Despite a five-day lull in most of the fighting in Syria on account of the latest US-Russia ceasefire deal, a large-scale resumption of the conflict looks increasingly likely to break out as early as next week, notwithstanding the mutual interest of Washington and Moscow to continue with further incremental truces (i.e. 48-72 hours).
That's because the fundamental underlying disagreement looks increasingly impossible to resolve: the US simply won't impose costs on the so-called "moderate rebels" for not breaking cleanly with the former Al Nusra Front, and until it proves it will, there's absolutely no reason for Russia to ease the Assad regime's stranglehold on Aleppo by allowing humanitarian supplies to reach the besieged rebel eastern sector of the key city which is the focal point of the entire five-and-a-half-year Syrian civil war.
Indeed, Moscow and Damascus now have every pretext to strengthen, not loosen, their encirclement of Aleppo: should they finally lose patience with American and Saudi foot-dragging over the "moderate rebel" impasse, they must be in a strong position to rapidly re-escalate their aerial bombardment of the civilian support infrastructure of eastern Aleppo in such a way that the 300,000 anti-government residents there can readily be forced into a "surrender-or-starve" choice.
This was, after all, the dire prospect that the entire anti-Assad insurgency and, even more to the point, its US and regional Sunni backers, found themselves facing when they desperately tried to secure a truce last week - and ultimately did so only at the price of agreeing to severe Russian and Syrian demands to completely cut off Al Nusra, which they're now clearly loathe to follow through on.
As a consequence, it now appears increasingly likely that all the ceasefire will end up doing is delaying the US-backed opposition's inevitable final rout from Aleppo by an additional two to four weeks. Putin and Assad can't sit on their thumbs forever. They know exactly what they're looking for, which with each passing day becomes more and more remote a prospect: that Al Nusra and its closest extremist affiliates will finally get booted out of the joint operational command center of the umbrella Islamist militant coalition called Jaish al-Fatah (Army of Conquest), which has dominated the anti-Assad insurgency in northern Syria since its formation in early 2015.
In other words, what should now be taking place is a full-scale purge of the most powerful rebel coalition's best commanders and intelligence operatives - because they're members of Al Nusra. But quite the contrary, it appears that other key Sunni fundamentalist factions which comprise the Army of Conquest (notably the proto-Taliban Ahrar al-Sham) have put their own feet down in support of Al Nusra - they have expressly refused to join the ceasefire at all. In doing so, they've made it practically impossible to meaningfully distinguish a "moderate" rebel group from an "extremist" one: not only are these jihadist bedfellows of Al Nusra effectively a clandestine liaison between the suicidal fanatics and the secular Free Syrian Army (FSA), but it's so obvious to just about anyone observing the conflict in northern Syria that even among the secular remnants of the original Arab spring and Syrian revolution, Al Nusra itself has gained tremendous popularity and legitimacy.
All this makes it quite clear that both "moderate" and "extremist" rebels still hope to maintain maximum ambiguity as to what distinction can be drawn between them on the battlefield - and by extension, that they still want to use the truce to strengthen themselves so as to become capable of breaking the regime's siege of Aleppo yet again.
When the US agreed to crack down on the insurgency's links to Al Nusra a week ago, it did so knowing that arm-twisting its proxies into compliance would be difficult to impossible - yet for Kerry and ultimately Obama, even this was far better than an unchecked Russo-Syrian onslaught that could well have obliterated much of the remainder of eastern Aleppo by now, unleashing another few tens of thousands of refugees.
Now, just a week later, and barely five days into the actual cessation of hostilities, the clock is already ticking down - fast. The US has reportedly threatened Russia that it will pull out of the agreement to jointly bomb Al Nusra (and ISIS for that matter) if humanitarian aid to Aleppo remains blocked as of early next week; this is obviously a media ploy to make it sound as though Moscow and Damascus are the parties blocking the path to resolving the Syrian conflict.
But in fact, it's obvious why the Russians are now making such hay about Washington deliberately withholding the actual terms of the Kerry-Lavrov agreement of September 9 from the rest of the world, not least the UN: disclosing these would unmistakably show that over the past week, it's actually been the US which has completely failed to keep its promise to extirpate from the Syrian opposition its CIA and Pentagon-brokered Al Nusra links.
And so here we are - Moscow and Washington once again reduced to making veiled (and soon not-so-veiled) threats or ultimatums against each other.
Except it's Putin's Kremlin whose guns are actually loaded to back up its diplomatic pressure, while Obama in the White House remains - as ever - essentially clueless as to the sheer futility of leaving policy implementation and details to his entrenched Beltway bureaucracy, which appears more set than ever on its course of suicidal stumbling into the claws of the Russian bear.
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