Syria votes in local elections as bloody battle looms

Syrians in government-controlled areas have voted in the country’s first local elections since 2011, as a major offensive looms in the last rebel stronghold.

State television broadcast footage of voters casting their ballots yesterday in Damascus, Tartus and Latakia, as well as the eastern city Deir Ezzor, recaptured last year from Islamic State.

But no voting took place in areas outside government control, including Kurdish-held parts of the northeast and the northwest Idlib province, the largest remaining rebel-held territory, Al Jazeera reports.

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The country last held local council election in December 2011, just nine months into the conflict.

“I’m optimistic that the incoming council will rebuild and recover the city after the huge destruction suffered by years of fighting,” said one voter from Deir Ezzor.

But a vast majority of the candidates are members of the ruling Baath party or affiliated to it, which “deterred some people from casting their ballot,” the Qatari broadcaster says.

“Why vote? Will anything change? Let's be honest,” said another voter in the capital, who boycotted the poll.

“Everyone knows the results are sealed in advance for a single party, whose members will win in a process that's closer to an appointment than it is to an election,” he added.

The election process is unlikely to be fair, agrees Joshua Clarkson, a risk analyst at Foreign Brief.

Expect President Bashar al-Assad loyalists of the Baath Party to dominate local elections, “giving the president a facade of local support and bolstering his position in the rebuilding process,” he says.

Meanwhile, Russian-backed government forces are preparing a major military offensive to retake Idlib, the last part of the country controlled by rebels.

The assault on a region home to three million civilians is already “shaping up to be the worst of the Syrian war,” says David Gardner, international affairs editor at the Financial Times.

“With Idlib it looks like this conflict — already a catalogue of horror — has saved the worst for last,” he says.