Russian President Vladimir Putin might be on the cusp of a pivotal victory in Syria’s civil war that would make it much harder for the US to achieve its stated goal of ousting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad without a major military escalation.
Al-Assad’s troops, backed by Russian airstrikes, are bearing down on rebels entrenched in Aleppo, Syria’s most populous city before fighting erupted in 2011. Reclaiming Syria’s commercial capital would give al-Assad control over all major population centers and cement his hold on a contiguous swath of land from Turkey to Jordan that makes up almost half of the country.
“Russia will stick to its guns in Syria and show the whole world we are right,” Frants Klintsevich, deputy head of the defense committee in the Russian Federation Council, said by telephone from Moscow.
Driving the last rebel groups out of Aleppo within a few months is now “quite realistic,” he said.
It has been almost a year since Putin stunned the US and its allies by entering the conflict to battle Muslim militants and prop up an old ally, turning the tables on Western and regional powers intent on regime change. What started as a bloody crackdown on peaceful protesters morphed into a multifaceted proxy war that triggered Europe’s worst refugee crisis since World War II and facilitated the rise of the Islamic State group and its global campaign of terror.
Opposition militias in Aleppo over the weekend managed to open a route out of besieged neighborhoods where about one-quarter of a million people live, but renewed attacks by government and Russian forces are preventing them from securing it, according to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the war through activists on the ground.
‘WE WANT OUR FREEDOM’
The official Syrian Arab News Agency called the fighting inside Aleppo “fierce,” while footage posted on the Twitter feed of the opposition’s Orient News showed dozens of residents dancing to the chant of “freedom, freedom, we want our freedom in spite of you, Bashar.”
The joint siege got an unexpected boost last month when a failed coup in Turkey accelerated a rapprochement between Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Putin, who called Turkey’s downing of a Russian fighter near the Syrian border last year a “stab in the back.”
With authorities in Ankara accusing the US of complicity in the failed putsch and officials from Washington to Brussels condemning Erdogan’s resultant purge, the Turkish leader is turning to Putin to forge a new strategic partnership. The two leaders met in St Petersburg, Russia, on Tuesday, a day after Putin held talks with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, al-Assad’s other major benefactor.
Key to the Turkish detente for Putin is getting Erdogan to curtail the flow of arms and men to militias fighting Erdogan’s sworn enemy, al-Assad, which he has been doing since the failed coup, according to Observatory director Rami Abdurrahman.
Turkey has slowed weapons shipments from Arab countries for the Aleppo battle, while slashing its own flows dramatically, he said.
“The Syrian regime wouldn’t have been able to besiege Aleppo had it not been for the Turkish-Russian rapprochement,” Abdurrahman said. “The military support is not what it used to be.”
The capture of Aleppo, whose eastern neighborhoods have been held by rebels since 2012, would give al-Assad control of more than 40 percent of Syrian territory and 60 percent of the population, leaving the Islamic State with about 35 percent of the country, mostly desert, according to observatory estimates. Kurds have about 15 percent of Syrian land, with the rest split between other groups.
Former US ambassador to Syria Robert Ford said it us now clear that al-Assad will not be forced out, leaving the next US president with few good options for dealing with a Kremlin-backed leader at the epicenter of Muslim extremism.
“Short of some kind of huge rethink in the US and a whole set of relationships between the US and partners in the region like Turkey and Saudi Arabia, al-Assad’s survival is no longer in question,” said Ford, who is now a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington. “The next administration will likely be left confronting a situation where a weakened, but still powerful Syrian government under al-Assad controls the former population centers.”
MAJOR POLICY CHANGES
US Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton and US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump have both called for major changes to current US policy for dealing with the conflict in Syria and the emergence of the Islamic State, which also controls swaths of Iraq.
Clinton would order a “full review” of US strategy to get the “murderous regime” of al-Assad “out of there” while escalating the fight against the Islamic State, Jeremy Bash, a Clinton adviser, told the Daily Telegraph last month.
Clinton has promised to establish a no-fly zone to protect civilians, which would put her directly at odds with Putin.
On the other hand, Trump has said the US has “bigger problems than al-Assad,” so he would focus on destroying the Islamic State, possibly by forging a military alliance with Russia.
Trump in June blamed Clinton’s policies as US secretary of state for “opening a Pandora’s box of radical Islam.”
With Trump offering the prospect of deeper US-Russia ties, Putin is also courting another major backer of al-Assad’s opponents, long-time US ally Saudi Arabia, whose main concern is countering Iran’s influence in the region.
The kingdom is pursuing “coordination and consultation” with Russia to bridge differences, Saudi Arabian Minister of Foreign Affairs Adel al-Jubeir said on July 31.
The regional realignment is happening as US President Barack Obama pursues joint action with Russia to fight al-Qaeda’s former Syrian branch, while avoiding forceful steps to prevent Putin from attacking other groups fighting al-Assad. Yet, even as Obama explores coordinating with Russia in some areas of Syria, he was condemning it in others, underscoring the complexity of the conflict.
’MEDIEVAL SIEGE’
Russia’s backing for the “medieval” siege of Aleppo and the unfolding humanitarian catastrophe raises doubts about its “commitment from pulling the situation back from the brink,” Obama told reporters last week, reiterating his position that defeating the Islamic State “requires an end to the civil war and the al-Assad regime’s brutality against the Syrian people.”
Obama’s failure so far to either destroy the Islamic State or topple al-Assad has frustrated many current and former US officials who backed a plan to arm rebels with advanced weaponry after a ceasefire negotiated by Moscow and Washington collapsed.
Dennis Ross, Obama’s senior Middle East adviser from 2009 to 2011, last week said the US should punish al-Assad for breaking the truce by bombing airfields and bases where no Russian troops are present.
A former member of the US CIA’s advisory board, Michael O’Hanlon, said the US should arm groups as long as they are not al-Qaeda’s former wing in Syria, Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, although not with anti-aircraft missiles.
Meanwhile, Putin and al-Assad have been gaining an unbeatable advantage since Russia unleashed an “unprecedented amount of firepower,” said Faysal Itani, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council think tank.
Given that “the groups best-placed to break the Aleppo siege are hard-line Islamists, the United States is likely to do little to lift the siege,” Itani said.
However, even with a victory at Aleppo, al-Assad would face an insurgency not unlike what the US encountered in Iraq a decade ago, Ford said.
“We could hold the cities in Ramadi and Fallujah, but there was still a lot of fighting, a lot of ambushes on the roads,” Ford said. “There are so many weapons floating around in Syria right now that there’ll always be an insurgent element able to take those weapons and use them.”
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