Powers still divided over Assad, but will Assad finally turn on ISIS?

Both Obama and Hollande have reiterated their conviction that Assad must be removed from office to end the Syrian civil war, despite the Paris bloodbath having given more pressing urgency to eliminating the terrorist threat from ISIS in that country.

The only problem: they'll have to do lots of bargaining with Putin to figure out a way to remove Assad while leaving the Syrian state essentially intact. An Australian piece points out the obvious: these Syrian state organs that Assad controls are anything but on the verge of collapse. The conclusion is telling:

And none of the opposition groups will have national reach in Syria or control any of the levers of government or the sources of administrative and fiscal power on which most Syrians rely. Those are held by Damascus and have been maintained throughout the conflict.

The Assad regime’s decision to maintain the functions of the state as far as is possible for as long as it can may end up proving a strategic masterstroke. Even if the regime hasn’t been able to win the war, by maintaining the facade of governance it still aims to win the peace.

But the post-Paris statements by Obama and Hollande won't be enough to reassure the Syrian opposition that Assad's still in the West's crosshairs: now that it's so obvious that Western public opinion wouldn't mind leaving Assad in place as the price for defeating ISIS, they're taking to the Western media to redouble their talking points about Assad, not ISIS, being the true enemy of global security, like here in the Guardian and here in Newsweek (an Italian diplomat apparently writing as a mouthpiece for the Iranian opposition, MEK).

But that brings us to the real question: has Assad now joined Russia in refocusing more of his campaign against ISIS? If so, that would bring to rest persistent Western criticisms, like this one, that Assad and ISIS have actually always been best buddies.

It's true that Bashar al-Assad takes after his father Hafez in that he has always used radical Sunni jihadists, who have no love lost for a secular Alawite Shia like himself, when it suited his purposes. Thus the following statement is accurate:

In the early stages of the uprisings against his rule, Assad released hundreds of jihadists from Syria’s jails, contributing to his strategy of portraying the war as an existential battle between secular forces of moderation and fanatic religious militants.

But that was back in early 2012, when it seemed almost a foregone conclusion that with enough Western and regional Muslim backing, the secular militants of the Syrian opposition would make Assad go the way of Qaddafi. Back against the wall, Assad unleashed his ace in the hole: the very Sunni extremists who hated him most. Extremely Machiavellian, yes; but brilliant strategy. Saddam Hussein tried the same gambit against the US invasion in 2003: releasing thousands of Shia extremists, many of whom had violently opposed his minority Sunni regime, as cannon fodder (the "Fedayeen Saddam") against American high-tech weaponry. Where the Iraqi Baath failed, the Syrian Baath has apparently succeeded - and largely because the deposed Iraqi Baath gave the US occupation so much trouble that American public opinion had no desire left to keep expending the national treasury to secure the peace (which in fact was finally achieved around 2008) when Obama took office.

It's a whole other thing to say that this makes ISIS (and other Sunni extremists) true friends of Assad. I mean, the Nazis and Soviets were also pretty chummy for a while after the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact (1939-1941), before Hitler finally concluded that he'd better break it before Stalin did. Perhaps we have finally reached that same tipping point between these two likewise brutal, anti-democratic forces in Syria, now that secular, pro-democratic insurgents have largely been marginalized on the battlefield. (Or have they?)

That's why these post-Paris Russian raids on ISIS targets are so crucial: if they herald a true intensification of the Russia-led Fatima coalition's campaign against ISIS to a level where the rogue statelet is as much a target as the Syrian rebels, sooner or later Assad will have to commit the boots on the ground against ISIS that he's been reluctant to so far.