After a coalition supporting the regime of Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad conquered the city of Palmyra from the Islamic State (IS) in late March, suggestions were made that this demonstrated the efficacy of the pro-Assad coalition in fighting IS, and doubtless the same will be said if and when the pro-regime forces conquer Tabqa. It isn’t true. From the time of Russia’s direct intervention in Syria on 30 September 2015 to Moscow’s announcement on 14 March 2016 that it was withdrawing “the main part” of its “military” from Syria, IS was almost untouched and al-Qaeda was barely damaged, while the Assad regime was bolstered and the moderate opposition, particularly those components supported by the West, were gravely weakened.
Despite Moscow’s claims that its mission was fighting IS or “terrorism,” Russia’s real goals can be summarized as three:
1.Rescue the Assad regime, which was assessed to be in mortal peril
2.Damage the mainstream armed opposition, especially those elements supported by the West, in order that Russia can …
3.Rehabilitate the Assad regime internationally by inter alia leaving only extremists as its opponents, depriving the international community of credible interlocutors, and therefore strengthening the Russian hand to make peace talks an instrument for re-legitimizing Assad, rather than removing him
In recent days, this basic war strategy has been seen again in southern Syria.
The Assad Regime Totters
In late March 2015, the Assad regime was swept from Idlib City, only the second provincial capital to fall, by Jaysh al-Fatah (JAF), a coalition of insurgents. JAF included Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda, Jund al-Aqsa, and Ahrar al-Sham. JAF included, too, Ajnad al-Sham, a slightly ambiguous group that appears to be more hardline, plus Liwa al-Haq, a Homs-origin Salafist group, and Jaysh al-Sunna, a non-ideological group, both of which have since been subsumed by Ahrar. JAF also at that time included Faylaq al-Sham, a much more moderate Islamist group that has since left JAF and moved into the Western orbit, and the offensive was supported by numerous U.S.-backed, FSA-branded groups.
JAF hung together after the fall of Idlib City and pushed on to take Jisr al-Shughur by late April, the gateway to Latakia Province, the coastal homeland of the Assad clan and the Alawi minority from which he hails and which has disproportionately staffed the regime’s trusted military units. By June, the regime was losing ground not only in Idlib, but in Aleppo and in the south. On 9 September 2015, the regime pulled out of Abu al-Duhour airbase, making Idlib the second province to be completely free of a regime presence—and the only one to be free of the regime and IS, which had been expelled by the moderate opposition in January and February 2014. Regime losses were then suffered in Aleppo to rebels led by the moderate Islamists of al-Jabhat al-Shamiya (The Levant Front).
It had been thirty months or more since the Assad regime had appeared in this much strategic trouble, and the regime was unable to hide it. Assad gave a very important speech on 26 July 2015 conceding, for the first time, that “there is a shortage in manpower“. This is a chronic problem for the regime: Iran has tried to solve it by raising sectarian militias, orchestrating a Shi’a jihad, and increasingly flooding in its own irregular (and now regular) forces. But the demographics were remorseless. This was the calculation behind the joint decision by Iran and Russia to step in directly.
By June, the regime’s Iranian and Russian supporters had begun preparing their intervention, assessing that the regime would fall without it. Iranian troops were moved into position and Russian air assets and even a contingent of troops were moved to Syria. In July 2015, with the nuclear accord secured, Qassem Suleimani, the head of Iran’s Quds Force, the expeditionary wing of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), went to Moscow—despite a travel ban imposed by international sanctions that ostensibly prevents him leaving Iran—to finalize the arrangements.
Meanwhile, Russia prepared the ground politically. As a recent comprehensive report by The Atlantic Council notes, Russia very specifically framed its intervention as a means of countering IS. Vladimir Putin had opened his speech at the United Nations, on 28 September 2015, by invoking the anti-Nazi struggle and calling for an international alliance “similar to the anti-Hitler coalition” to defeat IS. As ever, Moscow’s version of the “Great Patriotic War” starts with Operation BARBAROSSA in June 1941, not with the crushing of Poland in September 1939—when Moscow was in a formal alliance with the Nazis. Nor was this the only deception.
Russia Intervenes
Two days after the U.N. speech, with the blessing of the Russian Orthodox Church, which called Putin’s mission a “holy war“—not dissimilar to ROC’s view of Moscow’s undeclared war in Ukraine—Russia’s bombardment of Syria began. Russia’s first wave of airstrikes did not go after IS. Russia did not even go after al-Nusra, which has laced itself into the rebellion as part of its stratagem for longevity in Syria—thus potentially providing a fig-leaf for Russian claim it was fighting “terrorism”. Instead, Russia attacked Free Syrian Army (FSA)-branded nationalist rebels like Harakat Tahrir Homs, the First Coastal Division, Jaysh al-Izza, Liwa Suqour al-Jabal, and Jaysh al-Nasr, which were or had received support through the covert programme run by the Central Intelligence Agency that has vetted and supplies around 50,000 moderate rebels throughout Syria. Indeed, the CIA quickly concluded that Russia was systematically targeting its assets in Syria. This situation was not improved by a public admission that the U.S. did not intend to risk a confrontation with Russia by providing vetted rebels with the ability to defend themselves from Russia’s air attacks.
Russia simply, blatantly, and repeatedly lied about what it was bombing. By 12 October, Russia’s Ministry of Defence had published forty-three videos of airstrikes in Syria, by The Atlantic Council’s count. Exactly one video showed an airstrike on an area held by IS. This “inaccuracy on a grand scale,” as The Atlantic Council puts it, took the form of deception about both the location and the target. The U.S. State Department on 7 October said that more than ninety percent of Russia’s airstrikes had hit non-IS targets.
Russia’s airstrikes, in fact, allowed IS to gain territory in the first two weeks of the intervention. Russia claimed on 9 October that it had killed two-hundred IS jihadists in Aleppo. Hours later—with no sign of Russian jets—IS advanced nearly ten miles north-east of Aleppo City, in areas the rebellion had held IS out of for two years, one of IS’s largest territorial gains since it took Ramadi and Palmyra in May 2015. Clearly Russia had bombed the rebels out of the way, allowing IS’s advance. “Russia’s involvement in Syria is facilitating ISIS’s territorial gains,” The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) summarized at the time. “ISIS is benefiting from Russia’s strikes on the Syrian opposition.”
This was the demarcation between an anti-IS and a pro-Assad intervention: Russia would allow—even assist—IS gains if it helped Assad, and helping IS destroy the other insurgents and make Syria into a binary choice of Assad or IS was very helpful to Assad; it is what the regime had claimed was the case, and worked at making the case, all along. In such a scenario, the regime was sure it could rely on the tacit support of the international community to put down the insurgency.
That the build-up of extremists within the insurgency in Syria—especially extremists that attack the mainstream rebellion—serves Russia’s foreign policy goals is what is behind Moscow having facilitated the travel of Jihadi-Salafists from the Caucasus to the Levant. This was reported as far back as August 2015 and in May 2016 Reuters documented six cases where the Russian state had directly or indirectly helped Islamic militants to go to Syria to wage jihad.
In the case of Saadu Sharapudinov, a jihadi from the village of Novosasitli in Dagestan who was already in the woods waging war against Russia, an offer was made by the Russian security services in December 2012 via a political official—who confirms the story—for the provision of a false passport and an airplane ticket to wherever he wanted to go. In September 2013, the FSB drove Sharapudinov to the airport “in a silver Lada car with darkened windows,” handing him a passport with a new name on it and a one-way ticket to Istanbul. This continued until at least September 2014, when Temur Djamalutdinov departed the Russian Federation, despite having been denied a passport two weeks earlier for non-payment of alimony and being on a watch-list of “Wahhabists,” with a notable uptick of state-assisted departures around the Sochi Olympics in February that year.
Continued.....
Russia’s intervention has both removed obstacles to al-Qaeda and IS, namely the rebels who can uproot and replace them, and provided the only conditions—extreme anti-civilian violence—in which al-Qaeda and IS can pose as the Sunni vanguard, a protector-of-last-resort.
Originally Posted by OUTLAW 09
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