In the week and a half since Turkey's intervention in northern Syria, more evidence of a secret Putin-Erdogan accord to eventually draw down the five-year-old conflict into a mutually acceptable stalemate has steadily emerged. While the specifics must play out over a period of weeks or even months, the general contours of such a deal are already becoming clear. The path to peace in Syria is finally emerging - through a de facto partition of the country into no less than three statelets (regime, rebel, and Kurd, with ISIS a fourth wild card).
Assad will be allowed to survive - no question about that anymore. By "survive" it means he will be allowed to keep Damascus and other major urban centers in the west of the country, not yet including Aleppo in the far north, since that contested metropolis will continue to be the focal point of the diplomatic jockeying over the shattered country by the intervening powers. The city has effectively fallen back under regime siege in recent days aback intense airstrikes.
In the past week, starting with the key Damascus suburb of Daraya, a string of additional urban rebel holdouts along the country's main Damascus-Homs corridor have capitulated to the regime's starvation sieges: as before, the insurgent fighters and their families who wish to fight on are relocating to rebel-held Idlib province in the northwest. The total population being transferred seems to be in excess of 100,000 - a very significant portion of the hostile resistance that hasn't yet given up in core regime areas.
Damascus and Homs are now close to being fully and irrevocably secured, with even their long-restive outskirts and satellite towns cleared of rebels. The speed and suddenness with which these regime consolidations are taking place indicates Turkey's new concession of Assad's role in a political transition process. Since they were already on the verge of liquidation, these residual pockets were abandoned for good by Ankara, which two weeks ago finally buckled on its uncompromising stance that Assad must resign immediately.
In lieu of toppling the Baath regime on its home turf, Turkey is now stuffing many of its remaining eggs in the basket of solidifying the Sunni jihadistan of Idlib province: it apparently secured the unusual concession from Assad of allowing the deported fighters to retain their weapons, which will no doubt reinforce the militant ranks in their new positions in Idlib or on the still-raging front lines around Aleppo, further north and east.
So both the regime and the rebels are transferring military assets to the northwestern theater to double down on their contest for territory in Aleppo province, with Aleppo city itself still the central prize. To relieve intensifying regime pressure on the slim lifeline into insurgent-held eastern Aleppo, a new large formation of rebels and jihadists yesterday launched an offensive to cut off the vulnerable government supply road leading up to Aleppo from Hama, prompting a regime counteroffensive as well.
At this stage in the game, the key question is what degree of regional strategic capital Erdogan is willing to expend to prevent the fall of Aleppo to Assad. Turkish influence in any future Syrian polity now depends in large part on how strong a position its proxies in the northwest are able to consolidate vis-à-vis the Damascus regime; ideally, if Aleppo can be held, Ankara will wield a veto over the Baath regime it still detests because it will enjoy the political front of the surviving secular revolutionary opposition hanging on in the eastern districts.
More realistically, though, Assad and his Russian and Iranian backers have every intention to expel the rebel holdouts from eastern Aleppo just as they have successfully surrendered-or-starved other pockets of resistance to date - even though this effort will be an order of magnitude greater.
To do so, they must firmly secure the sole supply route from Hama up to Aleppo, which is now threatened by the rebel-jihadist counterthrusts from Idlib province southwards into Hama province. Even with this attack contained or thwarted, precious manpower and resources will have been diverted from elsewhere by the regime to secure this sector, leaving less available to reestablish the siege ring around Aleppo.
Nonetheless, Aleppo's re-encirclement and eventual fall to a surrender-or-starve siege may be just a matter of time - if Erdogan would but be realistic about what the low-hanging and attainable fruit for Turkey really are at this point in Syria. He knows beyond any shred of doubt that it's the Sunni jihadists, not the secular revolutionaries, who are key to the opposition's leverage against Damascus; he also realizes that should the Axis of Fatima really feel endangered in its goal of ultimately strangling eastern Aleppo, Tehran will simply consent to base Russian heavy bombers on its territory again, so they can quickly finish the job of depopulating the rebel sector of all noncombatants, thereby leaving nothing left for the jihadists to "liberate." So, for the very limited actual benefit of nominal secular leadership of the opposition's transition team in talks with Assad (itself already probably little more than a wishful sham), no way would Erdogan want to pour out the blood and guts of his most valuable Syrian proxies. Sure, Assad and the Iranians must pay dearly for their final victory at Aleppo, and that's why Al Nusra and its allies in the Army of Conquest who together punctured the government's initial siege in July, and indeed the beleaguered rebels in Aleppo itself, must fight on until defeat is finally truly inevitable; but Ankara has done the proper calculations and when it comes down to it, won't go for broke on account of what will end up being little more than a symbolic pile of rubble that could soon turn into a mass graveyard for the cream of its surrogate army (courtesy of becoming a training and target practice ground for the Russian and Syrian air forces).
Rather, Turkey's hopes in Syria - indeed, the regional Sunni powers' collective hopes - now rest on locking down the statelet of Idlib province and possibly opening another "moderate rebel" statelet along the border strip previously held by ISIS. If Kurdish sources are to be believed, the second part should be a piece of cake: already the Turkish operation around Jarabulus has cleared ISIS out from a 400-square mile zone with minimal losses as the latter appears to have largely withdrawn without a fight.
Ideally, eventually the Turkish-backed rebels can shove aside both ISIS and the Kurds in Aleppo province and link up a corridor with the Idlib statelet north of the city - which along with its environs will likely have fallen to the regime by then.
At that point, all four statelets will be relatively set and each will have been largely secured with a core of extremely difficult-to-conquer loyalist sectors. The Assad regime will have "won" its war by settling for the limited objective of securing the main cities of Damascus, Aleppo, Homs, Hama, and Latakia, the bulk of their surrounding governorates, and the main interconnecting roads and supply routes; it will have retained complete control of the Mediterranean coastline. The Kurds meanwhile will be all but untouchable in their distant "Rojava" federation in the north and northeastern highlands along the southeastern Turkish frontier, with a good slice of the eastern desert to boot. The rebel-jihadist, Al Nusra-led alliance - effectively the Saudi-Gulf-Turkish protectorate in Syria - will have a Sunni Sharia-run mini-state with Idlib its capital but also much territory in Aleppo province (though not the city and its immediate surroundings) and a small but strategically significant piece of Hama province as well. And finally, though severely truncated by the Kurds and Al Nusra-led rebels (as opposed to symbolically pinpricked by the regime), ISIS will still have most of the Syrian flank of its dwindling caliphate.
Interestingly, despite being considerably weaker than any of the other three mini-states and almost certain to have no place in peace negotiations that would involve those three, ISIS could still be a key strategic factor in what will have devolved into the final dismemberment of Syria into multiple sovereign entities in all but name. ISIS may yet survive if for no reason other than that the regime, the rebels, and the Kurds alike are each loath to give the other two a cheap strategic boost by bearing the cost of eliminating it. By the same token, however, ISIS may also reap the benefits of having three, not two (let alone just one) stronger enemies whose official policies will still invariably be its complete destruction, especially since the international community is likely to maintain far beyond its actual credibility an official fiction that Syria hasn't in fact permanently disintegrated - and concomitantly the half-truth that ISIS is the one common enemy of all legitimate Syrians.
So even ISIS, whose true degree of genuine suicidal spirit we'll eventually find out, might actually have a role in Syria's peace after all - that is, a peace through partition. Some might even argue that we've already been inexorably heading that way for a while.
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