As Turkey finally blinks, Russia pulls bombers from Iran

Barely a week after launching its first airstrikes from Iran, Russia has pulled its bombers from the base.

This is probably because Turkey has apparently blinked at long last, if only partially: Assad, says prime minister Binali Yıldırım, can indeed play a role in a political transition, even though he can't have any part in Syria's long-term political rearrangement. For a regime that's staked its entire foreign policy credibility on getting rid of the hated dictator in Damascus, this marks a major admission of defeat:

“He has the blood of 500,000 people on his hands,” Yıldırım has said, referring to al-Assad. “Will Syria be able to carry this burden? Today both the U.S. and Russia see that in the long run it is not possible. But for a transition [government], it is possible to sit and talk. It is obvious that, whether we like it or not, al-Assad is an actor.”

Just the day earlier, the Turkish foreign minister was still insisting that Ankara hadn't changed its hardline stance on Assad's fate:

Foreign Minister Cavusoglu also claimed that Turkey does not support Assad staying in power for a short period such as six months, which was claimed in the past. "Assad must go immediately."

Quite an embarrassment, one must say: it shows just how monumentally humiliating it is for Turkey to concede the scale of the debacle of its whole Syrian misadventure and miscalculation.

That debacle can yet be salvaged: Turkey can effectively lock down the insurgents' existing lines at Aleppo and also secure the jihadist stronghold of Idlib province. To do so, however, it must somehow convince the remaining Syrian revolutionary resistance and whatever moderate Islamist opposition groups would listen that at this point, their only alternative to talking with Assad on the latter's own terms is complete destruction in the cauldron of Aleppo, however long this might take or how costly they make it for the regime and its Iranian-sponsored allies.

In the prior two and a half weeks since the Al Nusra-led rebels broke the Syrian government siege of Aleppo, the Axis of Fatima unsurprisingly retaliated by reducing the rebel sector of Aleppo to rubble; both Russian and Syrian regime warplanes systematically targeted pro-rebel civilian infrastructure in the eastern part of the city to accelerate the exodus of noncombatants and isolate the jihadists and remaining diehard revolutionaries, paving the way for them to eventually be annihilated with saturation strikes by the heavy bombers Moscow deployed to Iran.

Bluntly, Ankara simply ran out of cards. A rebel victory at Aleppo now wouldn't be one it can leverage politically, because neither it nor the US can openly throw their lot behind Al Qaeda and Taliban-style jihadists that want an Islamic emirate. But even worse for Turkey, with Assad's troops now battling the Kurds in northeastern Syria and Assad's air force buzzing pro-Kurdish US jets, Damascus is presenting Mr. Erdogan with a choice: either help us end the Aleppo stalemate or we won't mind ceding autonomy to the Kurds that you so fear and despise.

In fact, all indications are that Putin's much-anticipated meeting with Erdogan back on August 9 has been fruitful: Russo-Turkish relations are so good now that some speculate that the US has already removed its 90 nuclear warheads from Incirlik Air Base, and at least one leaked report has even said that Ankara might actually give Russian warplanes access to that longtime regional stronghold.

By bombing and attacking Kurdish peshmerga, Assad too is trying to ingratiate himself with Erdogan and win some rapport with his erstwhile nemesis that the Americans are still clearly less willing to earn. That's on top of intensive shuttle diplomacy between Ankara and Tehran: their foreign ministers have met twice in the wake of the Putin-Erdogan summit, as if taking their cues from the Russo-Turkish détente (which is probably effectively the case).

The Axis of Fatima is now on the verge of scoring a massive diplomatic coup: wresting once-secular Turkey from the grip of Saudi and Gulf oil money-fueled Wahhabism that has for so long used a shady alliance with the US defense-intelligence establishment to further its anti-Western, anti-secular, and quite frankly anti-democratic aims in the region with heavy Western support. One must wonder how the deep state inside the Beltway will lash out to compensate for the loss.

They have Hillary Clinton as their preferred war candidate, for sure. But the CIA and Pentagon are losing their proxy war against Fatima now - and they're running out of time to somehow reverse Obama's strategic passivity that has put Putin in the driver's seat.

With Turkish-backed rebels lining up ever more obviously (if still implicitly) with reactivated regime troops and airpower in the north and northeast of Syria to contain Kurdish advances, the potentially explosive situation of a proxy war between the US and Turkey isn't even out of the question anymore. Doubtless this is Assad's way of reasserting sovereignty on his own territory at a time when the whole US-led regime change project is coming apart at the seams, and he's conveniently putting out feelers for teaming up with a vindictive Erdogan who's ever more openly defying the American and Saudi overlords who have been blackmailing and bribing him for years.

The more that Russia and Iran (and eventually Iraq too) cozy up to Turkey, and the more Ankara reciprocates, the more likely that an Assad-Erdogan rapprochement decisively shuts out US and Saudi designs on the Levant once and for all. The Axis of Fatima will then have taken its rival US-led alliance to the cleaners.