years, this position is untenable,” the diplomat said.He said countries including Sweden, Austria, Spain, the Czech Republic and Poland see no benefit to isolating Assad and want a softer European stance.”But they are too weak to have their voices heard,” he said.US Secretary of State John Kerry recently laid bare the shifting Western stance towards the Syrian leader.Assad “has lost any semblance of legitimacy,” Kerry said.”But we have no higher priority than disrupting and defeating Daesh,” he added, using an Arabic acronym for IS.Assad, seen briefly as a reformer at the onset of his rule nearly 15 years ago, was ostracised for his bloody repression of anti-regime protests that began in 2011.But in remarks that enraged the rebels, UN envoy Staffan de Mistura recently described the president as “part of the solution” in Syria.”The Syrian regime, and especially its head, is the interlocutor for the international community-even if officially, the West, Arab states, and Turkey don’t talk to him,” said Souhail Belhadj, researcher at the Geneva Graduate Institute and author of “Bashar’s Syria: Anatomy of an Authoritarian Regime”.
