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Category Archives: Syria
His grip still secure, Bashar al-Assad smiles as Syria burns
The New York Times reports: On the day after his 51st birthday, Bashar al-Assad, the president of Syria, took a victory lap through the dusty streets of a destroyed and empty rebel town that his forces had starved into submission.
Smiling, with his shirt open at the collar, he led officials in dark suits past deserted shops and bombed-out buildings before telling a reporter that — despite a cease-fire announced by the United States and Russia — he was committed “to taking back all areas from the terrorists.” When he says terrorists, he means all who oppose him.
More than five years into the conflict that has shattered his country, displaced half its population and killed hundreds of thousands of people, Mr. Assad denies any responsibility for the destruction.
Instead, he presents himself as a reasonable head of state and the sole unifier who can end the war and reconcile Syria’s people.
That insistence, which he has clung to for years even as his forces hit civilians with gas attacks and barrel bombs, is a major impediment to sustaining a cease-fire, let alone ending the war. [Continue reading…]
Pentagon grudgingly accepts Syria deal amid deep mistrust of Russia
The Washington Post reports: Hours after reaching an agreement on Syria last Friday with Secretary of State John F. Kerry and clearing the final deal with Moscow, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov wandered the halls of their meeting venue in Geneva, waiting for Kerry to get the okay from Washington.
In a secure room upstairs, a frustrated Kerry was on hold. Already deep into a conference call with President Obama’s top national security team, he was waiting for the Defense Department to locate its legal counsel to sign off on one of the many provisions of the accord that Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter was questioning.
“I hope before Washington gets some sleep, we can get some news,” Lavrov said as he offered pizza and vodka to reporters awaiting an announcement. Clearly on a propaganda roll, he observed that the wheels of government appeared to turn more efficiently in his country than in the United States.
Obama, who did not attend the principals’ meeting, ultimately approved the agreement and a news conference was held at midnight, Geneva time.
But beneath the politics and diplomacy of the deal — which began with a cease-fire Monday, to be followed, if it succeeds, by coordinated U.S.-Russian counterterrorism airstrikes — the prospect of military-to-military cooperation does not sit well with the Defense Department.
“There is a trust deficit with the Russians; it is not clear to us what their objectives are,” Gen. Joseph L. Votel, head of the U.S. Central Command, said Wednesday. “They say one thing, and we don’t necessarily see them following up on this.”
That mistrust resides most deeply in Carter, who officials familiar with the Russia negotiations said almost single-handedly delayed Friday’s final agreement with his repeated questions during the conference call. Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, voiced little objection during the principals’ meeting, officials said. [Continue reading…]
75,000 Syrians are trapped near Jordan’s border. Satellite images show some are dying
The Washington Post reports: Over the past five years, Jordan has become one of the biggest recipients of refugees fleeing its war-torn neighbor, Syria. Almost 700,000 Syrians have been registered as refugees in the country, which has a population of just 6.5 million. Those are just the ones who have registered; Jordanian officials say the real number is far over 1 million.
But Jordan’s hospitality may have hit a limit.
In the past year, as the trickle of new refugees entering the country slowed to a crawl, thousands of Syrian refugees have become trapped in an isolated no man’s land between Syria and Jordan known as “the berm.” Current estimates suggest more than 75,000 people are stuck in this area, but Jordanian authorities refused to allow access to the site for journalists and only limited access for aid groups.
A report from Amnesty International published Wednesday evening shows just how dire the situation on the berm has become. Using information from satellite images, video footage and a number of first-person accounts, Amnesty was able to show not only a dramatic growth in the size of the settlement at the border, but also what may be evidence of death and disease at the site. [Continue reading…]
Syria aid deliveries stall on border
The Wall Street Journal reports: Truckloads of humanitarian supplies were waiting at the Turkish border on Wednesday while the United Nations sought to negotiate safe passage for the aid to the besieged half of the Syrian city of Aleppo.
Security guarantees were needed for the 20 trucks and their drivers before moving into Syria at the Bab al-Hawa crossing, U.N. officials said.
U.N. Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura said both the government and some opposition forces were to blame for the standoff over aid deliveries to the rebel-held part of the city.
“There is always in these cases attempts to politicize humanitarian aid. So the government has been putting some conditions which I will not elaborate on and the opposition—at the receiving end in eastern Aleppo—have been putting some conditions,” he said in Brussels. He said the aid deliveries can take place only when those demands are resolved.
“The access to eastern Aleppo via the Castello Road should be unconditional and unimpeded,” he said, referring to a vital route into the city.
Armed forces from several parties in the multisided war are present along the routes to Aleppo. Despite a sharp drop in violence since a nationwide cease-fire brokered by Russia and the U.S. went into effect on Monday, no aid has yet entered Syria. [Continue reading…]
Details of Syria pact widen rift between John Kerry and Pentagon
The New York Times reports: The agreement that Secretary of State John Kerry announced with Russia to reduce the killing in Syria has widened an increasingly public divide between Mr. Kerry and Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter, who has deep reservations about the plan for American and Russian forces to jointly target terrorist groups.
Mr. Carter was among the administration officials who pushed against the agreement on a conference call with the White House last week as Mr. Kerry, joining the argument from a secure facility in Geneva, grew increasingly frustrated. Although President Obama ultimately approved the effort after hours of debate, Pentagon officials remain unconvinced.
On Tuesday at the Pentagon, officials would not even agree that if a cessation of violence in Syria held for seven days — the initial part of the deal — the Defense Department would put in place its part of the agreement on the eighth day: an extraordinary collaboration between the United States and Russia that calls for the American military to share information with Moscow on Islamic State targets in Syria. [Continue reading…]
Syria ceasefire takes effect with Assad emboldened, opposition wary
Reuters reports: A nationwide ceasefire in Syria brokered by the United States and Russia went into effect on Monday evening, the second attempt this year by Washington and Moscow to halt the five-year-old civil war.
The Syrian army announced the truce at 7 p.m. (11.00 a.m. ET), the moment it took effect, saying the seven-day “regime of calm” would be applied across Syria. It reserved the right to respond with all forms of firepower to any violation by “armed groups”.
Rebel groups fighting to topple President Bashar al-Assad issued a joint statement listing deep reservations with the agreement they described as unjust, echoing concerns outlined in a letter to the United States on Sunday. While the statement did not explicitly back the ceasefire, rebel sources said the groups were abiding by it.
“Regarding a truce, a ceasefire, the delivery of aid, this is a moral question and there is no debate around this, we absolutely welcome this, but there are other articles around which there are reservations,” Zakaria Malahifji of an Aleppo-based rebel faction told Reuters.
Combatant sources on both sides said calm prevailed in the first hours of the ceasefire but reported violations increased later in the night. [Continue reading…]
Confusion over cease-fire as U.S. walks back Kerry comments
The Associated Press reports: Confusion reigned Monday over Syria’s new cease-fire as Secretary of State John Kerry said the United States and Russia could permit President Bashar Assad’s government to launch new airstrikes against al-Qaida-linked militants. The State Department quickly reversed itself.
Spokesman John Kirby said later there were no provisions under the nationwide truce for U.S.-Russian authorization of bombing missions by Assad’s forces. “This is not something we could ever envision doing,” he said.
Kerry’s comments at a news conference were the closest any American official had come to suggesting indirect U.S. cooperation with Assad since the civil war started in 2011. President Barack Obama called on Assad to leave power more than five years ago; the U.S. blames the Syrian leader for a war that has killed perhaps a half-million people.
While Kirby called his boss’ remarks “incorrect,” Kerry’s statement reflected the general murkiness of an agreement that hasn’t been presented publicly in written form. The deal came after a marathon negotiation between Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov last Friday; descriptions by the two diplomats represent the only public explanation of what was agreed to. [Continue reading…]
Analysis: Russia-U.S. deal unlikely to end Syria’s war
Samer Abboud writes: Is the Russia-US agreement on Syria the beginning of the end of the conflict?
Unlikely. The agreement merely reflects a shared commitment to a military strategy, with its major strategic goals being to delink and separate Jabhat Fateh al-Sham (formerly known as al-Nusra Front) and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) from other rebel groups.
To be sure, the agreement also calls for a cessation of regime bombardment of civilian areas, an opening up of humanitarian corridors, and the demilitarisation of key supply routes – positive measures in the short-term.
However, the agreement cannot possibly serve as a blueprint for a resolution because it fails to set in motion any political mechanisms to do so. Instead, it represents the convergence of interest and strategy between the Americans and Russians, which will ultimately reshape the political possibilities for post-conflict Syria. Once heralded as necessary to ending the conflict, though, this convergence is unlikely to achieve that goal due to its narrow military focus. [Continue reading…]
Assad vows to retake Syria, calling into question impending cease-fire
The Washington Post reports: Syrian President Bashar al-Assad reiterated his determination to reconquer all of Syria, hours before the scheduled start of a U.S.- and Russian-sponsored cease-fire Monday aimed at ending five years of conflict.
Assad’s comments, made during a visit to the Damascus suburb of Darayya, called into question whether his government will comply with the entirety of the agreement. The pact spells out a process that intends — at least according to the Obama administration — to culminate in Assad’s departure.
Under the agreement announced in Geneva on Saturday by Secretary of State John F. Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, the Syrian government and the rebels are expected to halt all fighting and bombing at 7 p.m. local time on Monday (noon Eastern time). That sets in motion a sequence of events intended to lead to new negotiations for a possible transition away from Assad’s rule.
Assad, however, made it clear he has no plans to completely stop fighting to crush the five-year-old rebellion against his regime. [Continue reading…]
Bitter foes weigh up chance of peace, but prepare for war to rage on in Syria
Martin Chulov reports: Inside east Aleppo, talk of ways to bring a lasting peace were long ago discounted. On the eve of the latest deal being implemented by Russia and the US to bring calm to a five-year war, those trying to oust Bashar al-Assad in the opposition half of the city are now more sceptical than ever.
The pact, announced by Moscow and Washington late on Friday, aims to ease in a ceasefire, mainly by phasing out attacks by Russian and Syrian jets, which have pounded opposition areas for most of the past year, and allowing in desperately needed aid supplies.
While a potential end to the bombings was welcomed by militants inside the city, distrust has remained about the caveats – particularly an insistence that al-Qaida-linked elements be disentangled from more mainstream rebels – for much of the deal to kick in.
“Jabhat Fateh al-Sham [the renamed jihadi group Jabhat al-Nusra] are among us, that is true,” said Dawood Mahmudi, a senior rebel based in east Aleppo. “They are here because no one else is. They have kept the city open and have reopened it when it was besieged. Where were Russia and the US then? I’ll tell you where, the US was nowhere, and Russia was bombing us. And now they say ‘trust us’.” [Continue reading…]
The Associated Press reports: Rebel factions in Syria expressed deep reservations on Sunday about the terms of a U.S.-Russian deal that seeks to restart the peace process for the war-torn country, with the leader of at least one U.S.-backed rebel faction publicly calling the offer a “trap.”
The second in command of the powerful, ultraconservative Ahrar al-Sham group condemned the superpower agreement as an effort to secure President Bashar Assad’s government and drive rebel factions apart.
“A rebellious people who have fought and suffered for six years cannot accept half-solutions,” said Ali al-Omar in a video statement.
But the commander and other rebel leaders stopped short of fully rejecting the agreement’s interim cease-fire, which is slated to come into effect in stages beginning on Monday at sunset. [Continue reading…]
The Wall Street Journal reports: Mostafa Mahamed, the director of foreign media relations for Syria Conquest Front [previously known as Nusra Front], declared in written responses to questions that his group had the support of “numerous groups on the ground” despite the ultimatum to other rebels to split from his bloc.
“We expect a united stance of all major players in Syria against this deal. The sincere groups in Syria will never be tools used by external governments that fight their proxy wars,” Mr. Mahamed said. “Make no mistake about it. The U.S. and Russia have agreed to end this revolution.”
He slammed members of the political opposition who accepted the U.S.-Russian agreement to halt fighting as disingenuous representatives of the revolution who occupy “five star hotels and conference halls abroad.” [Continue reading…]
Will the U.S.-Russia deal bring Syria peace? Don’t hold your breath
Michael Weiss writes: In the late summer of 2011, President Barack Obama declared the reign of Bashar al-Assad “illegitimate” and told him the time had come to “step aside.” In the early fall of 2015, U.S. officials laughingly dismissed Vladimir Putin’s unexpected direct military intervention into Syria as an accident waiting to happen at Russia’s expense.
Today, Secretary of State John Kerry formally legitimized Assad’s military by way of delimiting its zone of combat; and he welcomed the Russian Air Force as a prospective U.S. partner prosecuting an increasingly complex and muddled war against the so-called Islamic State and al-Qaeda, two separate and competitive terrorist organizations in Syria. Significantly, the latter group often intermingles with U.S.-backed insurgents.
In a tardy press conference in Geneva that most reporters were so sure would never happen they began ordering champagne and pizza, Kerry mapped out this fingers-crossed bilateral plan of action. His remarks were leavened with repeated qualifications and conditional tenses as he described an agreement that must perforce be founded on trust between the United States and Russia would not in fact be based on anything of the sort.
“If, and again I want to emphasize the if –” Kerry began his presser tonight, “If the plan is implemented in good faith, if the stakeholders do the things that are available to them to do and are being called on them to do, this can be a moment where the multilateral efforts at the diplomatic table… could take hold and you could really provide the people of Syria with a transition.”
Except that nobody really believes that. [Continue reading…]
The imperfect world of the new deal on Syria
Bassam Barabandi, Hassan Hassan, and Faysal Itani write: The new US-Russian deal to reduce violence and combat extremists in Syria has been met with a great deal of scepticism among Syria watchers. Scepticism is both unsurprising and understandable, given the poor track record of ceasefires in the country. Indeed, senior American officials have indicated the deal is not going to produce calm any time soon, but they hope it will lead to a reduction in violence.
The deal, agreed between Washington and Moscow on Friday, should nonetheless be judged by its details and in the broader context of the war. We were privy to contents of the agreement yet to be publicly released. Also, conversations with senior American officials and rebel leaders offer insights into what the US seeks to achieve from the agreement and how the plan can strengthen the moderate elements within the opposition.
In many ways, the agreement looks good on paper and can in principle strengthen the opposition by constraining violence and bringing relief to civilian populations in rebel-held areas. The danger to the rebels emanates not from the agreement’s terms but from unanswered questions about the role of pro-government militias and the lack of an enforcement mechanism. [Continue reading…]
U.S.-Russian Syria ceasefire deal explained
Al Jazeera reports: A nationwide ceasefire by Assad’s forces and the US-backed opposition is set to begin across Syria at sundown on Monday.
That sets off a seven-day period that will allow for humanitarian aid and civilian traffic into Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, which has faced a recent onslaught.
Fighting forces are to also pull back from the Castello Road, a key thoroughfare and access route into Aleppo, and create a “demilitarised zone” around it.
Also on Monday, the US and Russia will begin preparations for the creation of a Joint Implementation Centre that will involve information sharing needed to define areas controlled by the Jabhat Fateh al-Sham group (formerly known as al-Nusra Front) and opposition groups in areas “of active hostilities”.
The centre is expected to be established a week later, and is to launch a broader effort towards delineating other territories in control of various groups.
As part of the arrangement, Russia is expected to keep Syrian air force planes from bombing areas controlled by the opposition. The US has committed to help weaken Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, an al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria that has intermingled with the US-backed opposition in several places.
A resumption of political dialogue between the government and opposition under UN mediation, which was halted amid an upsurge in fighting in April, will be sought over the longer term. [Continue reading…]
Stopping the killing in Syria is not a question of feasibility; it’s a question of political will
Muhamed Sacirbey writes: Syria’s largest city is on the brink of starvation. Bombed from the skies and besieged on the ground, Aleppo’s 2 million residents may soon be exterminated. A little more than two decades ago, my country’s capital confronted a similar catastrophe. In the spring of 1992, regular and paramilitary units, snipers, artillery and tanks surrounded Sarajevo, Bosnia, inflicting what would become the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare.
Like in Aleppo, the situation inside Sarajevo was dire. Extremists (ostensibly seeking to deliver a “Greater Serbia”) sought to pummel, choke and starve a cosmopolitan city with a long tradition of diversity. Major access roads were cut. Utilities including water, electricity and heat were shut off. Snipers made daily life a living hell. But Sarajevo’s 400,000 residents escaped many of the horrors now awaiting Aleppo’s residents. They survived, not because then-President Slobodan Milosevic’s forces were any more humane than Bashar al-Assad’s or because Yugoslav air forces were any less capable, but because NATO opted (albeit belatedly and, too often, inadequately) to uphold its responsibility to protect Bosnian civilians.
Calls for military intervention — even for the most noble of reasons — have developed a bad reputation in the decades since NATO’s intervention in Bosnia. The catastrophe of Iraq and the disastrous post-intervention rebuilding of Libya have caused many to doubt whether military intervention could ever work. While the West’s military intervention in Bosnia didn’t solve all our problems, it was decisive in moving Bosnia and the region from war to peace — a process that still continues, albeit highly imperfectly. There is every reason to believe that similar action and determination, centered on stopping aerial bombardment of civilians, would provide similar benefits to Syria and the world. [Continue reading…]
Here’s why Turkey’s Syria intervention is a huge gamble
Borzou Daragahi reports: Abu Mostafa was elated. Backed by Turkey’s armed forces, his Free Syrian Army unit racked up a series of rare victories against ISIS fighters in northern Syria this week, retaking five villages from the jihadi group on Tuesday.
Turkey’s intervention in Syria is meant to push ISIS and Kurdish militants away from a narrow strip of the northern Aleppo province along its southern borders. But Abu Mostafa, a nom de guerre, and the fighters from his Abu Bakir al-Sadeeq brigade already harbor grander ambitions.
“We are aiming for more than those areas, hopefully even the liberation of all of Syria and not only Aleppo,” he told BuzzFeed News this week over a spotty internet connection. “The Turks do not command us.”
A few weeks after a surprise ground incursion, dubbed Operation Euphrates Shield, Turkish armed forces and allied Syrian rebel groups managed to carve out a long-sought buffer zone along Syrian territory to prevent cross-border infiltrations by jihadi and Kurdish militant organizations, while designating a potential safe zone for civilians fleeing the conflict. The Turks launched a ground operation, backed by Turkish and US air support, after reassuring Russia and Iran that their aims were solely to roll back the territories under the control of ISIS fighters and Kurdish-led fighting groups with separatist agendas.
But Turkey’s calibrated strategy depends in part on both limiting its own involvement and reining in the ambitions of its FSA partners, whose battles against ISIS and Kurdish-led militias in northern Syria are secondary to their goal of bringing down the regime of Bashar al-Assad. [Continue reading…]
A reminder of the permanent wars: Dozens of U.S. airstrikes in six countries
The Washington Post reports: While Americans savored the last moments of summer this Labor Day weekend, the U.S. military was busy overseas as warplanes conducted strikes in six countries in a flurry of attacks. The bombing runs across Asia, Africa and the Middle East spotlighted the diffuse terrorist threats that have persisted into the final days of the Obama presidency — conflicts that the next president is now certain to inherit.
In Iraq and Syria, between Saturday and Monday, the United States conducted about 45 strikes against Islamic State targets. On the other side of the Mediterranean, in the Libyan city of Sirte, U.S. forces also hit fighters with the militant group. On Sunday in Yemen, a U.S. drone strike killed six suspected members of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The following day, just across the Gulf of Aden in Somalia, the Pentagon targeted al-Shabab, another group aligned with al-Qaeda. The military also conducted several counterterrorism strikes over the weekend in Afghanistan, where the Taliban and the Islamic State are on the offensive.
Militants in each of those countries have been attacked before, but the convergence of so many strikes on so many fronts in such a short period served as a reminder of the endurance and geographic spread of al-Qaeda and its mutations.
“This administration really wanted to end these wars,” said Paul Scharre, a former Army Ranger and Pentagon official now at the Center for a New American Security. “Now, we’ve got U.S. combat operations on multiple fronts and we’re dropping bombs in six countries. That’s just the unfortunate reality of the terrorism threat today.”
In meeting those threats, Obama has sought to limit the large-scale deployments of the past, instead relying on air power, including drones; isolated Special Operations raids; and support for foreign forces.
But militant groups have defied eight years of these sustained counterterrorism efforts.
Nowhere are the unexpected turns of Obama’s foreign-policy record more visible than in Iraq, where thousands of U.S. troops returned after the 2011 withdrawal to support local forces’ battle against the Islamic State. [Continue reading…]
Aleppo, Syria, and the U.S. presidential election
“What would you do — if elected — about Aleppo?” asked Mike Barnicle, when questioning Libertarian presidential candidate, Gary Johnson, on Morning Joe yesterday.
“What is Aleppo?” Johnson responded. He later explained that he thought he was being asked about an acronym with which he was unfamiliar.
Johnson has been mocked for his guileless response — what’s that? — but what’s much worse than not knowing something one should know is to feign knowledge so as to conceal ones ignorance. Politicians do it all the time and most people do it more often than they’re likely to admit.
When called on to comment on Johnson’s gaffe, Christopher Hill, former U.S. ambassador to Iraq who is currently Dean of the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver, thought it was “mind-blowing” that Johnson would have drawn a blank on the Aleppo question. Hill’s authority on the subject instantly evaporated, however, when he referred to the Syrian city as the ISIS capital. Likewise, the New York Times, reporting on Johnson, made the same mistake as Hill and compounded it by also referring to Aleppo as Syria’s capital city.
A presidential candidate, or a president, who can ask honest questions is much more desirable than one who concocts fake answers.
At the same time, the task of asking politicians questions generally falls on journalists who typically take on this responsibility with insufficient imagination, determination, or courage.
What would you do about Aleppo? is a case in point.
To circumscribe the war in Syria by giving it an epicenter (Aleppo) reinforces a narrative in which an administration that claims to be doing as much as it can — pushing diplomatic initiatives that have mostly gone nowhere — is contrasted with a yet-to-be formed administration that might do something — though as yet, no one’s really clear about what that something might be. The fact is, no one actually knows what the situation in Aleppo and more widely in Syria will be four months from now, when the next U.S. president takes office. The one thing that appears close to a certainty is that President Obama is committed to watching the clock on this issue until he leaves the White House.
Barnicle’s question could be construed as reasonable and appropriate if treated less literally as an effort to tease out a credible prescription for the immediate crisis in Aleppo, but instead viewed as a method for gauging the strategic sensibilities of the candidate.
Political discourse on Syria has been hamstrung for five years by a false debate between interventionism and anti-interventionism. The conventional wisdom drawn from the experience of the war in Iraq is that nothing is more important than avoiding another such war.
The rationale for fighting that war (after the WMD rationale evaporated) was that we need to fight them over there so we don’t end up fighting them here — them being the terrorists.
Ironically, even though the proponents of that argument mostly knew at the time that they were engaging in cynical fearmongering, it turned out that there was a kernel of truth to the interconnected world they were describing.
What Syria has demonstrated, not through predictions but by demonstrable, quantifiable facts, is that what happens in Syria doesn’t stay in Syria.
The Obama administration has treated the war in Syria as an exercise in containment. Its early nominal demands that Assad must go were never actually part of a policy of regime change. They were merely the expression of hopes and expectations that the U.S. could, in advance, place itself on the right side of history.
Ultimately, Obama’s approach to Syria has been shaped primarily by a domestic political calculus: that Americans are more concerned about ISIS than Syria.
Obama’s cynical choice has been to seek the short-term higher political dividends from battlefield successes against ISIS, than to become more deeply involved in a war that would risk becoming seen as his biggest foreign affairs legacy and failure.
But as Obama leaves office he will not actually leave Syria behind. Indeed, whoever becomes the next U.S. president will be inheriting a foreign policy headache shaped in large part by American inaction.
The war in Syria is the epicenter of regional conflict, widening instability, and a refugee crisis leading to the corrosion of democracy across the West, thus setting the course of the twenty-first century.
Like climate change, the situation in Syria has mostly grown worse because so many people thought it could safely be ignored.
An American president who imagines that what happens in the Middle East matters as little as the average American thinks it does, merely suffers from the same pathology that has always diseased the American mind: an outlook in which this nation and the world somehow magically stand apart.
Call me a globalist — I don’t mind — but there is only one world and through a lack of collective ownership over its affairs we are letting it fall apart.