ANALYSIS
"This is another blow
for President Assad and his overstretched forces, but Idlib was already
all but lost to the rebels. The region is now under the control of a
mainly Islamist coalition, dubbed the 'Army of Conquest', which includes
al-Qaeda's Syrian affiliate, the al-Nusra Front. The coalition's
success has come both from uniting a variety of rebel militias into a
single fighting force and a rapprochement of sorts between their main
backers, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey, which has allowed a new flow of
cash and weapons," says BBC Arab Affairs Correspondent Sebastian Usher.
"Even if the US and its allies defeat the Islamic State over the coming decade, we should be prepared for a similar Sunni extremist group
to rise from the ashes. Revolutions of the type the Middle East is
experiencing take a long time to resolve. The sources of revolutionary
instability include tenuous post-colonial boundaries; arrested
modernization; the failed 'Arab Spring'; and religious sectarianism,
exacerbated by the interstate rivalry between Sunni-ruled Saudi Arabia
and Shia-ruled Iran," writes Joseph Nye in Project Syndicate.
"Left alone, any space in Syria that the U.S.-led coalition opens up is likely to soon become filled with a motley coalition
of formerly Islamist Syrian rebel factions predominantly from
northwestern Syria’s Aleppo province: groups that have had enough
trouble fighting the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, much
less taking on ISIS in its core areas. These groups are less motivated
to fight ISIS far from their homes than they are to combat the clear and
present danger of the Assad regime. This means that the coalition will
have to cultivate partners from the ISIS-controlled areas," write Ilan
Goldenberg, Nicholas A. Heras, and Bassam Barabandi in Foreign Affairs. | 
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