By: Gary Gambill, Foreign Policy

Date: August 23, 2012

Excerpt: Islamists — many of them hardened by years of fighting U.S. forces in Iraq — are simply more effective fighters than their secular counterparts. Assad has had extraordinary difficulty countering tactics perfected by his former jihadist allies, particularly suicide bombings and roadside bombs. The Islamists’ ability to shatter the calm even in high-security neighborhoods of Damascus and Aleppo is slowly stripping away the regime’s outer layers of non-Alawite support. Militant Trotskyists just don’t pack the same punch