Manu Brabo/Associated Press
Rebel fighters attacked Syrian government forces on Thursday in the village of Tal Sheer.
MOSCOW — The outlook for Syria’s embattled president darkened considerably on Thursday when his most powerful foreign ally, Russia, acknowledged that he was losing the struggle against an increasingly coordinated insurgency and for the first time said it was making contingency plans to evacuate its citizens from the country, the Kremlin’s last beachhead in the Middle East.
The Russian assessment, made publicly by a top Foreign Ministry official in Moscow, appeared to signal a major turn in the diplomacy of the nearly two-year-old conflict and presented new evidence that the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, was losing politically as well as militarily. On Wednesday it was revealed that Mr. Assad’s forces had resorted to firing Scud ballistic missiles at rebels in an attempt to slow the insurgency’s momentum.
The assessment suggested that Russia no longer viewed Mr. Assad’s involvement in a negotiated solution as a viable alternative. It also appeared to reflect a new recognition in Moscow that Mr. Assad and his minority Alawite government, long a Russian client, could not survive in the face of a well-armed opposition financed by Arab and Western countries seeking his ouster. Some Russian officials have bitterly concluded that Mr. Assad’s foreign adversaries want an outcome decided by military force.
Further punctuating the Russian assessment was a dark view offered by the secretary general of NATO, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who told reporters in Brussels that “I think the regime in Damascus is approaching collapse. I think now it is only a question of time.”
While senior Western officials said the basic Russian position had not shifted markedly, they welcomed the comments that were made to a Kremlin advisory group by Mikhail Bogdanov, a deputy foreign minister and Russia’s top envoy for the Middle East, which were reported by the Interfax news agency.
“Unfortunately, it is impossible to exclude a victory of the Syrian opposition,” Mr. Bogdanov said. “We must look squarely at the facts, and the trend now suggests that the regime and the government in Syria are losing more and more control” and territory.
Mr. Bogdanov predicted a bloody future with many more dead, suggesting that the fall of Mr. Assad and his government would not mean the end of the civil war, which is increasingly sectarian — Sunnis from within and without versus minority Alawites and Christians. “If you accept this price to topple the president, what can we do?” he asked. “We of course consider this totally unacceptable.”
He said Russia continued to urge political compromise to avoid many more deaths, but he also said Russia was making plans to evacuate its many citizens in Syria, if necessary.
Senior Western officials said the remarks of Mr. Bogdanov and Mr. Rasmussen were not tied to any major or sudden shift on the ground. Rather, these officials said, the long war of attrition had leached power and money from the Assad government, and although the Syrian military had not been broken, it was no longer capable of regaining and retaining large portions of territory.
A mixture of opposition fighters, with arms and training from Qatar and other Persian Gulf countries, are performing better in the field, and while some are fighting for a more democratic Syria, others are fighting for sectarian reasons, as committed Sunni Muslims try to topple a minority Alawite government.
The Syrian military’s use of Scud missiles, reported by American and NATO officials, reflected what they called an effort by Mr. Assad to prevent the opposition from exploiting the military airfields, fighter planes and equipment that have fallen into insurgent hands, and which the Syrian military apparently believes it cannot recapture.
The Scuds have been fired since Monday from the An Nasiriyah Air Base, north of Damascus, according to American officials familiar with the classified intelligence reports about the attacks. The target was the Sheikh Suleiman base, which rebel forces had occupied. Syria has denied it fired any missiles.
“There is no particular tipping point now, but it could come at any time,” a senior Western official said Thursday. “What is clearly true is that the opposition is not only taking but holding territory, especially up north. And it is more and more difficult for the regime to take that territory back. So one reason for the Scuds has been to go after military facilities, like aircraft and airports, to make it hard for the opposition to use them.”
