Syria, 10 years of war - and a near future as a failed state?

Gudrun Harrer reports on how Syria may be on the verge of becoming a failed state, Syrien kollabiert, Assad krallt sich fest Der Standard 21.04.2021).

There is a Presidential election scheduled for May 26 in Syria. Bashar al-Assad is running for re-election. But the stability of his regime is still in question. He received 88.7% of the vote in 2014. A free election with competing parties campaigning freely will definitley not be what takes place on election day. A further derioration of the situation in Syria will generate more misery for Syrians and more pressure for refugees to seek asylum in Turkey and EU countries. It's also would pull even more foreign actors into Syria's internal

... it is precisely the catastrophic situation that is contributing to the fact that there have recently been more regional political activities to get Syria out of the impasse. Even explicit opponents of Assad, who have supported former rebels, fear a state collapse and a power vacuum after Assad's overthrow. Russia is trying to get the Arabs to accept Assad as a transitional figure – and to get Syria, whose membership was suspended in 2011, back in the Arab League.

But Assad, for his part, would also have to take steps, especially through concessions in the UN-led Constitutional Committee that includes the opposition, which is expected to meet again after the end of Ramadan. This concerns the implementation of UN Resolution 2254 of 2015, which calls for a political solution in Syria. U.N. envoy Geir Pederson has unveiled a new five-point roadmap and hopes Russia will put pressure on Assad to join. [my emphasis, my translation from the German]

It has been one of my recurring themes here how the EU is sadly unprepared for a recurrence of the unusuallly large refugee influx of 2015-16, which had very much to do with conflict in Syria and the collapse of the government of Libya. And the EU is doing a bad job, in someways a shameful and criminal job, of handling refugee issues right now. Here's one pitiful example from Denmark, Danish plan to repatriate Syrian refugees sparks controversy Aljazeera 04/12/2021.

This video from Aljazeera's "Start Here" series provides a summary of the last decades of conflict in Syria, Syria — is it a war without end? 03/14/2021: