By Abdel Bari Atwan

Syrian airspace is crowded nowadays with military aircraft of all types and nationalities. There were aready US, British, French, Saudi, [United Arab] Emirati, and sometimes Israeli aircraft. Now the Russians have joined them. All of this is happening under the title or pretext of fighting the Islamic State (IS) in order to weaken it as a prelude to eliminating it.

US and Western intelligence report 15 giant Russian cargo planes landing every day at a new air base in Latakia, carrying missiles, guns, planes, and sophisticated military equipment, as well as hundreds of military advisers and special forces. Today it was reported that the Duma, the Russian parliament, has approved this military engagement which has been requested, the Kremlin reported, by President Assad of Syria himself.

By way of stark contrast, the US announced yesterday that the few remaining fighters from a group of “moderate” Syrian opposition members, hand-picked and trained by the CIA at a cost of half a billion dollars, had joined Al-Nusrah Front – which is the official branch of “Al-Qa’idah” in Syria – together with their up-to-the-minute military vehicles, gadgets and weapons.

There are two interpretations for the latter. The first is that President Obama was unconvinced right from the beginning about arming and training the opposition, but did so under pressure from Congress; in this case, he wanted these forces in one way or another to join Al-Nusrah  or even IS in order to show US lawmakers, particularly the Republicans, that such a step was useless and that there was no moderate opposition.

The other interpretation says that recruiting moderate elements or the new awakening councils to the fight against IS was unacceptable and unconvincing because these forces are motivated only by their desire to bring down the Syrian regime – an aim IS is achieving even if unintentionally.
Both interpretations are valid, but we opt for the first, and add that the training and arming of those ‘moderate’ fighters was not serious enough, and that the fact they joined Al-Nusrah or any other jihadist group would not have come as a surprise, and was not opposed by the US leadership for the above-mentioned reasons.
US President Obama met his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in New York on Monday [28 September] on the sidelines of the UN summit. While the two men appeared to maintain insurmountable differences – not looking at each other while shaking hands and wearing ‘false’ smiles, as the media reported – it is clear that Obama has become more convinced of the Russian solution to the Syrian crisis which is to prioritize the fight against IS and to co-operate with President Assad and his army to this end.

The main reasons for Obama’s U-turn in this regard are first, his intelligent reading of recent US history in the Middle East, and second, the high political and military cost of toppling the Syrian regime. He is keenly aware of the failures of Western intervention in Iraq and Libyan which have allowed IS to flourish and at the same time does not want to repeat the Afghan experience or the stage that followed the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan.

In addition, Obama fears a clash with the Russians if events in Syria unfold along similar lines to former Yugoslavia – i.e partition along ethnic and sectarian lines. Then, the US and Nato resorted to bombing Serbia in order to force the departure of pro-Soviet President Slobodan Milosevic. And most significantly, Putin is not of the feathered variety of Russian President like his predecessors Yeltsin or Gorbachev.
There are reports of a Russian-Syrian-Iranian-Hezbollah operations room having been established to oversee military operations on the ground and in the sky; if true, the next few weeks will see a radical change in the Syrian scene.

The most likely scenario is that the Russians and their allies will open a front against IS and the other militant Islamist groups in Syria, while the Americans and their allies will open a parallel front on the Iraqi side of the border thus putting IS in the middle of a military ‘pincer movement’.

The Russian plan requires Iran to be responsible for the southern front that extends from Damascus to Al-Qunaytirah and Dar’a, where Al-Nusrah and Jaysh al-Islam [Army of Islam] hold sway; Hezbollah meanwhile will be responsible for the northern front, including Idlib, Jisr al-Shughur, and parts of Aleppo. As for the Russian troops, these will be stationed in Latakia and will be in charge of protecting the northern coast. The Syrian Arab Army will be present on all these fronts, and Russian warplanes will provide air cover on all fronts.
It is also reported that Russia’s current surge of military action came as a result of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s crossing a red line when he supported the entry of Jaysh al-Fatah [Army of Conquest] into Idlib and Jisr ash Shughur, and their advance towards Latakia, which posed a real threat to Russian interests: Moscow’s only Mediterranean naval base is in Tartus, south of Latakia where it has established an air base. Erdogan’s U-turn which we noted last week – when he abandoned his call for the departure of President Al-Asad – was a recognition of his having made a mistake in this regard and his willingness to correct that mistake.

We could go further and say that Erdogan faces isolation on the world stage and, politically, at home; Turkey is also highly vulnerable regionally in the light of the new Russian initiative. Therefore, he decided to completely or partly abandon both the Syrian opposition and his Arab allies (Saudi Arabia and Qatar), just as he earlier abandoned Libyan leader Mu’ammar al-Qadhafi and ended up supporting the Nato intervention in Libya.
The Syrians, including those who stand in the trench of the regime (through their steadfastness), and those who stand in the camp of the Islamist opposition (IS and Al-Nusrah), and even migrants among them, who poured in the hundreds of thousands into Europe via land and sea, are the ones who, each according to his location and method, imposed all of these variables on the ground in their country.
The question now is whether the new scenario will produce more definitive results than all the previous initiatives we have seen in Syria over the past five years. We do not want to rush judgment as many in this or that party do, but end up disappointed. Therefore, we prefer to stand in the observer’s trench at least for the time being.