Think-Tank: Syrian Opposition Can't Beat Assad's Forces

Syria's armed opposition groups cannot defeat President Bashar al-Assad's forces, a think-tank expert said Wednesday.

Toby Dodge, the senior Middle East expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), said the fractured nature of the opposition forces meant they were more of an "irritant" to the regime than a threat.

"The way that the demonstrations against the regime have militarized in response, undoubtedly, to extended, aggressive suppression, has left ... the Free Syrian Army fractured, highly localized, based on village and town neighborhood patterns of organization," Dodge told a press conference in London.

"So that means although they're an irritant, they're no direct threat to the Syrian regime.

"The Syrian regime can suppress specific areas but cannot completely remove the military opposition to it.

"What we're in is a form of bloody attrition," he said, where the Syrian regime will control the main urban centers and the majority of the population, while the opposition will pop up and take suburbs before being forced out.

"There is no way a lightly armed, poorly centralized force can pose a direct threat to the regime, unless it triggers such a response from Damascus, using air power, using even more violence than in Homs, that the international community are forced to react."

IISS chief John Chipman said Assad's apparent strategy was to secure regime loyalists and suppress the opposition while keeping the conflict below a level that would risk triggering international intervention.

IISS land warfare expert Brigadier Ben Barry said it would be pointless declaring safe areas or humanitarian corridors without the military means to protect them.