LONDON - Having crushed a popular uprising, he rules by force over an Arab land shattered by conflict and sanctions, his people too exhausted and cowed to resist. Is this the fate awaiting Syria under Bashar al-Assad? Saddam Hussein lasted for 12 years after his defeat in the 1991 Gulf War until a U.S.-led invasion unleashed chaos and carnage from which Iraq, for all its oil, has yet to recover. The trajectories of the two Baathist leaders are far from parallel, but Saddam's prolonged survival is a warning to anyone who believes Assad will fall simply because he has alienated the West and its Arab allies or earned the hatred of countless Syrians, including perhaps most of its Sunni Muslim majority. Kofi Annan's UN-backed ceasefire may temporarily calm a conflict that has already cost more than 9,000 dead, but it is hard to see a compromise emerging between Assad's ruling Alawite elite and those bent on ending its four decades in power. After so much blood, both sides now see it as a life or death struggle from which they cannot step back, and the United Nations lacks the international consensus to make them. Time may not be on Assad's side, but while the 46-year-old president hangs on, sectarian rifts he has exploited are likely to widen as Syria descends towards all-out civil war. In recent weeks, some of Assad's visitors reported him confident he could weather the storm, as his forces unleashed withering bombardments of towns and cities where lightl -armed rebels had possibly unwisely attempted to hold ground. Military assaults persisted right up to Thursday's dawn ceasefire, which was not preceded by a withdrawal of tanks, troops and big guns as stipulated in Annan's six-point plan. For now, the Syrian leader remains entrenched, albeit in a battle-scarred landscape and a ruined economy in which his legitimacy and his international repute have been shredded. Parts of restive cities like Homs have been reduced to rubble. Russia and China still shield Assad from U.N. Security Council action. Iran and its Lebanese Hezbollah ally back him to the hilt, while Lebanon and Shi'ite-led Iraq offer open borders to mitigate the impact of sanctions on their Syrian neighbour. "The economy is very deeply in the red," said Jihad Yazigi, editor of the economic Syria Report online newsletter. The only bright spots were a rise in exports to Iraq and a good rainy season, he said, although two of Syria's best farming areas have suffered severe disruption during the unrest. "Daily life is increasingly harsh," Yazigi said, declining to predict how this might affect prospects for political change. Sanctions have at best a patchy record, and the crippling UN measures against Iraq failed to loosen - and may have reinforced - Saddam's grip on power for more than a decade. Sanctions and hardship could similarly perpetuate Assad's reign. "If the middle classes emigrate ... then an exhausted population ruled over by a state tightly controlling the supply of food and fuel could look very much like the Saddam model," said Chris Phillips, a Middle East lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London. Russia and China have twice vetoed draft resolutions on Syria in the UN Security Council. Assad has long derided Western sanctions targeting him and his entourage, but which have now been extended to Syria's small but vital oil sector. Decades of isolation have had little impact on Assad's policies and his Western adversaries, weary of costly foreign wars, have disavowed any military option, even when the bloody siege of Baba Amr in Homs was at its height in February. Careful not to provoke outside intervention, Assad has kept assaults on cities a notch below the one meted out to Hama in 1982 when his father Hafez al-Assad crushed an armed Islamist revolt by razing neighbourhoods and killing many thousands of civilians in a three-week attack that had a lasting deterrent effect. Despite Saudi and Qatari promises of weapons and money, the assorted army deserters and civilians who took up arms after Assad's relentlessly violent response to initially peaceful protests remain mostly on their own, ill-trained and outgunned. Having shifted from amity to hostility as Assad turned his tanks on civilians and rebels alike, the Turks are now incensed by an influx of 25,000 Syrian refugees. After Syrian soldiers fired over the border this week, Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan asserted Turkey's right to ask its NATO partners to defend it. In 1991, Turkey prodded its Western allies to create a safe haven in Iraq after half a million Kurds fled from Saddam's helicopter gunships. It has floated the same idea for Syria, while signalling any such move would need U.N. or NATO cover. Turkey almost went to war with Syria in 1998 over its support for Turkish Kurd rebels. Assad's father caved in, expelling Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan and opening the way for a surprise rapprochement with Ankara. Phillips said the spectre of Turkish military intervention was more likely to alarm Assad than any Gulf Arab effort to channel weapons to disparate insurgent groups - something which would fit Syria's portrayal of the unrest as the work of "terrorist" gangs fighting at the behest of foreign enemies. Extra weaponry for opposition groups might speed Syria's descent into civil war, but would scarcely tip the military balance against Assad. In Libya last year, it was NATO warplanes, not rebel guns, that decided Muammar Gaddafi's fate. "But if Turkey launched some full-frontal assault using air power on Syrian military bases, Bashar might be concerned about his own military turning on him and saying, 'We're going to be destroyed by this, it's time for you to go'," Phillips said.
