How the White House is handing victory to Bashar al-Assad, Russia, and
Iran.
What a difference a year makes
in Syria. And the introduction of massive Russian airpower.
Last February, President
Bashar al-Assad’s regime and its Shiite auxiliaries mounted a large-scale
attempt to encircle Aleppo, the northern city divided between regime and rebels
since 2012 and battered by the dictator’s barrel bombs.
Islamist and non-Islamist
mainstream rebels — to the surprise of those who have derided their
performance, let alone their existence — repelled the offensive at the time.
What followed was a string of rebel advances across the country, which weakened
Assad so much that they triggered Moscow’s direct intervention in September, in
concert with an Iranian surge of forces, to secure his survival.
Fast-forward a year. After a
slow start — and despite wishful Western assessments that
Moscow could not sustain a meaningful military effort abroad — the Russian
campaign is finally delivering results for the Assad regime. This week, Russian
airpower allowed Assad and his allied paramilitary forces to finally cut off
the narrow, rebel-held “Azaz corridor” that links the Turkish border to the
city of Aleppo.
The city’s full encirclement is now a distinct possibility,
with regime troops and Shiite fighters moving from the south, the west, and the
north. Should the rebel-held parts of the city ultimately fall, it will be a
dramatic victory for Assad and the greatest setback to the rebellion since the
start of the uprising in 2011.
In parallel, Russia has put Syria’s
neighbors on notice of the new rules of the game. Jordan was spooked into
downgrading its help for the Southern Front, the main non-Islamist alliance in
the south of the country, which has so far prevented extremist presence along
its border. Turkey’s shooting down of a Russian military aircraft that crossed
its airspace in November backfired: Moscow vengefully directed its firepower on
Turkey’s rebel friends across Idlib and Aleppo provinces.
Moscow also courted
Syria’s Kurds, who found a new partner to play off the United States in their
complex relations with Washington. And Russia has agreed to a temporary
accommodation of Israel’s interests in southern Syria.
Inside Syria, and despite the
polite wishes of Secretary of State John Kerry, the overwhelming majority of
Russian strikes have hit non-Islamic State (IS) fighters. Indeed, Moscow and
the Syrian regime are content to see the United States bear the lion’s share of
the effort against the jihadi monster in the east, instead concentrating on
mowing through the mainstream rebellion in western Syria. Their ultimate
objective is to force the world to make an unconscionable choice between Assad
and IS.
The regime is everywhere on
the march. Early on, the rebels mounted a vigorous resistance, but the
much-touted increase in anti-tank weaponry could only delay their losses as
their weapons storages, command posts and fall-back positions were being
pounded. Around Damascus, the unrelenting Russian pounding has bloodied
rebel-held neighborhoods; in December, the strikes killed Zahran
Alloush, the commander of the main Islamist militia there. In the south, Russia
has fully backed the regime’s offensive in the region of Daraa, possibly
debilitating the Southern Front.
Rebel groups in Hama and Homs provinces have
faced a vicious pounding that has largely neutralized them. Further north, a
combination of Assad troops, Iranian Shiite militias, and Russian firepower
dislodged the powerful Islamist rebel coalition Jaish Al-Fatah from Latakia
province.
But it is the gains around
Aleppo that represent the direst threat to the rebellion. One perverse
consequence of cutting the Azaz corridor is that it plays into the hands of the
al Qaeda-affiliate Jabhat Al-Nusra, since weapons supplies from Turkey would
have to go through Idlib, where the jihadist movement is powerful. Idlib may
well become the regime’s next target. The now-plausible rebel collapse in the
Aleppo region could also send thousands of fighters dejected by their apparent
abandonment into the arms of Nusra or IS.
The encirclement of Aleppo
would also create a humanitarian disaster of such magnitude that it would
eclipse the horrific sieges of Madaya and other stricken regions that have
received the world’s (short-lived) attention. Tens of thousands of Aleppo
residents are already fleeing toward Kilis, the Turkish town that sits across
the border from Azaz. The humanitarian crisis, lest anyone still had any doubt,
is a deliberate regime and Russian strategy to clear important areas of
problematic residents — while paralyzing rebels, neighboring countries, Western
states, and the United Nations.
Assad all along pursued a
strategy of gradual escalation and desensitization that, sadly, worked well.
Syrians already compare the international outcry and response to the IS’ siege
of Kobane in 2014 to the world’s indifference to the current tragedy.
To complicate the situation
even more, the regime’s advances could allow the Kurdish-dominated,
American-favored Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) to conquer the area currently
held by the Free Syrian Army and Islamist militias between the Turkish border
and the new regime front line north of the Shiite towns of Nubl and Zahra. This
would pit the SDF against IS on two fronts: from the west, if the Kurds of
Afrin canton seize Tal Rifaat, Azaz and surrounding areas, and from the east,
where the YPG is toying with the idea of crossing the Euphrates River. An IS defeat
there would seal the border with Turkey, meeting an important American
objective.
The prospect of further
Kurdish expansion has already alarmed Turkey. Over the summer, Ankara was
hoping to establish a safe zone in this very area. It pressured Jabhat al-Nusra
to withdraw and anointed its allies in Syria, including the prominent Islamist
group Ahrar al-Sham, as its enforcers.
True to its record of calculated
dithering, President Barack Obama’s administration let the Turkish proposal hang until
it could no longer be implemented. Turkey faces now an agonizing dilemma: watch
and do nothing as a storm gathers on its border, or mount a direct intervention
into Syria that would inevitably inflame its own Kurdish problem and pit it
against both IS and an array of Assad-allied forces, including Russia.
Turkey and Saudi Arabia, the
rebellion’s main supporters, are now bereft of options. No amount of
weaponry is likely to change the balance of power. The introduction of
anti-aircraft missiles was once a viable response against Assad’s air force,
but neither country — suspecting that the United States is essentially quiescent
to Moscow’s approach — is willing to escalate against President Vladimir Putin
without cover.
Ironically, this momentous
change in battlefield dynamics is occurring just as U.N. envoy Staffan de
Mistura yet again pushes a diplomatic track in Geneva. But the developments on
the ground threaten to derail the dapper diplomat’s peace scheme. Fairly or
not, de Mistura is tainted by the fact that the United Nations is discredited
in the eyes of many Syrians for the problematic entanglements of its
Damascus humanitarian arm with the regime. Despite U.N. resolutions,
international assistance still does not reach those who need it most; in fact,
aid has become yet another instrument of Assad’s warfare. Neither Kerry nor de
Mistura are willing to seriously pressure Russia and Assad for fear of
jeopardizing the stillborn Geneva talks.
Seemingly unfazed by this
controversy, de Mistura’s top-down approach relies this time on an apparent
U.S.-Russian convergence. At the heart of this exercise is Washington’s
ever-lasting hope that Russian frustration with Assad would somehow translate
into a willingness to push him out. However, whether Putin likes his Syrian
counterpart has always been immaterial.
The Russian president certainly has
reservations about Assad, but judging by the conduct of his forces in Chechnya
and now in Syria, these are about performance– not humanitarian principles or
Assad’s legitimacy. For the time being, Moscow understands that without Assad,
there is no regime in Damascus that can legitimize its intervention.
Ever since 2011, the United
States has hidden behind the hope of a Russian shift and closed its eyes to
Putin’s mischief to avoid the hard choices on Syria. When the Russian onslaught
started, U.S. officials like Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken predicted a quagmire
to justify Washington’s passivity. If Russia’s intervention was doomed to
failure, after all, the United States was not on the hook to act.
Russia, however, has been not
only been able to increase the tempo of its military operations, but also to justify the mounting
cost. And contrary to some pundits, who hailed the Russian
intervention as the best chance to check the expansion of IS, Washington knows
all too well that the result of the Russian campaign is the strengthening of
the jihadist group in central Syria in the short term. This is a price
Washington seems willing to pay for the sake of keeping the Geneva process
alive.
The bankruptcy of U.S. policy
goes deeper. The United States has alreadyconceded key points about Assad’s future —
concessions that Russia and the regime have been quick to pocket, while giving
nothing in return. In the lead-up to and during the first days of the Geneva
talks, it became clear that the United States is putting a lot more pressure on
the opposition than it does on Russia, let alone Assad.
Just as Russia
escalates politically and militarily, the Obama administration is cynically
de-escalating, and asking its allies to do so as well. This is weakening rebel
groups that rely on supply networks that the U.S. oversees: In the south, the
United States has demanded a decrease in weapons deliveries to the Southern
Front, while in the north, the Turkey-based operations room is reportedly
dormant.
The result is a widespread and
understandable feeling of betrayal in the rebellion, whose U.S.-friendly
elements are increasingly losing face within opposition circles. This could
have the ironic effect of fragmenting the rebellion — after years of Western
governments bemoaning the divisions between these very same groups.
It’s understandable for the
United States to bank on a political process and urge the Syrian opposition to
join this dialogue in good faith. But to do so while exposing the rebellion to
the joint Assad-Russia-Iran onslaught and without contingency planning is
simply nefarious. Washington seems oblivious to the simple truth that diplomacy
has a cost, as does its failure — probably because this cost would carried by
the rebellion, for which the United States has little respect or care anyway,
and would be inherited by Obama’s successor.
The conditions are in place
for a disastrous collapse of the Geneva talks — now delayed until late February
— and a painful, bloody year in Syria. All actors understand that Obama, who
has resisted any serious engagement in the country, is unlikely to change
course now. And they all assume, probably rightly, that he is more interested
in the appearance of a process than in spending any political capital over it.
As a result, all the parties with a stake in Syria’s future are eyeing 2017,
trying to position themselves for the new White House occupant. This guarantees
brinksmanship, escalation, and more misery. 2016 is shaping up as the year
during which Assad will lock in significant political and military gains.
No comments:
Post a Comment