Iran: Assad's Hope of Survival (Syria-Iran‪)‬

President Bashar al-Assad of Syria is fighting for the survival of his iron-fisted regime, dominated by the Alawite minority to which his family belongs, amid the staggering political turmoil that has turned the Arab world upside down since the start of the year. But he has few friends in the Arab world. His only true ally is Iran, and, by all accounts, it is doing all it can to preserve the Damascus regime, a vital element in Tehran's drive to expand its influence across the Middle East. "Arguably, Syria has become a battleground between Iran and its Western and Arab opponents, and this conflict threatens to overshadow the internal one," observed analyst Victor Kotzev. Turkey, a recent ally of Syria, which has become increasingly critical of the regime's brutal crackdown that is driving thousands of Syrians fleeing to Turkish territory, may soon lose patience as its southern neighbor, like Turkey a Sunni majority state, becomes a bloodbath and falls apart. With Ankara's Islamist government embarked on a determined drive to regain Turkey's former glory as a paramount power in the region, the influential Turkish newspaper Hurriyet cautioned on July 3 that the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan could intervene militarily if the Alawite regime in Damascus engages in massacres of the magnitude that Assad's late father, Hafez Assad, unleashed in February 1982 against the rebellious Muslim Brotherhood in the city of Hama, where his troops slaughtered at least 10,000 Sunnis.