Over the last six weeks the regime of Bashar al-Assad—which by this point means in most areas Iranian-run ground forces and Russian air power—have made territorial gains in northern Syria that threaten the existence of the armed opposition in the area. This threat has been compounded by the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) and allies, which have also drawn on Russian airstrikes to attack the rebellion in the same areas. The US-led coalition against the Islamic State (ISIS) has made the PYD its main proxy inside Syria—the only force that can call in coalition airstrikes. This policy was obviously flawed...
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On January 12, an important rebel stronghold in north-eastern Latakia, on the Syrian coast, fell to an ideologically diverse pro-Assad coalition: the Syrian Arab Army, the National Defence Force (the largely-Alawite, Iran-built sectarian militia that has overshadowed the SAA), Mihrac Ural's al-Muqawama as-Suriya (ostensibly Communist), the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (the irredentist outfit descended from, as its party symbol attests, European fascism), and Iraqi Shiite jihadists under the control of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The Latakia offensive was heavily directed by Russian military advisers and possibly included Russian troops. The offensive was carried into Aleppo, where the IRGC-led pro-Assad forces, backed by Russian airstrikes, set their sights on the narrow corridor in the north of the province around Marea and Azaz that kept supplies coming in from Turkey to the rebel enclave in eastern Aleppo city that rules over more than half-a-million people.
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The rebels had been struggling to hold the Azaz corridor since the second week of Russia's intervention, which began on September 30, when Moscow killed hundreds of rebels in Aleppo, clearing the way for ISIS to sweep into areas the rebels had held them out of for years. ISIS's territorial advances in Aleppo in October 2015 were the largest since their capture of Ramadi and Palmyra five months earlier. This brought the pro-Assad and ISIS frontlines into contact; they made no move against one-another as the Assadists advanced on Azaz.
Meanwhile, the PYD was bearing down on the rebellion from the east. On January 2, the PYD pushed the rebels out of Tanab, a demarcation point between the PYD-held Efrin canton and the rebel-held corridor. The PYD claimed to have defeated Jabhat al-Nusra (al-Qaeda in Syria). The rebels were in fact al-Jabhat al-Shamiya (The Levant Front), Ahrar al-Sham, and three Free Syrian Army (FSA)-branded groups: The First Regiment, Division 13, and Division 16. The PYD would often use the Nusra pretext when attacking rebels, where they didn't outright deny their involvement and claim it was an intra-Arab...
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Those with an agenda include the US State Department. After saving the Kurdish city of Kobane in northern Syria went from non-strategic to imperative in the space of two weeks in October 2014, the US fell into an alliance with the PYD, which became the only force in Syria able to call in US airstrikes. By the summer of 2015, the Obama administration preferred the PYD over its own trained rebel groups. The terrorism laws thus have to be circumvented—in this case, by flat denial. Just last week, the State Department said it remains "very firm" in opposing the PKK, but continues to regard the PYD as an asset.
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Despite the denials, the PYD/YPG's own fighters don't make a secret of their organization's subservience to the PKK's command structure. When the US's envoy to the anti-ISIS coalition, Brett McGurk, journeyed to Kobane he met with one of the PYD's founders, Polat Can, who just happens to be a veteran officer of the PKK. In late January 2016, with Turkey and the PKK back at war, an English-speaking foreign fighter for the YPG was featured in a video calling for more foreign volunteers to either join the YPG or at least carry out terrorist attacks against Turkey. The YPG does not just take orders from the PKK's leadership in the Qandil Mountains, however. The extent of the PKK's dominance over the YPG can be seen in the YPG's self-reported casualty figures: between January 2013 and January 2016, half of the Kurds killed fighting for the YPG came from Turkey.
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In a masterly piece of maskirovka, the Russians announced their agreement to a ceasefire on Friday, which contained a loophole for continued strikes on terrorists big enough to permit Russia to bomb anyone they liked...
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One view is that this is bad negotiating; another view—already prevalent in Syria—is that this is deliberate. If the US allows the destruction of the moderate rebels and lets the pro-Assad coalition make this a binary choice—the dictator or the terrorists—as they have wanted to all along, it won't matter if the US deliberately ran out the clock on those it claimed to be supporting or is engaged in post-facto rationalization. Everyone saw the US's pro-Iran tilt, symbolized most acutely by not punishing Assad for the chemical weapons attack, and every Sunni will believe it was a conspiracy—as ISIS has continuously told them.
The pro-regime coalition crushing the rebels in Aleppo City—either killing them or driving them from the battlefield—will not just be a propaganda (i.e. recruitment) victory for ISIS, but will open an immediate military opportunity. The spearheading of the offensive by foreign Shiite militias strongly indicates that the regime's chronic shortage of manpower is getting no better, so while an aerially-delivered and ground-supported round of massacre and expulsion is possible, actually holding new terrain is likely to prove impossible. If the pro-regime forces clear the rebels from Aleppo, it will be ISIS that fills the vacuum.
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Grim as this was looking for the rebellion, it was looking a lot worse once the PYD started its own offensive—also supported by Russian airstrikes.
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It was always likeliest that the next PYD target would be Marea, a Homs-like symbol of the revolution, the first town in Aleppo to rebel and the hometown of Abdul Qader Saleh, the charismatic military leader of Liwa al-Tawhid, the most powerful rebel group in Aleppo Province until the regime killed Saleh in November 2013. Already by Monday evening, the PYD—via Jaysh al-Thuwar—was signalling its intent to move on Marea, demanding the withdrawal of Nusra, despite Nusra having no presence in Marea...
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More than one analyst noted during the contest for Tel Rifaat that the town has a special significance in Syria's recent history, as the base of Samir al-Khlifawi, better known as Haji Bakr, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's deputy, who planned and orchestrated the formation of ISIS's statelet. Al-Khlifawi did not live to see his plan come to fruition with the caliphate declaration in June 2014: he was killed by Syrian rebels when they went on the offensive against ISIS in January 2014. That it was the rebels who eliminated the strategic head of ISIS was very telling.
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Still, contrast this with the PKK, which in nearly a year-and-a-half, backed by extensive US airstrikes, has been able to expel ISIS from less than one province-worth of territory—they held Kobane and took parts of southern Hasaka and Sinjar (after fifteen months). These are Kurdish zones, peripheral to ISIS. The PYD's ethno-territorial limitation is not unreasonable: they have little interest in expending blood outside Kurdish areas and will be regarded as sectarian occupiers, opening space for ISIS, if they try.
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The PYD repeatedly claimed it was fighting jihadist-Salafists in the Azaz corridor. At one point the PYD paraded a Nusra commander they had captured. In fact it was Ismail al-Naddaf, commander of Liwa al-Fatah, a nationalist group unconnected to Nusra. One of Nusra's own fighters eventually admitted that Nusra was uninvolved in the clashes with the PYD—Nusra withdrew from this area last summer. Nusra has, as a strategic policy, wound itself into the military opposition, offering specialist military capabilities and tried to make rebels reliant on it. Nusra also tries to foster co-dependency with rebel-sympathetic populations. This gives Nusra a longevity ISIS does not have, and makes preventing Nusra embedding itself within opposition dynamics one of the coalition's most urgent tasks, given how difficult it will be to untangle Nusra later on. Thus, attacking Nusra-dependent rebels is likely not the best policy: empowering them so they no longer need Nusra is. But, regardless, the PYD is attacking moderate rebels who are not entangled with Nusra, some of them backed by the Islamist-allergic CIA. Not only is the PYD directly attacking non-Nusra-associated rebels, making them more likely to become dependent on Nusra, but the PYD's aggression is politically helping Nusra by pushing insurgents to prioritize unity over moderation. Nine rebel groups, some CIA-supported, have already declared that during this crisis they will be led by Ahrar al-Sham, a close battlefield ally of Nusra's.
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Originally Posted by CrowBat
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