IRAQ: Syrian rebel group directed US airstrikes against ISIS targets in the desert near Aksahat.

The Kremlin: Obama agrees to more military coordination in Syria

President Obama and Russian President Vladi­mir Putin, in a telephone call Wednesday, agreed they were ready to intensify military coordination in Syria, according to a Kremlin statement.

“Both sides reaffirmed their readiness to increase the military coordination of Russian and U.S. actions,” it said, according to a translation by the Russian news agency, Interfax.

The call, initiated by Putin, came as the Syrian military said it would begin a 72-hour truce in the country’s long-running civil war to honor the Eid holiday marking the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Syrian rebels reportedly agreed to the truce, although fighting continued.

Secretary of State John F. Kerry said he hoped the truce initiative was an “outgrowth” of talks in which the United States is trying to persuade Russia to press its ally, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, to stop bombing civilians and opposition groups seeking to oust him. Kerry spoke during a visit to Tblisi, Georgia.

The administration last week offered to help Russia improve its own air targeting against terrorist groups, including the Islamic State, if it would rein in Assad. In Wednesday’s call, the Kremlin said, Putin “urged” Obama to work harder to separate U.S.-backed opposition groups from the forces of Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate.

U.S. officials have said they are willing to discuss additional coordination in their so-far separate counterterrorism operations in Syria, but remain unsure if Russia would pressure Assad and that no decisions have been made.

The White House made no mention of increased coordination with Russia in its own statement about the Putin call. Obama, it said, “emphasized his concerns over the failure of the Syrian regime to comply with the cessation of hostilities in Syria,” referring to a truce that was negotiated under U.S.-Russian auspices in February, but has since largely fallen apart under intensified Syrian and Russian bombing.

“President Obama stressed the importance of Russia pressing the Syrian regime for a lasting halt to offensive attacks against civilians and parties to the cessation, noting the importance of fully recommitting to the original terms of the cessation,” which was signed by Assad and opposition groups, but excluded the Islamic State and Jabhat al-Nusra.

Russia has long been eager to expand its military cooperation with the United States, a goal that administration officials attribute to Putin’s desire for increased status on the world stage. While both oppose the Islamic State and agree that Syria’s separate civil conflict undermines efforts to destroy the terror group, they have vastly different prescriptions — centering on whether Assad stays or goes — for resolving it.

Both Obama and Putin, their statements said, called for progress on negotiations toward a political solution to the Syrian conflict. More here from WashingtonPost

The Syria Trump and Clinton Aren’t Talking About

As the presidential candidates spin sketchy ideas for peace in Syria, whole cities are starving.

In part from Politico:

The truth is that the world, at least much of the United States, is not watching.

For Americans, caught up in a circus-like presidential election driven by fear and anger—about lost jobs, about terrorist attacks, about immigrants—Syria is simply part of an indefinite mass of Middle Eastern chaos and danger. Though Syria has endured five years of war, and suffered more than 400,000 dead, it manages to arouse as much suspicion as pity. And when it has been discussed at all by presidential candidates often it has been to argue over the need for an immigration ban on all Muslims to prevent terrorists from hiding among the trickle of Syrians entering the country. No one talks about Daraya, or the 18 other besieged towns across Syria just like it where starvation is being used as a tool of war.

The ordeal of Daraya exemplifies how we have gotten everything wrong about Syria. Daraya is suffering because the U.N. and Western countries like the United States cannot act effectively in concert, cannot manage to compel Assad to do anything he says he will do. Beginning last autumn and continuing through early this year, the International Syria Support Group (ISSG), the 17-nation group plus the European Union and U.N., convened in Vienna and Geneva to help determine the future of Syria. The group issued a series of directives, most of them quite straightforward: Commit to a cease-fire and allow humanitarian aid to enter places like Daraya.

So far, Assad has violated every directive, with no consequences for his noncompliance. This demonstrates two things: the U.N., which has been attempting to mediate the peace talks for four years, has once again lost any credibility and that Assad is basically above the law. The question for the United States is what will the next president do about it?

Going by the sketchy and not always consistent ideas put forward by Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, the presumptive presidential nominees of their parties, it’s hard to believe the next occupant of the White House will make a measurable improvement. That said, there is some reason to believe either one of them could be far more aggressive than President Barack Obama, whose decision not to enforce his so-called red line on chemical weapons in 2013 and his general desire to get out of the Middle East has left him open to criticism that he pulled his punch on Syria.

Obama has consistently rejected direct strikes against the Syrian government, saying that “what we have learned over the last 10, 12, 13 years is that unless we can get the parties on the ground to agree to live together in some fashion, then no amount of U.S. military engagement will solve the problem.” And now the White House is proposing a plan that would strengthen military cooperation between the U.S. and Russia, which has been bombing targets inside Syria since September, to combat terrorist groups in Syria in exchange for Russia’s agreement to persuade the Assad regime to stop bombing U.S.-supported rebels like the ones holed up in Daraya. Whether Vladimir Putin would follow through on such a deal is something about which Syria experts express deep skepticism.

So what would Clinton and Trump do differently—if anything?

“Under a Clinton administration, it’s fair to assume there will be a move to discuss the establishment of safe zones, probably first in places away from Russian activities to avoid any potential confrontation,” Shadi Hamid, a senior analyst with the Brookings Institution, says. “Regardless of her own preferences, she’d be under pressure to distinguish herself from Obama on foreign policy, and Syria would make sense as the place to chart a new approach.”

The no-fly zone Clinton has called for in north Syria would provide a humanitarian safe-space that, in theory, would stem the tide of refugees fleeing for Europe. But Clinton, generally seen as more hawkish than Obama, has struggled to answer the difficult questions about how to implement it and enforce it. Would she commit ground troops, widely accepted as a logistical prerequisite? And would she be prepared for the U.S. to shoot down Russian jets that violated the airspace? Her answers about “deconflicting airspace” have sounded more wishful than anything.

Her answers about “deconflicting airspace” have sounded more wishful than anything.

Kim Ghattas, who wrote a biography of Clinton, The Secretary, says: “She will likely want to quickly signal to the Russians, but also the Iranians, that there is a new president in the (White House) who is ready to impose a price on Iran for its behavior in the region—at the risk of undermining the nuclear deal—and force a political settlement in Syria.”

But Ghattas says that a lot depends on what is actually happening inside Syria by the time she gets to the Oval Office. “Either way, her approach will be driven by her concerns about the vacuum that the U.S. leaves when it is not fully engaged in a situation or a region.”

And then there’s Trump.

The real estate mogul’s thoughts on Syria are in such conflict they ought to have their own no-fly zone. He has campaigned against foreign entanglements like the Iraq War, never missing an opportunity to remind voters of Clinton’s support for that invasion. But he has also pledged to destroy ISIL, something he alleges current U.S. policy will never achieve. But that can only mean committing American troops to the region. As for Assad, whom he has pronounced “bad,” Trump has expressed no interest in angering Vladimir Putin by interfering with Russia’s desire to keep Assad in power.

“Trump’s experience in foreign policy matter is dire, to say the least, and the erratic nature of his approach confounds explanation,” says H.A. Hellyer, senior nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Centre for the Middle East in London. “What little he has said on Syria indicates he’s more comfortable with the Russian position than he is with the current American one, and views ISIL as more of a threat to regional and international stability than Assad’s regime.”

While Clinton has a four-year record of foreign policy decisions to indicate her tendencies, Trump’s utter lack of a record is what confounds those trying to responsibly predict what he might do.

“Trump is unpredictable and a total mystery, ‘a jump in the dark’, possibly over a cliff,” Nadim Shehadi, director of the Fares Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies at the Fletcher School of Tufts University, says. “But those who are favorable to him think that he will be more like a chairman of the board and appoint various CEOs for different tasks like Defense, State, Health, and leave them to do their job.”

Hamid, from Brookings, says there might be some flexibility in Trump’s approach if his advisers, or public opinion, can persuade him to re-engage on Syria. “In the form of establishing no-fly and no-drive zones, which Trump seemed to suggest recently he’d be open to,” Hamid says. “But this is at cross purposes with his friendliness with Putin, who would see such safe zones as a threat.” Full story here.