WHAT RUSSIAN INTERVENTION BRINGS TO THE WAR IN SYRIA

As of this first week of October, Syria (and the world) became a lot scarier place. Already hell on earth, with half of its population displaced by war, hundreds of thousands killed and hundreds of thousands more injured or mutilated, the Syrian nation is now facing not only the airstrikes by the 60-country US-led coalition on Islamic State targets, but also the direct intervention of the Russian military against any and all rebels seeking to overthrow Moscow’s friends and allies in the harsh, authoritarian Bashar al-Assad regime.

Syria is strategic to Russia in its Middle-Eastern backyard, and Moscow has a close-knit relationship with the ruling Assad family dating back to 1970, when Hafez al-Assad came to power after a series of military coups starting in 1963 and in which he gained ever greater control, rising from defense minister to prime minister and, finally, to president, an office he held for 30 years, before handing power down to son Bashar in 2000. Even before the 1970s, however, Soviet Russia had a foothold in Syria, making a secret agreement including diplomatic, political and military support for the Arab country, signed in 1946 just prior to the country’s independence from France in the aftermath of World War II.   

The Assads, both father and son, have forged ever closer ties with Russia. Since the days of the Cold War, Russia has maintained a major naval base in the Syrian port of Tartus and the Russians are widely rumored to have at least three intelligence bases operating out of Syrian territory. These facilities have all begun to take on renewed significance recently with the swift deterioration of post-Soviet East-West relations, leading to the worst situation for world peace since the end of the Cold War in the 1980s. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Russia has forgiven the Assad regime nearly 10 billion dollars in debt out of a total of about 13.5 billion accumulated with the former Soviet Union and has supplied the country with many billions of dollars more in arms and sophisticated heavy weaponry. And since the outbreak of civil war in 2011, Moscow has continued to keep up a running supply of arms to the Syrian government to be used against al-Assad’s own people in some of the cruelest criminal attacks on a civilian population in recent history.

Russian jets over Syria

But over the course of the last week, Russia’s autocratic President Vladimir Putin has decided to take his country’s support for the Assad government a giant step further by intervening directly in the fighting, running airstrikes on targets within Syria’s borders, in response to a request from Bashar al-Assad. With the excuse of attacking powerful positions currently held by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL)—action much of the rest of the world would be wont to condone—Putin is tipping the balance in Syria and, hence, in the Middle East (since the war has turned decisively regional over the past four years) by turning his guns on other rebel groups opposing the Assad regime as well.

Typical of Putin’s less than forthcoming political style—witnessed in the Ukraine civil war where he has consistently denied direct Russian intervention in the conflict while annexing Crimea, loading up pro-Russian rebels with advanced weaponry and fleshing out their forces with Russian “volunteers”—Moscow was at first downplaying and even denying any intention to attack non-ISIL targets. The Kremlin sought to make it look as if Russia were merely bolstering aerial attacks on ISIL in view of the only relative effectiveness of the US-backed coalition’s actions. But the Kremlin has made it clear this week that the Russian military is coordinating its air and naval missile strikes with deployment of Assad’s ground troops.

Russian Navy firing missles deep within Syrian territory.

The Russian naval attacks have brought a new dimension to the war in Syria, with Russian missiles striking as far as 900 miles into the heart of the country’s territory to wreak death and destruction on rebel-held positions. Nationalist rebels, who have been making painstaking progress against Assad’s Russian-equipped military for the past four years, in a bid to overthrow the four-decade-old regime and set up a more pluralistic system, suddenly find themselves facing fire from not only the regime and ISIL, but also from Assad’s military supplier, which happens to be one of the two most powerful militaries on earth. Both Assad and the rebels locked deep in civil war against him were relieved to see coalition airstrikes holding back the ISIL advance, since Islamic State’s mission is its own and no more beneficial to Syria’s future than Assad himself is. But the Kremlin’s design is to tip the balance in Assad’s favor and for Syria to go back to business as usual under the same political system as ever, a system highly favorable to Russian interests in an area of the world where Moscow is bereft of other allies, and one that is strategic to its military interests.

It is no coincidence that Russia has decided to actively intervene in the Syrian War at this time. According to independent news reports, rebel-held areas of the country that Assad was earlier bombing and starving into submission are now, nevertheless, slipping from his grasp. Some observers say that this past year has been a turning point in the civil war. While Assad has been busy confronting ISIL’s more expansive incursions, his troops have lost most major battles with nationalist rebels during that time and are seeing any advances they had made against the Jaysh al-Fatah Coalition in Idlib Province or the Fatah Halab Coalition in Aleppo, for instance, melt away, while the mainstream rebels of the so-called Southern Front continue to bring ever more irresistible pressure on the regime’s forces in that part of the country. And now Assad’s soldiers are also suffering occasional rebel-orchestrated cuts in their own supply lines, after having unsuccessfully used this tactic themselves to try and break the back of armed regime-change movements earlier in the war.

Furthermore, Assad is now facing a manpower shortage through both attrition and desertion. With half the country either displaced within Syrian borders or having fled to other countries, many of those escaping the war now are seeking to avoid military conscription, while others who have stayed behind have done so to join the rebels with the hope of driving Assad from power once and for all. And Iran, the regime’s only other major international ally, is rumored to have made it clear that, without Russian intervention, under the weakened conditions in which Assad currently finds himself, Teheran will no longer be willing to keep propping him up indefinitely.      

In other words, Bashar al-Assad has turned to Moscow in desperation and Putin seems to have perceived the threat to the Kremlin-friendly regime as sufficiently grave to warrant risking a clash with the West by warning the US-led coalition to stay out of its way when it takes to the sky, flying uncoordinated air raids on both ISIL and nationalist rebel positions in Syrian territory.

Emergency NATO meeting

So aggressive has Russia’s action been in the past week that it flew at least one mission cutting through Turkish airspace and sparking an immediate storm of protest from the Turkish authorities. As a strategic member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Turkey immediately called on its allies to react. NATO’s response was swift and clearly escalated the threat to world peace: After an emergency meeting the NATO alliance reminded Russia that any incursion into the territory of a NATO member country was a violation of the territory of NATO as a whole. The Western mutual defense alliance also announced plans to practically double its rapid intervention response force to some 40,000 international troops, underscoring that the decision was in response to the ever clearer threat posed by Putin’s Russia.And at the weekend, there were unconfirmed reports that Turkey had shot down a Russian fighter that invaded its airspace.

The situation in Syria could hardly pose a more serious threat to world peace than it does at this time. The gravest war on earth for several years running, what started as civil strife and turned swiftly to civil war didn’t take long to advance into regional conflict status. This week, it became an international conflict of major proportions, with the two most militarized powers on earth a hair’s breadth away from clashing in Syria’s airspace, or in Turkey’s. As such, then, Syria is fast taking shape as a potential flash-point scenario for the unthinkable: A third world war.

The Geneva II talks held in Switzerland early last year were a major opportunity for the world to hammer out an agreement capable of ensuring an end to the slaughter in Syria and a de-fusing of a progressively more explosive situation for regional and world peace. But both the US and Russia torpedoed that important UN-led peace meeting by only giving it lip-service support. Beneath the surface neither Washington nor the Kremlin wanted peace negotiations to prosper. Both were pushing agendas of their own, with the US betting on the eventual fall of Assad and a chance to cap Russia’s strategic potential and with Putin knowing full well that he would do whatever it took to keep Assad’s regime in power.

The chillingly dangerous situation that is developing now in Syria is a reflection of the results of that sort of reckless brinkmanship among world powers and it can only be hoped that cooler heads will soon prevail, before the point of no return.