Russia’s Vladimir Putin tilts Syrian war to Bashar al-Assad

The Syrian conflict has taken a dangerous turn, amid Russian air strikes and Iranian muscle on the ground.

FILE - In this Tuesday, Oct. 2, 2012 file photo, smoke rises over Saif Al Dawla district, in Aleppo, Syria. Aleppo was one of the last cities in Syria to join the uprising against President Bashar Assad’s government which began in 2011. (AP Photo/Manu Brabo, File)

This week, as forces loyal to Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad tightened a noose around the country’s largest city, an unthinkable end to the bloodshed loomed into sight.

Unthinkable because Assad might end up winning a war he started just on five years ago to crush what was then a peaceful protest movement and end the last blush of the Arab Spring.

Backed by Russian strike power in the air and Iranian muscle on the ground, the regime has regained the upper hand in the battle for the urban hub of Aleppo, the key piece on the bloodstained chessboard of the Syrian conflict.

What happens there now, while a new wave of refugees rolls towards the border, will decisively affect the outcome of the war and the web of regional agendas and alliances that have spun out of it.

The recapture of Aleppo by the government would be a disaster for the rebel cause, affirm to the Russians their support for Assad and force a reassessment in the West of whether regime change is a viable option to halt the carnage.

In a sense, all roads in Syria lead to its peacetime commercial capital in the north, not the seat of political power in Damascus, which is the scene of three-way fighting between the regime, rebels and the fanatics of Islamic State.

When the armed opposition occupied much of Aleppo in 2012, in the opening phase of the war, it was hailed as the beginning of the end for Assad.

But Moscow’s intervention last September appears to have tilted the balance back in the autocrat’s favour, blasting open a route for his militia to encircle Aleppo and squeeze rebel positions.

The pro-government forces — a euphemism for the disintegration of Assad’s regular army — severed a vital supply route for the rebels to neighbouring Turkey and broke their siege of two Shi’ite villages to consolidate regime-held sections of Aleppo.

UN-brokered peace talks in Geneva collapsed in the face of the onslaught: Assad was happy to do his talking on the battlefield while the rebels, in disarray as usual, bickered over whether they had been left in the lurch by the US, perceiving backsliding in Secretary of State John Kerry’s reported concession that the Syrian dictator might not be part of the problem after all and could play a role in the transition to a new government.

The offensive gained momentum on Monday when the loyalists seized the northern town of Kfeen, just short of the border with Turkey. As 35,000-plus Syrian refugees massed behind barriers guarded by Turkish troops, international aid groups warned that food convoys were unable to reach Aleppo from the north, putting the population at risk of starvation. The UN warned that more than one million people were trapped in besieged areas of Syria.

With a humanitarian catastrophe unfolding on their doorstep, the Turks were in a dilemma. The government said the country was “saturated” by 2.5 million Syrians and issued mixed messages as to whether crossings near the border city of Kilis would be opened.

The Europeans have been deeply inconsistent in their demands of Ankara. German Chancellor Angela Merkel professed this week to be horrified by the suffering of Syrian civilians when she dropped in to the Turkish capital to dispense high-handed advice.

In the next breath, she demanded a firmer hand at the border to stem the influx of people taking the Balkan corridor to claim asylum in the EU’s rich western states, especially Germany.

An exasperated Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Yalcin Akdogan made a telling point, complaining of the EU: “On the one hand, they say, ‘Open your borders, take everyone in’. On the other hand, they say, ‘Close your border, don’t let anyone through’.”

To complicate the outlook, Islamist President Recep Tayyip Erdogan suggested that Turkey could send ground troops into Syria. This is not only about Assad, whom Erdogan despises, or the Turks’ desire to set up a buffer zone on its 900km border with Syria to provide a sanctuary for refugees and transfer more responsibility for them to the international community. The YPG militia of the Syrian Kurds is also on the march, occupying parts of the north depopulated by Russia’s aerial bombardment.

Battling a renewed insurgency by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party — PKK — on its own soil, Turkey is unlikely to stand by while the Syrian Kurds link a string of cantons reaching from Syria’s southeastern frontier with Iraq to the western border with Turkey.

That doesn’t make a Turkish military incursion inevitable, of course. Erdogan would think twice about a direct confrontation with the Russians, as would the US and its European allies, given Turkey is a NATO member.

Yet Turkish action is likelier than the troop deployment flagged by Saudi Arabia against Islamic State in Syria. The Saudis have their hands full fighting a proxy war in distant Yemen — another Arab Spring debacle — against Iranian-backed Houthi rebels. It’s fair to say the Saudis’ performance there has failed to impress.

Scoffing at the prospect of Saudi boots on the ground in Syria, a commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards militia, Ali Jafari, said: “I don’t think they will dare do so. They have a classic army and history tells us such armies stand no chance in fighting irregular resistance forces.”

Mohammad Mansour, a militia boss with the rebel Free Syrian Army featured on these pages last Saturday, said his men were mainly up against Shi’ite fighters from Iran, Afghanistan and the Hezbollah group, Tehran’s pawn in Lebanon. “There is not much of the (Syrian) army left,” he explained. But the Russian air force caused fearsome damage, and had started to target the rebels’ command centres with devastating precision.

Mansour estimated that his positions around Aleppo were being pounded by up to 200 airstrikes a day, making a mockery of Moscow’s claims that its primary target was Islamic State in Syria, not the so-called moderate opposition to Assad.

Mansour wants advanced American surface-to-air missile systems, along with more of the US-made TOW tank-killers supplied through the Saudis that have wreaked havoc on the Syrian military’s Vietnam-era armour.

To date, anti-aircraft rockets are a no go with Washington, wary of having the missiles fall into the wrong hands, as happened in Afghanistan in the 1980s after they were supplied to mujaheddin insurgents to use against the Soviets.

In the lead-up to the failed talks in Geneva, the US had pressed Turkey, Saudi Arabia and other allies to curtail the supply of approved weapons to the rebels, leaving them vulnerable when the Aleppo offensive rumbled into action, the hard-pressed fighters fume.

“We have had lots of dialogues, but we’ve received nothing … just empty promises,” Mansour said.

Fresh negotiations in Munich between the US, Russia and other stakeholder states in Syria overnight agreed to a broad ceasefire within a week, primarily to allow for the delivery of humanitarian aid. However, there appeared to be no clear commitment to end Russian airstrikes, leading rebel groups to question whether the agreement had value.

Some observers believe Assad will settle for encircling Aleppo and starving out the remaining rebels rather than risking a bloody street battle where the advantage of Russian air support would be neutralised.

Adherents to the self-interested doctrine of realpolitik argue that defeat of the rebels would not be all bad news for the West: if the regime were secured then its guns could be turned on Islamic State.

The case advanced by Russia and Iran that Assad is the best hope for ending the war and destroying Islamic State is gaining currency as his militia army steadily books gains around Aleppo, underlining the disconnect between the war aims of Washington, Ankara and Riyadh and what’s happening on the ground in Syria.

“This is not the end of the war but it could be the beginning of the end with Assad, Russia, Hezbollah and Iran as the biggest winners,’’ Patrick Megahan, of US think tank the Foundation for Defence of Democracies, told Bloomberg news.

Senior policy fellow with the European Council on Foreign Relations Julien Barnes-Dacey said the international “sense of urgency or moral impulse” to get rid of Assad had abated to the detriment of Syria’s armed and political opposition.

“But Assad can’t win this war outright,” he insisted. “No one realistically believes he can stabilise the country and deal with both extremism and refugees.”

So where does this leave Islamic State? The jihadists are under attack from the air by US-led coalition warplanes, as well as the Russians at times (about 30 per cent of Moscow’s effort is thought to be directed at Islamic State targets). The Kurds are making inroads against Islamic State in northern Syria and northern Iraq and now the Russian-backed Syrian forces are competing for some of the same territory along the Turkish border. Columb Strack, a Middle East specialist for IHS Jane’s Intelligence Review, told Reuters “the current trends look bad for the Islamic State”.

But as Paris-based terrorism expert Agnes Levallois pointed out to the wire service, there is a danger in freeing up Assad’s forces to take on Islamic State, however attractive that may appear to the West.

“The Russian plan is to get to a place where Assad is left alone against the Islamic State,’’ she said. “But that will create a scenario where the Islamic State can present itself as the great and only defender of the Sunni community against the Syrian regime.”

All the while, the plight of Syria’s refugees grows more acute.

Fears that the gates to Europe will be slammed on asylum-seekers mean there has barely been a pause for winter in the sad streams of refugees braving stormy seas or snowy mountain passes to find a new life. At least 250 refugees drowned last month while attempting the perilous ocean crossing from Turkey to Greece — a third of the toll for all of last year and an ominous portent of what is to come this year.