Rebel Defeat in Qusayr

Jacob Wirtschafter, reporting for USA TODAY, says that Qusayr has been taken by government troops:

"Yes, al-Qusayr fell to regime control," said 25-year-old Muhammad Awad of the Free Syrian Army's al-Farouk Battalion in Qusayr. "Let the world, the regime and all the people against us be happy. We retreated because we could not take them on anymore." 

The Free Syrian Army, which had held on to the city for months through increasingly fierce bombardment and attacks by the regime, killing hundreds, conceded that they had to make a retreat from the town that lies on a key supply route.

Widely predicted to determine the outcome of the revolution, Qusayr puts the West in a difficult spot. How will it respond? Look no further than today's story by Steven Erlanger, Nick Cumming-Bruce and Alan Cowell, "France and Britain Say Nerve Gas Likely Used in Syria":

A day after France announced that French laboratory tests had confirmed that sarin gas had been used “multiple times” in Syria “in a localized way,” Britain on Wednesday repeated an earlier assessment that “a growing body of limited but persuasive information” pointed to the use of the same toxin.

The French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, said that in one case, at least, “there is no doubt it was the regime and its accomplices” that used the gas. France and Britain said their conclusions were based on samples brought out of Syria.

The statements came as United States, Russian and United Nations officials prepared for talks on Wednesday in Geneva on setting up a possible international peace conference. 

In a statement, Mr. Fabius said samples of body fluids taken from victims in Syria and tested at a French laboratory — including urine samples carried out of Syria by French reporters — “prove the presence of sarin,” a poisonous nerve gas. 

“It would be unacceptable that those guilty of these crimes can benefit from impunity,” Mr. Fabius said, without specifying of whom he spoke. But sarin is in the government’s stock of chemical weapons, and he later told France 2 television that blood samples from victims of a helicopter attack in April in Idlib Province left no doubt that it was the government that had used sarin. 

“We are aware of the entire chain, from when the attack took place to when the people were killed and the samples taken,” he said.

The Assad government, so it appears, has finally mastered how to defeat the rebels: use surface-to-surface missiles and air power to pound opposition forces and then send in tanks and infantry. The rebels can't hold turf in face of this; they don't have the firepower. For a description of this, check out C.J. Chivers' frontpage story this morning, "Syrian Rebels Meet Setbacks on a New Front." Chivers describes the fighting in the towns of the Hama plain east of the Damascus-Aleppo Highway in northern Syria:

The battles have shown the strains on all sides in a war in its third year. 

The rebels are pulled between the limits inherent to a lightly equipped and fundamentally guerrilla force and their urge to fight with the battlefield weight of an army.

And the Syrian Army and its loyalist militias are simultaneously trying to maintain a sprawling network of outposts on territory sympathetic to the opposition, while repositioning forces with hopes of reversing the rebels’ gains of the past year. 

The West now appears to be committed to ginning up a justification for direct military intervention. It won't have a UN stamp of approval. Carla Del Ponte's statement in early May that UN investigators had "strong, concrete suspicions" that rebels used sarin gas undercuts the rationale for an attack on the Assad government. This means that it would have to be a NATO operation like Libya. But it is not clear -- because of Germany -- that NATO would lead an assault. So it would probably fall to the old colonial powers -- France, Britain -- in concert with the U.S., Israel and the Gulf monarchies. To go this route the West will have to accept the likely outcome -- world war in the Middle East and replacing Sykes-Picot for something that would look like Somaliland. At this point I'm not sure that the West is willing to stomach this. Clearly a bellicose posture is being maintained in an attempt to get Assad to bargain away the territorial integrity of Syria.