A mind-boggling stew of nations is fighting in Syria’s civil war
MilitaryTimes: Armies and militias from more than a dozen countries have joined the Syria conflict, making for a mind-boggling and dangerous stew of shifting and competing alliances.
Even as a proposed cease-fire is scheduled to begin as early as this week, more nations are escalating their roles in the nearly 5-year-old civil war: Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey said they may send ground troops to fight.
Here’s how different countries are currently aligned:
Pro-Syrian government
Forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar Assad are backed by two nations, Russia and Iran, and many Shiite militias from across the region who are organized by Iran. The combatants include:
Syrian government troops
Iran
Afghan Shiite militia
Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite militia
Iraqi Shiite militia
Russia. Russian airstrikes target the Islamic State and what Russia says are other “terrorist” groups. But the U.S. military says most Russian airstrikes are aimed at opposition groups threatening Assad’s forces.
Anti-Syrian government
Many rebel forces fighting to overthrow the Syrian government are backed by arms, funds and airstrikes by a U.S.-led coalition. The CIA vetted Syrian rebel groups and helped train them in Jordan to use advanced anti-tank weapons against Assad’s forces. Saudi Arabia and Qatar supplied the weaponry and funds. These rebels are being supported by:
Jordan
Saudi Arabia
Turkey
Qatar
United Arab Emirates
United States
Israel, on Syria’s southern border, provides some assistance to rebel forces fighting the Syrian government and has also launched airstrikes against Syrian and Hezbollah targets to prevent the transfer of “game changing” technology and weapons to Hezbollah, a U.S.-designated terrorist group.
Anti-Islamic State
The U.S.-led coalition conducting airstrikes against Islamic State forces in Syria and Iraq includes:
Australia
Bahrain
Canada
France
Jordan
Saudi Arabia
Turkey
United Arab Emirates
United Kingdom.
Russia is not part of the U.S.-led coalition, though it has also hit Islamic State positions.
Other fighters
Kurdish militia from Turkey, Iraq and Syria are fighting the Islamic State, also known as ISIL or ISIS. But the Kurds are sometimes aligned with the Syrian government and seen as a threat by Turkey, which has fought for years against a Kurdish separatist movement threatening its territorial sovereignty. Syrian Kurds are backed by Russia, the United States and Iraqi Kurdish groups.
The Islamic State, a vicious al-Qaeda spinoff, and Jabhat al Nusrah, al-Qaeda’s branch in Syria that works with many Sunni Arab opposition groups in Syria, have attracted foreign fighters from across the Arab world and Europe. Both have expanded during the chaos in Syria.
Who wins in the end?
AEI: The Syrian ceasefire agreement of February 11 is a big win for the Russians and the Syrian regime. Russia, Iran, and Syria are in the midst of a major military offensive that has allowed them to besiege Aleppo and has them poised to make gains across the battlefield. This so-called “cessation of hostilities” agreement allows them to consolidate and prepare for further advances, while preventing the opposition that the US ostensibly supports from attempting to undo any of their gains.
It does not require the Assad coalition to allow humanitarian access to the hundreds of thousands they have just trapped in and around Aleppo itself, and it leaves them fully in control of what humanitarian aid goes to the other areas they themselves are besieging and deliberately starving. It was concluded without the participation of the opposition, and is thus an imposition of a truce on the fighters the US is theoretically supporting at a moment when they have lost vital ground.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Secretary of State John Kerry and UN Special Envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura (L-R) arrive for a news conference in Munich, Germany, February 12, 2016. REUTERS/Michael Dalder.
The Russians, moreover, define all of the opposition groups in northern Syria as either ISIS or Jabhat al Nusra. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said today,
… if liberation of the city that has been taken by illegal armed groups can be qualified as aggression, then, well, yeah, probably. But to attack those who have taken your land is necessary – is a necessary thing. First of all, this has been done by Jabhat al-Nusrah, and also the western suburbs of Aleppo are still being controlled together with Jabhat al-Nusrah by Jaysh al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham.
The Russians will read this agreement as letting them continue operations against all opposition groups in Aleppo and continue their encirclement, siege, and targeting of that city. They will therefore continue to weaken the non-Jabhat al Nusra, non-ISIS opposition now concentrated in Aleppo, and likely strengthen the hands of the terrorist organizations they purport to be attacking.
This “cessation of hostilities” also continues the policy of requiring the opposition to make concessions in order to get the regime temporarily to stop committing what the UN has called crimes against humanity.
This agreement is a ceasefire in the manner of the Minsk agreements that shaped the supposed ceasefires in Ukraine — ceasefires that have been nominally in effect throughout all of the major Russian and separatist military offensives since February 2015. The Russians posed as a neutral third party when in fact they are a belligerent in the conflict, and have continued to escalate and de-escalate military operations in Ukraine in order to extract concessions from the Ukrainian government.
Not only will this Syrian “cessation of hostilities” also fail, but it will fail in a way that further alienates the non-ISIS, non-al Qaeda Sunni opposition groups and populations on which any meaningful political settlement of the conflict in accord with America’s vital national security interests must rely.
