Category Archives: Syria

Do Tehran and Moscow still believe Assad’s political survival depends on mass murder?

Frederic C. Hof writes: In Syria consent for the country to be used as a supply and training base for Hezbollah is limited to Assad-Makhluf family and its enablers. Popular consent in Syria is the last thing Tehran wishes to facilitate.

What Iran might be willing to consider, however, is — with the support of Moscow — obliging its client to suspend indefinitely the worst aspects of his mass homicide political survival strategy. Assad will not conduct mass casualty events — barrel bombing, artillery barrages, aircraft strafing, or Scud missile assaults on apartment blocks — if Iran and Russia instruct him not to do so. If so ordered, Assad will direct the lifting of sieges and the unrestricted passage of United Nations humanitarian assistance convoys to people desperately in need of food and medical treatment.

The key question here is whether Tehran and Moscow will persist in believing that mass terror is essential to their client’s political survival. For some four years they have believed so. To the extent that the Supreme Leader and Russian President Vladimir Putin have had reputations worth preserving, they have jeopardized them by facilitating the ability of the Assad regime to conduct war crimes and crimes against humanity with absolute impunity. As they evaluate the Syrian situation now, in October 2015, do they still believe that Assad’s political survival must rest on mass homicide?

This is the question that could conceivably produce a new answer from Tehran. Speaking privately in track two settings, senior non-governmental Iranians have expressed regret over and disgust with Assad regime behavior toward defenseless civilians. Can Tehran reconcile the protection of civilians in Syria with its own national security interests? This — rather than some manner of political grand bargain over Syria — would be worth a serious discussion in Vienna. [Continue reading…]

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Aleppo faces ISIS ‘siege nightmare’

NOW reports: Fears have risen in regime-controlled quarters of Aleppo after ISIS cut off the government’s main supply line leading into the city late last week.

Pro-Damascus daily Al-Akhbar published a report Tuesday on the situation in Syria’s second city, saying the mood among residents has worsened after “the great extent of the breach ISIS has achieved” on the key front became clear.

Describing the feelings of regime supporters in the Aleppo, Al-Akhbar reporter Basel Dayoub said that the city’s residents were “remembering the nightmare of the first siege in 2013,” in reference to a rebel siege from August to October of that year.

The period was marked by the hardships suffered by residents of the regime controlled areas of east Aleppo, which saw an increase of prices and shortages of basic staples.

The prospects of another long-siege renewed last Friday when ISIS seized a stretch of the Khanaser-Ithriyah highway southeast of Aleppo—cutting off the main regime controlled route into the city—while rebels staged fierce counterattacks against the Iranian-backed government offensive southwest of Aleppo. [Continue reading…]

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Obama weighs moving U.S. troops closer to front lines in Syria, Iraq

The Washington Post reports: President Obama’s most senior national security advisers have recommended measures that would move U.S. troops closer to the front lines in Iraq and Syria, officials said, a sign of mounting White House dissatisfaction with progress against the Islamic State and a renewed Pentagon push to expand military involvement in long-running conflicts overseas.

The debate over the proposed steps, which would for the first time position a limited number of Special Operations forces on the ground in Syria and put U.S. advisers closer to the firefights in Iraq, comes as Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter presses the military to deliver new options for greater military involvement in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.

The changes would represent a significant escalation of the American role in Iraq and Syria. They still require formal approval from Obama, who could make a decision as soon as this week and could decide not to alter the current course, said U.S. officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the discussions are still ongoing. It’s unclear how many additional troops would be required to implement the changes being considered by the president, but the number for now is likely to be relatively small, these officials said. [Continue reading…]

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Georgia offers clues on the accuracy of Russian airstrikes in Syria

Reuters reports: In the courtyard of an apartment building in the town of Gori in ex-Soviet Georgia is a clue to whether Russia’s air strikes on targets in Syria are as accurate as the Kremlin would like the rest of the world to believe.

Fashioned out of fragments of ordnance is a makeshift shrine to the five residents killed during the Russian-Georgian war in August 2008 when a Russian air force jet, which Georgian defense officials believe was aiming for a nearby tank regiment, missed and hit the apartment building instead.

“So, can we say that their strikes were accurate? I don’t think so,” said Gori resident Avtandil Makharadze as he stood in front of the now-rebuilt apartment block.

Until Russia launched its military operation in Syria last month, the war in Georgia was the last time its air force had conducted air strikes in combat.

There are differences between the two campaigns. Russia’s military has undergone major modernization since the Georgian war. Unlike in Georgia, in Syria there are no anti-aircraft missiles shooting at Russian jets, which allows them to take their time lining up their targets.

But there are similarities too, so the performance of Russian aviation in the Georgia conflict could shed light on the operation in Syria, where making an independent assessment of the Russian strikes on the ground is impossible.

In particular, despite the advent of precision guided weapons in Russia’s arsenal, the majority of the munitions being launched in Syria are still the “dumb bombs” which in Georgia contributed to the off-target strikes. [Continue reading…]

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Iran to attend Syria talks in Vienna

BBC News reports: Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif will attend multilateral talks on finding a political solution to the conflict in Syria in Vienna this week, a government spokeswoman has said.

It will be the first time Iran – an ally of President Bashar al-Assad – has attended such a summit with the US.

Representatives of Russia, Saudi Arabia and Turkey will also attend the talks. [Continue reading…]

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New allies in northern Syria don’t seem to share U.S. goals

McClatchy reports: After the failure of its $500 million program to stand up a Syrian volunteer force to battle Islamic State extremists, the Obama administration has begun an effort to enable Arab militias to fight alongside a Kurdish force that has gotten U.S. air support for the past year.

The stated U.S. aim is to oust the Islamic State from its de facto capital of Raqqa in Syria. But if the Shammar tribal militia, the biggest in Hasaka province, is any example, many Arab forces on the ground have a different agenda. For that matter, so does the Kurdish People’s Protection Force, or YPG, which dominates this area and has worked closely with the United States since the siege last year of the border town of Kobani.

The road to the palace of Sheikh Humaydi Daham al Hadi, the head of the Shammar tribe, winds through vast wheat fields in this isolated corner of eastern Syria, past checkpoints manned by YPG fighters, and then by his own guards.

Hasaka, an oil, gas and grain producing area, is now part of what the YPG calls Jazera, one of three cantons that comprise Rojava, or west Kurdistan, a 200-mile-long corridor on Syria’s border with Turkey. The Syrian government, which still has troops in at least two cities, has acquiesced to YPG control.

Because Turkey views the YPG as a terrorist group and has closed its borders because of the YPG’s affiliation with the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, the only way into Rojava is by a ferry across the Tigris River from Iraq and hours of driving on secondary roads.

Welcoming visitors in his vast reception room, Sheikh Humaydi says his goal is to lead a Shammar tribal uprising against the Islamic State “to liberate Syria, Iraq and beyond.” But he also wants to carry on a 2-century-old struggle against conservative Wahabi Islam, which he said destroyed the last Shammar emirate, and he favors the breakup of Saudi Arabia, where the puritanical sect dominates. “We are already working on that,” he said. [Continue reading…]

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Tehran and Moscow: a shaky alliance

Hanin Ghaddar writes: Fundamentally, Iran wants in Syria what is has in Lebanon — weak, ineffective state institutions incapable of making decisions without the approval of their patrons. As in Lebanon, Iran wants to indirectly control Syria’s state institutions and have access to the Golan in the same way it has access to South Lebanon through Hezbollah.

Of course Putin mainly wants to empower himself, but he needs the Syrian institutions to do so. Russia wants to preserve the Syrian state. Putin wants to prop Assad up simply because the state institutions — including the army and the security apparatus — are still linked to his regime. Putin is not investing in Assad per se, but rather in Syria’s institutions. That’s why Russia has only supplied weapons to the Syrian Army and wants all militias united under it.

Unlike Tehran, Moscow is not interested in changing demography or in maintaining the Shiite/Alawite corridor. Moscow does not want to see Assad go and then be implicitly replaced by Soleimani. Assad must go eventually, but only after a stable political solution is secured. That’s why Russia went with Geneva I. [Continue reading…]

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Iran invited to participate in international talks on Syria’s future

On Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported: “European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini spoke in favor of including Iran. ‘All relevant actors, regionally and internationally should be involved,’ she said. ‘I hope that Iran can be part of this common effort.’ ”

But US Secretary of State John Kerry said: “For the moment Iran is not at the table. And there will come a time perhaps where we will talk to Iran but we are not at the moment at this point of time.”

That was Friday, now it’s Tuesday.

The Associated Press reports: Iran has been invited to participate for the first time in international talks over Syria’s future, U.S. officials said Tuesday, a shift in strategy for the United States and its allies as they seek to halt the four-year civil war and eventually ease President Bashar Assad out of power.

Iran has yet to reply, the officials said.

The next diplomatic round starts Thursday in Vienna, with Secretary of State John Kerry, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and several top European and Arab diplomats attending.

Washington had held out the possibility of Iran joining the discussions in future, but is only now offering Tehran a seat after days of behind-the-scenes negotiation, particularly with its regional rival Saudi Arabia. Russia extended the invitation. [Continue reading…]

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Istanbul has more Syrian refugees than all of Europe says David Miliband

The Associated Press reports: Nearly 60% of refugees are living in cities today and there are currently more Syrian refugees in Istanbul than in all the rest of Europe, the head of the International Rescue Committee has said.

David Miliband told The Associated Press in an interview Monday that “the iconic image” of a refugee being someone in a camp has changed.

He said so many people are fleeing conflict and chaos that there’s no room for them in camps. Equally important, he said, is that most people don’t want to be in refugee camps and when they’re displaced for a long time, they want to earn a living — even if that means working in the black market.

Miliband gave the example of Istanbul, without citing any figures. The International Rescue Committee said there are currently more Syrian refugees in Istanbul – some 366,000 – than the rest of Europe put together.

Currently, there are 20 million refugees in the world, including 2 million in Turkey, and 40 million people uprooted and displaced in their own countries, which Miliband called “a grisly world record.” [Continue reading…]

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What Russia’s own videos and maps reveal about who they are bombing in Syria

Bellingcat reports: The Russian Federation launched an air campaign on 30 September 2015, allegedly targeting Islamic State (or ISIS) positions in Syria. The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) has been releasing selected videos on its YouTube channel ever since. Bellingcat began geolocating and independently verifying videos published by the Russian MoD after initial reports from the ground indicated that Russian airstrikes have instead destroyed positions held by the Free Syrian Army and other groups rather than ISIS.

Bellingcat has geolocated, verified, and visualised each airstrike published by the Russian MoD on its official YouTube channel as of 25 October. The outcome of our work is unequivocal: the overwhelming majority of Russian airstrikes have targeted positions held by non-ISIS rebel groups posing a more immediate threat to the Syrian regime and its head, Bashar al-Assad. In contrast, ISIS strongholds have rarely been attacked. The methodology and results of the investigation are laid out below.

We noticed that, for many videos, the Russian MoD adds a description in Russian before the video of the strike itself begins. A longer, more in-depth description is also appended to each upload, along with the title of the video. For the verification process, each video was uploaded to Bellingcat’s Checkdesk verification project. We Google-translated the description and pasted the original one in Russian alongside to keep track of the information in an independently managed online space. [Continue reading…]

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Iran’s generals are dying in Syria

Robin Wright writes: The Islamic Republic described the first men to die as a few young “volunteers” deployed to protect symbols of the faith. The numbers have escalated since then. In June, the Islamic Republic News Agency reported that more than four hundred volunteers from Iran, including Afghan refugees living in the country, had died in Syria so far. Iranian news agencies and social media are now rife with stories about senior officers killed in Syria on the war’s toughest front lines. Last week, Iran’s Fars News Agency reported that the death toll hit eight in just two days. The funerals have become major events, sometimes drawing thousands onto Tehran’s streets to escort the coffins to Zahra’s Paradise.

Iran has increasingly been forced to acknowledge its losses—including at least four generals in the past year—with some reports suggesting that twice that number have been killed since the intervention began. Brigadier General Hossein Hamedani, who was killed on October 8th, was given a state funeral. Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, personally called on Hamedani’s family to convey his condolences. Khamenei’s official Twitter account, in English, lauded the general for fulfilling his “martyrdom wish.”

Hamedani’s death was a setback for Iran—and possibly for Syria, too. According to Jane’s Defense Weekly, Syria’s regular Army has been halved since the war began, in 2011. Assad has increasingly relied on leaders in Iran to develop strategy, and counted on Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy force in Lebanon, to provide new fighters. Hamedani was the senior Iranian tactician in northern Syria, where the regime is simultaneously fighting Western-backed rebels, the Islamic State, a local Al Qaeda franchise, and smaller militias. Hamedani was a hero of the war with Iraq—the deadliest modern conflict in the Middle East—and his death was the most notable Iranian military loss since that war ended. [Continue reading…]

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Russian airstrikes in Syria appear to violate laws of war, says Human Rights Watch

Human Rights Watch: At least two air strikes in northern Homs on October 15, 2015, that local residents believed to be Russian, apparently violated the laws of war. The air strikes killed a total of 59 civilians, residents said, including 33 children and a commander of the local armed opposition group. Russia should investigate the attacks.

The deadliest attack hit a house in the village of Ghantou, where the extended Assaf family had taken shelter, killing a reported 46 family members, all civilians, including 32 children and 12 women, first responders and local activists said. The victims were related to a local commander affiliated with the opposition Free Syrian Army (FSA), but witnesses said that he was away from the home at the front lines. The second air strike, on the neighboring town of Ter Maaleh, hit near a bakery, and according to local witnesses, killed at least 13 civilians as well as a local FSA commander who was a Syrian army defector. It is not clear whether he was the intended target, as neither Russia nor Syria have issued statements about the specific air strikes. [Continue reading…]

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Saving Syria’s ‘lost generation’

The Atlantic reports: It wasn’t long after the onset of the Great Recession that academics and headline writers began referring to recent college graduates as a “lost generation.” Faced with unemployment rates for their cohort higher than at any time since World War II, young Americans seemed doomed to a lifetime of lower earnings and savings. But even at the peak of pessimistic predictions, pundits had to acknowledge: Those with college degrees were relatively well-off compared to those without.

What, then, do you call an entire generation that never even finishes college? That’s the threat facing Syria’s young adults. In the years leading up to the current civil war, enrollment figures for Syrian tertiary education had been climbing steadily upward—from 12 percent of the college-age population in 2002, according to the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, to 26 percent in 2010, on the eve of the Syrian uprising. Now, the estimated 100,000 university-qualified refugees currently scattered throughout the Middle East and Europe must place their hopes in schools outside Syria—and that’s to say nothing of those still inside the country, where few educational institutions remain functional. In neighboring Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan, all of which have been overwhelmed with refugees since the start of the conflict, only a fraction of students have found ways to continue their studies, despite the number of Syrian students in Turkish universities, for example, reportedly quadrupling in recent years. With professors and researchers displaced as well, Syria’s entire university infrastructure is at risk. [Continue reading…]

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Russian warplanes shatter tenuous truce forcing thousands of Syrians to flee

The New York Times reports: For almost two years, the village in the Syrian countryside north of the city of Homs had been relatively calm, profiting from a tenuous truce between the government and rebel groups that had made it a refuge for thousands of desperate people displaced by the war.

But the peace was shattered earlier this month, when Russian warplanes started attacking the village, Ter Ma’aleh, killing at least a dozen people and sending most of the residents into hurried exile.

The assault on the village was part of a wider escalation of violence across the country that has displaced tens of thousands of people in just weeks and led relief workers to warn that Syria is facing one of its most serious humanitarian crises of the civil war.

The intensity of the fighting, they say, is fueling increased desperation as a growing number of Syrians are fleeing to neighboring countries and, especially, to Europe. More than 9,000 migrants a day crossed into Greece last week, according to the International Organization for Migration, the most since the beginning of the year. [Continue reading…]

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Glenn Greenwald: Support for Syrian rebels is legitimate in spite of Al Qaeda’s presence

Glenn Greenwald writes: I personally don’t view the presence of Al Qaeda “affiliated” fighters as a convincing argument against supporting Syrian rebels. It’s understandable that people fighting against an oppressive regime – one backed by powerful foreign factions – will align with anyone willing and capable of fighting with them. Moreover, the long-standing US/UK template of branding anyone they fight and kill as “terrorists” or “Al Qaeda” is no more persuasive or noble when used in Syria by Assad and the Russians, particularly when used to obscure civilian casualties. And regarding the anti-Assad forces as monolithically composed of religious extremists ignores the anti-tyranny sentiment among ordinary Syrians motivating much of the anti-regime protests, with its genesis in the Arab Spring. [Continue reading…]

This statement might confuse some of Greenwald’s readers — at least I’m sure it would have if he had made it the lead of his latest column. Instead, this recognition that alliances of convenience are inevitably formed during any attempt to overthrow a tyrannical regime, was more of an afterthought buried deeply within a diatribe aimed at the BBC.

Greenwald goes on to assert: “It’s not a stretch to say that the faction that provides the greatest material support to Al Qaeda at this point is the U.S. and its closest allies.”

He might not think it’s a stretch — many others would beg to differ.

The idea that Al Qaeda inside or outside Syria is backed by the U.S. government should be treated with the same amount of scorn as claims that 9/11 was an “inside job.”

Why?

American concerns about weapons falling into the wrong hands has and continues to be obsessive, as a Wall Street Journal report in January made clear.

It didn’t take long for rebel commanders in Syria who lined up to join a Central Intelligence Agency weapons and training program to start scratching their heads.

After the program was launched in mid-2013, CIA officers secretly analyzed cellphone calls and email messages of commanders to make sure they were really in charge of the men they claimed to lead. Commanders were then interviewed, sometimes for days.

Those who made the cut, earning the label “trusted commanders,” signed written agreements, submitted payroll information about their fighters and detailed their battlefield strategy. Only then did they get help, and it was far less than they were counting on.

Some weapons shipments were so small that commanders had to ration ammunition. One of the U.S.’s favorite trusted commanders got the equivalent of 16 bullets a month per fighter. Rebel leaders were told they had to hand over old antitank missile launchers to get new ones — and couldn’t get shells for captured tanks.

On those occasions where U.S. supplied weapons are known to have ended up in the hands of Al Qaeda, this has been a major embarrassment to the Obama administration.

Even now, after a month in which Russia has conducted more than 800 airstrikes in Syria, rebels have yet to be supplied with the most basic form of effective air defense — MANPADs, though this may soon change — and the flow and use of TOW anti-tank missiles remains tightly regulated.

What continues to get obscured by those who insist on pushing the narrative of rebels heavily armed by the U.S. and its allies, is the enduring imbalance of military power in this war: the fact that the Assad regime and its allies continue to maintain air dominance largely unchallenged.

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In Golan, a battle looms between Iran and Israel

Jean-Loup Samaan writes: More than four years into the Syrian conflict, the Golan Heights have become the centre of gravity for an indirect war between Iran and Israel. This was not an inevitable turn of events, as the area had been home to one of the quietest borders in the Middle East for decades. Although Israel seized the plateau in 1967 and unilaterally annexed it in 1981, the Golan had not witnessed clashes like South Lebanon or the Sinai Peninsula. This dramatically changed with the worsening of the war in Syria.

By the end of 2012, Iran and Hizbollah had sent hundreds of fighters to support the Bashar Al Assad regime. Fights with Syrian rebels, in particular Jabhat Al Nusra, increased on the Syrian side of the Golan and its vicinity. In April 2013, the Qusayr battle saw Hizbollah deploying a contingent of more than 1,200 men. In the following months, a war of attrition emerged in Quneitra and the Qalamoun mountains, with a new major battle flaring in Yabroud in February 2014.

But progressively it appeared that Hizbollah and the Iranians were not solely fighting Syrian rebels, but turning the Golan into a new forward base to target Israel. Various reports claim that tunnels and bunkers are being built to prepare for the next conflict with the Israeli military.

Soon the Israelis reacted by playing a rather ambiguous game with Syrian rebels on the other side of the border. Although it was common knowledge that medical care had been provided to Syrian civilians in Israeli hospitals, the United Nations Disengagement Observation Force based in the Golan were, by 2014, describing something bigger. [Continue reading…]

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Harsh conditions are foiling Russian jets in Syria

USA Today reports: Russian warplanes sent to Syria to back the regime of Bashar Assad are breaking down at a rapid rate that appears to be affecting their ability to strike targets, according to a senior Defense official.

Nearly one-third of Russian attack planes and half of its transport aircraft are grounded at any time as the harsh, desert conditions take a toll on equipment and crews, said the official who was not authorized to speak publicly about sensitive intelligence matters.

The Russians appear to be having difficulty adapting to the dusty conditions, and the number of airstrikes they have conducted seems to have dipped slightly.

“For deployed forces, that’s a hideous rate,” said Richard Aboulafia, an aviation analyst at the Teal Group, an aerospace consulting firm.

Russian President Vladimir Putin deployed warplanes, including Russia’s advanced Fullback ground-attack jet, helicopters and troops to a base near Latakia, Syria, in September. In addition, at least a dozen transport planes have been stationed there.

“They could have bad operating procedures, inadequate supplies of spare parts and support crews,” Aboulafia said. [Continue reading…]

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Russia said to redeploy special-ops forces from Ukraine to Syria

The Wall Street Journal reports: Russia has sent a few dozen special-operations troops to Syria in recent weeks, Russian and Western officials say, redeploying the elite units from Ukraine as the Kremlin shifts its focus to supporting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Russia in late September launched a campaign of airstrikes in support of Mr. Assad’s government, and President Vladimir Putin has said Russian troops won’t play a role in ground combat. But Russian military experts and officials say small numbers of special-forces units—whose missions are rarely acknowledged publicly—are also on the ground in Syria.

“The special forces were pulled out of Ukraine and sent to Syria,“ a Russian Ministry of Defense official said, adding that they had been serving in territories in eastern Ukraine held by pro-Russia rebels. The official described them as “akin to a Delta Force,” the U.S. Army’s elite counterterrorism unit.

A senior Western official also said a contingent of elite Russian forces was on the ground in Syria from eastern Ukraine. A U.S. defense official said one of their roles is to provide coordination between Syrian troops and Russian aircraft conducting airstrikes in support of the regime’s ground offensive. [Continue reading…]

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