The Syria Analysis Thread

Niccolo and Donkey Tuesday 25 Jul 2017

Secret Russian-Kurdish-Syrian military cooperation is happening in Syria’s eastern desert

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After a sweeping Syrian military advance to the edge of the besieged Isis “capital” of Raqqa , the Russians, the Syrian army and Kurds of the YPG militia – theoretically allied to the US – have set up a secret “coordination” centre in the desert of eastern Syria to prevent “mistakes” between the Russian-backed and American-supported forces now facing each other across the Euphrates river.

The proof could be found this week in a desert village of mud-walled huts and stifling heat – it was 48 degrees – where I sat on the floor of an ill-painted villa with a Russian air force colonel in camouflage uniform, a young officer of the Kurdish militia – with a YPG (Kurdish People’s Militia) patch on his sleeve – and a group of Syrian officers and local Syrian tribal militiamen.

Their presence showed clearly that despite belligerent Western – especially American – claims that Syrian forces are interfering with the “Allied” campaign against Isis, both sides are in reality going to enormous lengths to avoid confrontation. Russian Colonel Yevgeni, thin and close-shaven with a dark moustache, smiled politely but refused to talk to me – The Independent being the first western news media to visit the tiny village near Resafeh – but his young Kurdish opposite number, who asked me not to disclose his name, insisted that “all of us are fighting in one campaign against Daesh [Isis], and that is why we have this centre – and to avoid mistakes”. Colonel Yevgeni nodded approvingly at this description but maintained his silence – a wise man, I thought – for he must be the easternmost Russian officer in Syria, only a few miles from the Euphrates river.

The 24-year-old Kurdish YPG representative, a veteran of the Isis siege of Kobani on the Turkish border, said that just over two weeks ago – after the latest Syrian offensive took Isis forces west of Raqqa by surprise – a Russian air strike had mistakenly targeted a Kurdish position. “That is why we set up our centre here 10 days ago,” he said. “We talk everyday and we already have another centre at Afrin to coordinate the campaign. We have to make one force that fights together.” The presence of these men at this remote desert outpost shows just how seriously Moscow views the strategy of the Syrian war and the need to monitor the largely Kurdish “Syrian Democratic Forces” who are already inside Raqqa with the support of US air strikes.

The SDF – which has nothing democratic about it except perhaps its pay scales – is regarded with deep suspicion by the Turks, who will be enraged to learn of the Syrian-Kurdish cooperation, even though both Ankara and Damascus are both ferociously opposed to the creation of a future Kurdish state. But, however tenuous the new YPG-Russian-Syrian connections may be, they demonstrate that all sides are determined to avoid any military confrontation between Moscow and Washington.

There was more than a whiff of TE Lawrence about the self-confidence of these few men amid the dust and sand which covered most of us the moment we stepped outside their office. Around us on the desert floor lay hundreds of bombed or abandoned Isis oil “wells” – amateurishly built iron barrels and concrete platforms from which Isis extracted the oil to finance their caliphate, which once stretched from here all the way to Mosul. The YPG officer insisted that the location of the Russian-Syrian-Kurdish centre had no connection to the vast Syrian oil fields around us, but evidence of recent Russian and American attacks on the Isis constructions was everywhere.

Burned-out oil tankers, trucks and even some exploded Syrian tanks – presumably victims of Isis – lay across the desert. One trail of tankers – much like those angrily described by Vladimir Putin almost two years ago, taking oil exports to sell in Turkey – stood carbonised beside the road. Even a lorry carrying potatoes had been blitzed apart. There was no sign of bodies but the Syrian army had with some sense of irony left the original black and white Isis sign standing on the main road from Homs, “welcoming” visitors to the Isis “Caliphate-Province of Raqqa”.

Syria’s forward units of Russian-made tanks and infantry armour now cluster not far from the Roman and Umayad city of Resafeh, whose massive walls and stone towers still stand – untouched by Isis’s two years of culturecide, perhaps because their carvings display no human or animal images. Thousands of camels were being herded past the great and crumbling city of the ancient Calipha Umaya bin Hisham Abdul-Malik in a smog of dust which drifted over military hardware and soldiers alike. Resafeh was the Roman city of Sergiopolis, named after a Christian Roman centurion who was tortured and put to death for his religion – not unlike Isis’s own Christian victims in the deserts here three years ago.

The highway east from Homs was expected to have been the route of the Syrian attack this month. Hence the vast earth “berms” and defensive sand walls erected by Isis along the length of the road. But for Isis, the now-infamous Syrian army tactic of assaulting its enemies from the rear and flank drove the caliphate from hundreds of square miles of land west of the Euphrates.

General Saleh, the one-legged commander of the Syrian division on the Euphrates – who has adapted this policy many times, along with his fellow officer and friend, Colonel “Tiger” Suheil – says that his forces could, if he wished, be in the centre of Raqqa within five hours “if we decided to do that”. He described how his men had first driven al-Qaeda and Isis from the Sheikh Najjar industrial city outside Aleppo back to the Assad lake, how they had protected the water supply to the city at great loss to their own forces, how they had moved east from the Koyeress airbase to capture Deir Hafer and Meskane and other towns in the Aleppo countryside – and then suddenly surged south east, south of the Euphrates towards Raqqa.

“Our forces are now seven miles from the Euphrates between Raqqa and Deir ez-Zour, 14 miles from the centre of Raqqa and 10 miles from the old Thabqa airbase,” the general almost shouted. “How many Daesh did we kill? I don’t care. I am not interested. Daesh, Nusrah, al-Qaeda, they are all terrorists. Their deaths do not matter. It’s war.”

But, I suggested to General Saleh – because I had been studying my sand-blasted maps and had listened to many a military lecture in Damascus of late – surely his next target would be not Raqqa (already partly invested by American-backed forces) but the huge surrounded Syrian garrison city of Deir ez-Zour with its thousands of trapped civilians.

“Our President has said we will recover every square inch of Syria,” the general replied, repeating the mantra of all Syrian officers of the regime. “Why do you say Deir ez-Zour?” Because, I said, that would release the 10,000 Syrian soldiers in the city to fight on the war front. There was just a hint of a grin on the officer’s face, but then it faded. In fact, I don’t think the Syrians will get involved with the American-supported force fighting for Raqqa – that, after all, was the point of the little “coordination” centre I saw in the desert – but I do believe the Syrian army are heading for Deir ez-Zour. As for the general, of course, he was saying nothing about this. Nor, obviously, did he believe in body counts.

There is, in reality, another intriguing tactic being deployed by the Syrian administration. The local Rif Raqqa governor – “rif” indicates the countryside around a city, not to be confused with the town itself – is now setting up headquarters near General Saleh’s caravan. It’s a real campaign caravan, by the way, which rocks when you step aboard, his office and bedroom combined in one small room, his black walking stick by the bed-head. The local governor, however, is scarcely a mile away, planning the restoration of water and electricity supplies, the financing of public works and relief for refugees.

When I left the area, 29 families – cartloads of children and black-shrouded women and upturned sofas – had just arrived in Rasafeh from Deir ez-Zour to seek the Raqqa governor’s assistance. Another 50 had arrived the previous day. It seemed perfectly obvious that if the Syrian army lets America’s largely Kurdish friends occupy Raqqa, it is going to help the Syrian government civilian administration take over the city by the force of bureaucracy. How would that be for a bloodless victory?

But military self-confidence is often the handmaiden of misadventure. The highway that forms the tip of the Homs-Aleppo triangle has now been extended 60 miles to Resafeh, and General Saleh makes no secret that Isis and its fellow cultists return across the desert after dark to attack his soldiers. These men – many of whom are teenagers – are billeted in tent encampments beside the road, protected by tanks and anti-aircraft guns. And their battles are constant, Isis still placing IED bombs beside the highway today. When I later travelled across the desert to Homs, I followed for some time a truck carrying a 155mm artillery piece so overused that its barrel had split apart.

Yet already, Syrian engineers are restoring electricity capacity from the desert generating stations which have only recently been hideouts for Isis leaders, a power system intimately connected to the Syrian oil fields, slowly being recovered from the Isis enemy, which remain – modest though they are in comparison with the great Gulf, Iraqi and Iranian oil resources – Syria’s “pearl in the desert”. Who controls these wealth machines – how their product will be shared now it has been freed from the Isis mafia – will determine part of Syria’s future political history.

Niccolo and Donkey Tuesday 25 Jul 2017

Good piece by Scott Ritter on the supposed end of the arms to Al-Qaida program.

Say Goodbye to Regime Change in Syria

President Donald Trump has ordered that the CIA begin to phase out its covert train-and-equip program in support of so-called “moderate” rebels fighting against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The program represented the tip of the spear of a larger goal of regime change that had been the official policy of the United States since September 2013, when President Obama declared “Assad must go” in the aftermath of a chemical attack in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta that killed hundreds of civilians. Through this action, President Trump is walking away from an established policy of America taking an active role in forcing the Syrian President’s ouster, willing instead to leave Assad’s fate in the hands of the Syrian people and its allies. The decision by Trump to terminate support for the “moderate” Syrian rebels, while not giving voice to a policy that rejects regime change in Syria, is the clearest signal yet that the United States has changed course on trying to force regime change in Damascus as a precondition for a political settlement of the Syrian crisis.

The train and equip mission of the CIA in Syria can be traced back to the spring of 2011, when a revolution broke out in Libya against the dictatorial rule of Muammar Gadhafi. Backed by NATO airpower, anti-regime fighters were able to establish control over large areas inside Libya. The CIA began a program to train and equip these fighters , supplying weapons to Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, who in turn shipped these weapons to Libya, where they were turned over to Libyan rebels. (This circuitous route was chosen to avoid the U.S. being in violation of a UN embargo against weapons deliveries to Libya.)

In August 2011, in the aftermath of the capture of the Libyan capital of Tripoli by rebel forces, Qatar began diverting arms originally intended for Libya to Turkey, where they were turned over to rebel forces that had, since June of 2011, been fighting against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. These rebels were grouped together under the umbrella of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), an ostensibly secular resistance group that was in reality controlled by the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood , an Islamist organization that had been crushed by Bashar al-Assad’s father back in the early 1980’, and was operating in exile in Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan. While the CIA was not directly involved in this activity, CIA personnel in Libya and Turkey monitored these shipments to make sure no sensitive weaponry, such as hand-help surface-to-air missiles, made their way into Syria. This effort, which involved billions of dollars of arms, including those provided by the United States for the express purpose of aiding Libyan rebels, continued through 2012 and into 2013. (The U.S. Ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, who was killed in an attack on the American Consulate in Benghazi in September 2012, was involved in coordinating these weapons transfers .)

As the fighting in Syria expanded in scope and scale, the number of anti-regime combatant organizations increased. The FSA took on an increasingly Islamist character, and many of its fighters defected to more extreme organizations, such as al-Nusra (an Al Qaeda affiliate). Many of the CIA-provided weapons being shipped by Qatar through Turkey made their way into these Islamist units, with the unintended result being that the U.S. was actively arming Al Qaeda and other extremist entities openly hostile to American interests. In an effort to control the flow of weaponry into Syria, President Obama authorized the CIA to formally take over the process of training and equipping Syrian rebels. This operation, known by its codename, Timber Sycamore, was run out of Turkey and Jordan with the full support of both governments.

From 2013 through 2015, Timber Sycamore oversaw the purchase of billions of dollars of modern weaponry from Balkan suppliers, primarily in Croatia, and their shipment to ports in Turkey and Jordan, where the CIA, working with Turkish and Jordanian intelligence agencies, trained and equipped thousands of rebel fighters from more than 50 groups inside Syria that had been vetted by the CIA. The impact of this program on the fighting in Syria was significant—by the fall of 2015, the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad was teetering on the brink of collapse, largely due to the military pressure brought to bear on the regime by these U.S.-backed groups. The success of these rebels played a large role in triggering Russian military intervention in Syria in the fall of 2015, with Russian air power being unleashed against these very same rebels in an effort to save the regime of Bashar al-Assad. The Russian gambit worked, and by 2016 the Syrian military had reclaimed the initiative, recapturing the city of Aleppo and driving the U.S.-backed rebels back on all fronts.

The U.S. and its allies had no effective response to the Russian intervention. One of the reasons for this is the fact that there was little to differentiate the U.S.-backed rebels on the ground inside Syria from the more extremist fighters from al-Nusra and other Islamist groups. While the United States protested the Russian air strikes, it had to deal with the reality that Timber Sycamore was arming far more than just the so-called FSA. In both Turkey and Jordan, corrupt intelligence officers were siphoning off tens of millions of dollars in weapons and munitions, selling them on the black market, where they were bought by al-Nusra and, after 2014, ISIS. The U.S.-backed rebels would often sell or trade their US-provided weapons to both al-Nusra and ISIS, and in many cases, U.S.-trained fighters would defect with these weapons. Thousands of fighters serving under the banner of Al Qaeda and ISIS were, in fact, armed and trained by the CIA.

Another problem confronted by the United States was the growing divergence between its objectives in supporting so-called “moderate” Syrian rebels, which were shared by Jordan, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, and the willingness on the part of Turkey and Qatar to train and equip more radical anti-Assad fighters, including al-Nusra (Al Qaeda) and ISIS. The position taken by Turkey and Qatar are rooted in their mutual support for the Muslim Brotherhood, which had morphed into various radical Islamist units operating inside Syria under the guise of the FSA, but in reality fighting in support of both al-Nusra and ISIS. Qatari support for the Muslim Brotherhood became unsustainable for Egypt, Jordan and the Gulf Arab nations, which subsequently outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization. The demise of Timber Sycamore is directly linked to the ongoing crisis between Qatar and its Gulf Arab neighbors over support for the Muslim Brotherhood; Turkey’s position in support of Qatar has, given Ankara’s status as a NATO member, likewise created diplomatic problems for the U.S. that are simplified through the termination of the CIA’s train-and-equip efforts in Syria.

President Trump’s decision to terminate Timber Sycamore is part and parcel of an overall policy objective designed to gain control over U.S/ objectives in the region. In many ways, Washington’s policy of regime change in Syria, of which the CIA’s train-and-equip program was a major part, was responsible for the crisis currently underway in Syria, and the region as a whole. Central to this failure was the notion that there existed inside Syria a moderate, secular force able and willing to take down the regime of Bashar al-Assad, which led to the decision to flood the region with U.S.-provided arms and munitions that only served to spread of Islamic extremism under the banner of Al Qaeda and ISIS.

The fact is that there was no secular, moderate force worthy of the name operating inside Syria; virtually the entire anti-Assad effort is dominated by Islamist extremists who, if Assad was overthrown, would probably replace a secular dictator with something far worse. The Obama policy of regime change in Syria, like the Bush policy in Iraq, has done little more than unleash forces which the U.S. was unable to control, costing American taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars and the blood of American military personnel who lost their lives in its implementation.

President Trump’s decision to terminate Timber Sycamore, and with it the Obama-era policy of “Assad must go,” when seen in this context, is the clearest expression to date of his desire to rein in the unsuccessful policies of the past. The president’s decision liberates the United States, which can now proceed in its fight against ISIS and Islamic extremism unencumbered by policies that do little to further American interests while empowering enemies. By working with Russia to focus on the defeat of ISIS, President Trump is positioning the United States to play an important role in helping shape a political solution to the Syrian problem that will bring peace to the people of Syria and the region. Achieving such a solution will not be easy, nor is the outcome guaranteed. Timber Sycamore, however, was nothing more than an impediment in this regard, and President Trump was wise in shutting it down.

Derrick Wednesday 26 Jul 2017

This guy keeps talking about "Arab League Commandos" but that sounds like complete bullshit, the Arab League would not be attacking the jihadi groups they fund. Does anyone know what he's talking about?

(In spoilers because the picture is terrifying.)

Mireman Friday 28 Jul 2017

Interesting how the US and Russia have both wavered in their support for YPG and SDF in the recent past since they have needed to appease the Turks.

Many accounts suggest that there's a measure of resentment of SDF among Syrian Arabs and I imagine this will only increase in the future after the Raqqa campaign is finished.

The renewed support for the Kurdish-led forces suggests they are taking advantage of the situation in Turkey since the questionable referendum and the halting Turkish military intervention.

Even a federalized Syria incorporating Assad's government, SDF, and possibly others isn't going to stop the hand-wringing about "Iran's land bridge to the Mediterranean"...

American think tanks sure are releasing a ton of different conflicting takes on the Kurds, etc.

Derrick Friday 28 Jul 2017

Assad would be wise to drive a wedge between the Arabs and the Kurds within the "SDF." Perhaps he's been doing so the whole time.

Niccolo and Donkey Monday 14 Aug 2017 at 8:49 AM

Thread hasn't been updated.

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Derrick Monday 14 Aug 2017 at 9:49 AM

Hail Nike!

mkondich Monday 14 Aug 2017 at 11:01 AM

about time there were some gains, things slowed down the last week

J-Mask {107} Tuesday 15 Aug 2017 at 6:29 AM

This makes me like Assad even more.

Niccolo and Donkey Tuesday 15 Aug 2017 at 7:05 AM

The Syria Analysis Thread

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