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A FREAK sandstorm that swirled out of the Syrian Desert blotted skies over much of the Middle East from September 7th to 9th. Choking dust added to the misery of war-ravaged Syria, yet brought a brief respite from both the Syrian regime’s deadly barrel bombs and, in the parts of Syria and Iraq held by Islamic State (IS), from coalition air-raids targeting the self-declared caliphate.
The giant dust cloud also provided a metaphor for the muddle of a brutal four-and-a-half-year-long conflict that keeps sucking in more armed actors even as it spews out ever more refugees. Bitter polarisation, not only between local groups but between their international sponsors, repeatedly obliterates any chance for peace.
A flurry of diplomacy in August had, for instance, seemed the result of a growing convergence of interests between nearly all the main actors in Syria about the need to defeat IS. There were reasons to be hopeful. The deal over Iran’s nuclear program, Russia’s need to calm tense relations with the West, the growing exhaustion on the ground of President Bashar al-Assad’s forces, the keenness of America and its allies to show some progress after a year of bombarding IS, plus Turkey’s decision in July to commit more effort to the American coalition; all these factors suggested the possibility of movement.
Russia, which despite its backing for Mr Assad has kept ties open with his foes, sponsored a constellation of meetings in Moscow and elsewhere. They brought together Vladimir Putin and several Arab heads of state, as well as Syrian government and opposition figures, Iranian officials and others. Yet it is now clear that no one has in fact budged. Russia and Iran, the main diplomatic and military sponsors of Mr Assad’s regime, announced renewed commitments to his survival. America and its allies retorted, with varying degrees of firmness, that the Syrian leader bears too much responsibility for the rise of IS, and has too much blood on his own hands, to be part of any transition. Turkey and Saudi Arabia, in particular, remain adamant that Mr Assad must go.
Back to battle
Positions on both sides seem now, if anything, to have hardened. Iran’s soft-spoken foreign minister, Javad Zarif, deflated what some Western diplomats had taken as hints that the Islamic Republic might be flexible about a regime it has supported with billions of dollars worth of arms and fuel as well as thousands of proxy fighters. “Those who set conditions about the Syrian president should be blamed for the continued war,” he said on September 7th.
Russia, for its part, appeared piqued that neither America nor its allies in the Middle East is prepared to drop its rejection of Mr Assad in the interest of joining forces against IS. “The demand for Assad’s resignation as a precondition for the struggle against terrorism is completely unrealistic and counterproductive,” said Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, on September 1st. His words reflected Russia’s long insistence that the Syrian regime represents a bulwark in the global struggle against Islamist extremism—and a belief that its Western critics are naive to assert that Mr Assad’s own brutality and his efforts to stir sectarian hatred have been not only the prime recruiting tools for IS, but also the prime creator of refugees.
Quietly, Russia also backed up these words with action. Since the start of Syria’s war in 2011 it has supplied Mr Assad with a constant flow of arms, spare parts, intelligence and technical aid. That flow has now increased markedly. The number of ships docking at Russia’s naval depot in the Syrian port of Tartus—its sole military facility outside the former Soviet Union—has grown. Instead of small numbers of regular conscripts, Russia has begun rotating in groups of highly trained infantry. American officials say they have detected the unloading of prefabricated units to house up to 1,000 Russian troops. Russia has also escalated propaganda to bolster Mr Assad; among other moves it dispatched a teen weightlifting star, Maryana Naumova, “the world’s strongest girl”, to the Syrian capital at the invitation of Asma al-Assad, the president’s wife.
While there is no sign that America or its allies have any intention of matching Russia’s bravado by putting troops on the ground in Syria, the coalition air effort is also expanding. Britain announced this week that it has undertaken its first drone strike in Syria (see article). France has launched aerial reconnaissance operations in advance of its own possible air strikes, and Australia has announced that it, too, is joining the aerial campaign. On September 9th, meanwhile, Syrian sources claimed that a coalition air raid west of the IS capital, Raqqa, had killed as many as 20 civilians who had been drafted to dig trenches for the jihadists.
Since its losses to coalition-backed Kurdish forces in northern Syria earlier in the summer, IS has largely held its ground despite the bombing campaign. Mr Assad’s forces have not fared so well. On September 9th they admitted the loss to a rebel force of an important airbase south of Aleppo, Syria’s second city (its largest in population terms, at least before the war). The defeat follows a sequence of smaller setbacks for the regime, and endangers the long and narrow salient that is the Assad government’s sole supply route to the city, where its forces have been locked in a ruinous two-year war of attrition against multiple rebel groups.
Embarrassingly for America and its allies, the rebel force that captured the air base was led by Jabhat al Nusra, the Syrian affiliate of al-Qaeda and itself a target of American air raids. The fall of Aleppo would be a disastrous blow to Mr Assad, but it would also generate yet another flood of refugees, adding to the 7.6m already displaced in Syria and 4m who have fled abroad. This time, for a change, the new wave of arrivals in Europe would largely be Mr Assad’s supporters.