Battle scenarios in Sweida, Syria.

The governorate of Sweida is witnessing an unprecedented military escalation between Syrian regime forces and armed groups from the province portends a worsening of the security and political situation in southern Syria. After months of intermittent tensions, direct clashes erupted, involving machine guns and military vehicles, and extended to multiple areas within the province. What's striking is that these confrontations have not remained within the confines of a traditional security response, but have taken on an open character in the past few hours, suggesting that a swift resolution will not be achieved and that the battle is set to become more complicated unless a sudden settlement is reached.

The current situation opens the door to several possible scenarios. The first is that the escalation continues for a long period, exhausting and depleting regime forces on the Sweida front, which could push Kurdish groups in the North or other groups in the Alawite regions  to take military actions to exploit this preoccupation. If this possibility is realized, then the Syria we know, may enter into a model similar to the Libyan model. Or the Sudanese, where political centralization collapses and the state disintegrates into conflicting armed zones of influence, making control impossible and the war protracted.

The second scenario is no less dangerous, and represents the possibility of direct Israeli intervention under the pretext of protecting the Druze component in Sweida. Such intervention, if it occurs, could take the form of an Israeli invasion. Even if limited or establishing points of concentration inside Syrian territory, which will be considered a direct occupation that will not be accepted by Damascus in any form, it will inevitably lead to a direct military clash between Syrian and Israeli forces, with the wide regional repercussions that this would entail.

The third scenario is based on the Syrian state resolving the situation, aiming to confront it quickly, whether through force or negotiation, and then move toward some kind of agreement with Israel, overt or implicit, that guarantees it control over a large part of Syrian territory, in exchange for security or political understandings. This possibility may seem tempting to the regime in terms of regaining control, but it carries a significant risk to stability at the Home Front, especially if it is framed as normalization or abandoning traditional positions.

What is happening in Sweida goes beyond a local conflict and reveals a new phase in the Syrian conflict, one that could redraw the map of influence within the country and draw regional parties into open confrontations within Syrian territory.

The original article was by the insightful Ali Mantash, from the respectable site "Lebanon 24" , translated and arranged to fit our blog, as always, to help my good readers to better understand difficult and dangerous situations all over.        My many thanks, as always, to all.