Jamil Maidan Flores: Putin Rescues Assad, Alters Middle East Landscape
Where Obama tiptoes, Putin barges in. At the end of last month, Russia launched its own “September 30 Movement” with airstrikes in Syria avowed as targeting the Islamic State (IS). This will be a campaign of several months.
We should all be cheering as the bombs hit strongholds in Raqqa where IS has committed unspeakable war crimes. But munitions also rained on Aleppo, Hama and Idlib, provinces under control of moderate rebels.
What’s going on? The goal of the campaign is to preserve the undeserved life of Syrian President Bashir al-Assad’s regime. So all the forces ranged against him are fair game, including civilians in areas controlled by moderate rebels. To Assad and the Russians, anyone in Syria who doesn’t sing his praises is a terrorist.
The displaced civilians can’t seek refuge in government-controlled areas. They’ll trek to Europe, which is OK with Vladimir Putin. The larger the Exodus of refugees to the continent, the less focused is Europe on his Ukraine pickle.
At least the IS is now getting battered on behalf of Assad. Syrian government forces aren’t famous for fighting the IS. The suspicion is that early on, Assad cultivated the IS and manipulated it as a ballast against the rebels.
There’s one group of IS fighters, though, that the Russians will not spare: those from Chechnya. A Chechen separatist movement still simmers within the Russian Federation. In years past, fighting between Chechen separatists and the Russian security forces was bloody and brutal.
Iranian troops are now massing inside Syria. With the Hezbollah militia and the Syrian army, they will advance against the IS, while Russian aircraft give them cover. We’ll soon know how well this tactic works.
At the same time, Russia is forming a new coalition that includes Syria, Iran, Turkey, Egypt, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Already it has an intelligence-sharing arrangement with Iran, Iraq and Syria.
With this arrangement, and an airbase and a naval base within Syria, Russia has seized the military and diplomatic initiative from the US. It has started on an important leg in a march from the humiliation of the Soviet break-up to respectability as a global player. It has created an alluring distraction from its economic failure. Also a chance to get at the Chechen fighters. A chance for its defense industry to make sales. And a chance to show the world it doesn’t abandon its friends.
On the other hand, this is a bad time for the US. It has been helpless in Ukraine. In the South China Sea, it has yielded the strategic advantage to China. And now in the Middle East, the best President Obama has done is to wish that Russia got bogged down in the sands of Syria.
Meanwhile the Syrian conflict keeps producing refugees. And the IS goes on attracting foreign fighters from all over the world, including Indonesia. One day they will return as hardened veterans of terrorist atrocities. They’ll inflict innovative mayhem on their native societies.
Don’t blame Putin for this muddle. He’s just looking after himself and his bloodthirsty friend. The US and its allies simply must produce and implement better ideas. Better than training and equipping recruits with no taste for a fight, who quickly surrender their arms to terrorists. And better than snubbing 100,000 rebels already fighting Assad.
Nothing much that’s good will happen in Syria until the sponsors of the civil war reach an understanding and start working as a team to eradicate the IS and escort Assad to the door.
That won’t happen if one major sponsor, the US, remains sharply divided, with a large part of it working hard to bring down its own president as a pathetic failure. With the US presidential election campaign already heating up, I’m not optimistic.
Jamil Maidan Flores is a Jakarta-based literary writer whose interests include philosophy and foreign policy. The views expressed here are his own. He may be contacted at jamilmaidanflores@gmail.com.
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