Defections and revolts expose the Assads This time last year, there was much talk of the quagmire that was Libya. Nato, it was said, had been sucked into a campaign built on quicksand. The rebels were a rabble who could not dent the cohesive inner core of Muammer Gaddafi's "coup-proof" regime. Six weeks later, Tripoli fell. IN Columnists The sceptics looked at Libya as an almost conventional war, rather than an insurgency culminating in an insurrection - which succeeded in Tripoli because the rebels had split their enemy. However irreducible the Gaddafis" inner circle looked from the outside, we now know the rebels had more than 70 moles burrowing to undermine it from the inside. Might something similar be happening, invisible to all but those directly involved, inside Syria? Last week's defection of Manaf Tlas, a commander in the Republican Guard, the praetorians of Bashar al-Assad's dictatorship, is a milestone. The erosion of the regime - after 16 months of revolt that the Assad clan's brutality has turned into an insurgency - is now speeding up. Erosion is a largely invisible process, its extent rarely clear until the pillars start falling (or, in the Tlas case, more of a load-bearing prop). No, Syria is not Libya. But the ebbs and flows of power between despotism and its discontents do tend to recur. And the ways in which Syria differs are important, too, and bode ill for the Assads. The cohesion of the Alawites, the heterodox Shia minority that forms the backbone and nervous system of the regime, is important. So is the Assads" cynical recourse to sectarian tactics to reinforce this assabiya, or group solidarity. Yet, Mr Assad's inability to crush the uprising and retake control of the country has lost him credibility among the Alawites, while the savagery of the regime's attacks is losing him the support of the Sunnis, three-quarters of Syria's population. Brig Gen Tlas is a Sunni from a family that was joined at the hip with the Assads. General Mustafa Tlas, his father, was chief of staff and then defence minister to Hafez al-Assad, the current president's father, for 30 years. When Hafez's brother Rifaat tried to seize power in 1984, Gen Tlas remained loyal, and when the elder Assad died in 2000 he helped choreograph Bashar - by then an intimate of his son - into power. The Tlases were the last important Sunni family in the Assad inner circle after the defenestration of the elder Assad's comrades such as former vice-president Abdelhalim Khaddam and chief of staff Hikmat Shehabi. That may not make Brig Gen Tlas a "prince across the water" around which a Sunni-dominated opposition might group. But his desertion shows that the last strips of Sunni insulation around the power and privileges of the Assad clan are peeling off. The younger Tlas tried to mediate a soft landing for the regime. But his attempts to brake the slide into civil war were overruled by the Assad securocrats, who pounded Rastan, his home town, near Homs, showing that the Tlases could not protect their own. That Brig Gen Tlas defected from the Republican Guards should also worry the regime and cheer its opponents, especially the armed rebels now in control of swaths of Syria's countryside. The Republican Guard is one of only two units, both under the control of Maher al-Assad, the president's volatile younger brother, on which the regime has been able to rely. While there have so far been no cases of entire units switching sides, the trickle of loyalist defections is now a steady stream. The loyalty of many still inside the castle walls, moreover, may be more apparent than real, for fear of regime retribution, against them and their families. The much-trumpeted army manoeuvres last weekend were probably to measure real strength, amid chronic non-performance as well as desertion. Austin Tice, a US Marines veteran, reported for McClatchy Newspapers in June that "weeks of observation of Syrian military operations while travelling with rebel forces leave the impression that the Syrian army is unfamiliar with modern military tactics." He wondered whether ostensibly loyalist troops "may be intentionally missing when they target rebel positions." It would be misleading to read too much into the Tlas affair. But the Assads, while probably more coup-proof than the Gaddafis, do not look split-proof.