Having effectively called the Russian leader a war criminal for his actions in Syria, French president Francois Hollande has unsurprsingly been spurned by Vladimir Putin as the latter canceled an important trip to Paris that would have included crisis talks on both Syria and Ukraine.
Russian propaganda has already seized on French opposition criticism of Hollande's high moral grandstanding: just who does this clown think he is to accuse the one person who has confronted ISIS aggressively enough to finally overturn its secret support by so-called Western allies in the Middle East?
Less than a year ago, it was none other than Hollande who practically begged the Kremlin to help him retaliate against ISIS after a terrorist attack in Paris killed around 130 people. In response, Russia not only bombed the terrorist state's illicit oil trade so heavily that it was ultimately reduced to a trickle, but in the process humiliated Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan so thoroughly for secretly aiding and abetting ISIS and other jihadist groups in Syria that the latter tried to corral NATO into an armed conflict with Moscow, shooting down a Russian warplane which momentarily strayed across the Turkish border from Syria in the hope that Russia would retaliate (and letting a local sponsored militia then kill one of the bailed-out pilots on the ground).
As a sign of Putin's unique gift as a geopolitical power player, the Kremlin has now turned the tables around completely: it's now Erdogan who has come around to Russia's way of thinking in Syria, even as feckless Western powers like France and Britain - who are all but exposing themselves as little more than lapdogs for an enraged and befuddled Washington - hit new heights of diplomatic stupidity and realpolitik deficiency with their blanket segregation of "humanitarian" concerns from the hard realities of proxy warfare to overthrow an unwanted dictator.
Now that Putin and Erdogan have sealed their rapprochement with the reinstatement of the much anticipated "Turk Stream" pipeline project, further collusion between Moscow and Ankara to stabilize the Syrian crisis is likely. For Putin, this turn is worth incalculably more than having his name rehabilitated with a puffed-up self-important pathetic joke of a US surrogate whose ego hopelessly outstrips his achievements.
Events since the breakdown of last month's US-Russia ceasefire agreement in Syria have probably convinced Turkey by now that the Americans have finally abandoned the original goal of regime change against Assad, and that even a likely Hillary Clinton victory next month is unlikely to change that. No amount of Washingtonian rhetoric can alter the sobering calculus that US military operations against the Syrian regime would be an effective declaration of war against not only Damascus, but Moscow and Tehran as well - a prospective adventure the Iranians have derided as "suicidal" for American interests in the region.
Having been convinced by Russia and Iran that US threats at this point amount to little more than hot air, Turkey has most likely reduced or cut off supplies and arms traversing its territory to jihadists and rebels fighting the Assad regime across its Syrian frontier; this would appear to be largely behind the Syrian government's gains in and around Aleppo since the renewal of hostilities in the final week of September, and also why a jihadist counteroffensive in Hama province which appeared so threatening around the same time late last month has been largely reversed.
Ankara now has little leverage against the Kremlin and the ayatollahs should the Axis of Fatima reignite the Kurdish issue in Syria's northern frontier region to punish it for still refusing to give up a proxy war to overthrow Assad. But Putin and Khamenei know what his bottom lines are and appear willing to concede them. That's quite a contrast with his phony friends in the West who are still pestering him over "human rights" for the traitors who tried to kill him in the July putsch, or who are still effectively blackmailing his government over its prospective EU membership contingent on proper handling of Syrian refugees.
It's clear that Mr. Erdogan wants an effective veto over both Kurdish and Iranian influence in both Syria and Iraq as ISIS is finally whittled back in the vast contiguous desert spanning the hinterland of the two countries. Putin's Turkish diplomacy has doubtless focused on these core interests of Ankara, and the revival of the pipeline deal indicates how masterfully he has satisfied his fellow strongman's prerogatives.
In Syria, Turkey clearly wants to extend its "Euphrates Shield" operation to push further southwards from the border buffer zone it has already established when it evicted ISIS about six weeks ago, before further Kurdish consolidation of the area. Ideally, Turkish-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) units will play a key role in the coming assault to liberate Raqqa - being fellow Sunni Arabs, they're most suitable to long-term occupation of this jihadist stronghold sector - but at present they're still too thin and weak in the area compared to the Kurdish YPG (peshmerga) militia-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which remains better positioned and heavily favored by its Pentagon sponsors to lead the campaign for the caliphate capital. Behind the scenes, meanwhile, a tug-of-war might be raging between Erdogan's security-intelligence apparatus and its CIA counterparts as to if and how best to redeploy the FSA: the spooks at Langley probably don't want too many of them pulled out of anti-Assad front lines in western Syria too quickly to beef up Turkish-led operations against ISIS to the north and east, because that would betray a Turkish capitulation to Russia which would deeply embarrass the US.
Russia's sensible strategy with regards to the Turkish presence in Syria should be focused on delaying for as long as possible any powerful SDF operation on Raqqa: the longer this is put off, the more likely it becomes that Turkish proxies of the FSA and other "moderate" Syrian opposition get reshuffled from the fight against Assad to an alternate anti-ISIS front much deeper inland, to eventually play a large if not the leading role in Raqqa's liberation before a US-led Kurdish operation seizes the initiative from Moscow and Ankara. Neither Putin nor Erdogan should be particularly concerned about this latter possibility, in any case: because it would entail virtual ethnic cleansing of Sunni Arabs and Turkmen by Kurds, ISIS can be expected to put up a good fight; or if not, the Turks can reopen covert arms and supply channels to the caliphate to hold off the SDF (a move that would irk the US but smirk Russia).
Of course, the longer term problem of what happens to those parts of eastern Syria liberated from ISIS will remain: Will the Sunni Arabs and Turkmen get their own federation just as the Kurds have created theirs? Will they still be represented by Damascus internationally? For Moscow and Ankara, these are probably secondary concerns: the main consideration both now and in future is the simple matter of who will be responsible for the security of these distant locales not controllable from Damascus. If Russia throws its weight behind a long-term or even permanent Turkish peacekeeping presence in areas that the Turks clear of ISIS - under UN auspices, of course - the door could open to much-needed Saudi and other Gulf Sunni peacekeeping participation in the Syrian interior, as well. That sure won't go down well with Assad, but still won't be a particularly high price to pay for political survival and prospective international rehabilitation (at least with much of the non-Western world).
Recent developments in Iraq could already be a harbinger of what's coming in Syria in terms of cooperative Russo-Turkish conflict management. Last week, a row erupted between Turkey and the Shiite-dominated government of Iraq over the former's extended deployment of a contingent of troops in Iraqi Kurdistan. Ankara has clearly signaled that it wants Sunnis - be they Arabs, Kurds, or Turkmen - to take part in the liberation of the ISIS Iraqi capital of Mosul, which is being led by the heavily Shiite Iraqi government army. While Baghdad is understandably furious, its response is hampered by its double dependence on the US (for air power) and Iran (for local militia muscle on the ground), each with its own distinct interest in keeping Mosul mostly Sunni: the US, obviously, for the purposes of checking Iranian influence in northern Iraq; the Iranians to secure their primary strategic goal of an unbroken corridor from Tehran to the Mediterranean, which is only attainable with Kurdish collusion and some grudging Turkish acceptance that Moscow is probably being asked to mediate.
Amidst all this strategic jockeying in the region by its major players, Western marginalization in Syria is becoming increasingly evident - and so is its potential negative spillover to the US and Western position in Iraq and the broader region more generally. If it were but more open to Russia's underlying viewpoint that Assad has a vital role to play in Syria's eventual stabilization, Washington would have enjoyed much greater flexibility to bargain away its regime change program for a much faster resolution of the ISIS problem. Russia and Iran would have gladly acquiesced - and incomparably more happily than Assad - to Turkish and Gulf Sunni security dominance of the sparsely populated heart of the combined territory of Iraq and Syria, provided it was exchanged for a guarantee of their vital interest of access to the Mediterranean. Instead, the Obama administration has allowed the most uncompromising Wahhabist-Salafist extremists of the Gulf Sunni establishment to effectively dictate a policy of eliminating Assad at any cost, with cool strategic rationale eviscerated by the flame of sectarian passion. In straining for a gnat, America has swallowed the proverbial camel, leaving the door wide open to the fate of the Mideast being dictated by the Axis of Fatima.
No comments:
Post a Comment