Atlantic Sentinel

Tag: Syria

  • Syria’s Endgame

    It has taken at least 400,000 dead and over ten million internally and externally displaced Syrians, but we are finally coming to the end game of the Syrian Civil War.

    Last week, Turkey’s Recep Erdoğan blithely announced in a news conference that Raqqa, the capital of the Islamic State, would be the final target of the Turkish invasion.

    Today, Pentagon sources leaked that the United States might send large combat forces into Syria.

    This comes on the heels of talks between Iran, Turkey and Russia aimed at ending the conflict.

    At long last, a confluence of interest is emerging that is the beginning of the end of the Syrian Civil War. (more…)

  • Aleppo Has Fallen. Now What?

    “I am waiting to die or be captured.”

    That is the farewell message of one of the handful of remaining anti-Assad activists in Aleppo. As the Assad regime now triumphs a murderous, four-year-long victory, the question of what comes next must be asked.

    Syria is a ruined country. It was a state imposed upon a land not yet a nation and while that state had made progress in building a Syrian nation over the past forty years under the Assad family, at the end of the day the corruption and incompetence of the regime coalesced into an uprising that almost immediately became a civil war.

    As early as the summer of 2013, a year into the battle of Aleppo, Bashar al-Assad’s regime had concluded they would have to create a wilderness to manufacture peace. This they have done in several places, emptying out whole villages and neighborhoods and helping create the world’s largest postwar refugee crisis.

    Under the barrage of relentless bombing, Russian and barrel, Aleppo, the symbol of the rebellion, has collapsed.

    So now what? (more…)

  • Joining Assad and Russia Against Islamic State Is Foolish

    One of Donald Trump’s most foolish foreign-policy proposals is to team up with Iran, Russia and Bashar al-Assad to defeat the Islamic State in Syria.

    “I don’t like Assad at all, but Assad is killing ISIS,” the American president-elect said last month, referring to the self-proclaimed Islamic State by an acronym.

    “Russia is killing ISIS and Iran is killing ISIS.”

    If that were true, a pact might make sense. But it isn’t. And even if it were, the arguments are against an alliance. (more…)

  • As Syria’s Ceasefire Fails, It’s Time to Break Some Stereotypes

    Even last week, as I went about analyzing the Russian and American motives behind the most recent go at peace in the Syria civil war, I was hesitant to triumph success. I doubt many are shocked; maybe John Kerry is heartbroken, but certainly this wasn’t beyond the realm of expectations.

    So while anybody paying attention is full of “I told you sos,” perhaps fewer say much more beyond the cliché that the Middle East is full of people who have hated one another since the Bible.

    The truth it, folks out there have been hating one another a lot longer than that. And yet, such age-old conflicts are irrelevant at best and worse, misleading. Of value now is using geopolitics as a way to both understand why the ceasefire failed and as a way to break up some useless stereotypes. (more…)

  • The Long, Short and Medium of the Syrian Peace Deal

    Barack Obama Vladimir Putin
    American president Barack Obama speaks with Australian foreign minister Bob Carr as Russian president Vladimir Putin opens a plenary session of the G20 in Saint Petersburg, September 6, 2013 (White House/Pete Souza)

    We should all retain a hefty dose of skepticism whenever someone uses the words “Syria” and “peace” in a sentence. Having becoming the world’s geopolitically favored proxy battleground, Syria’s civil war may not stop upon the say-so of Washington and Moscow.

    There is, of course, the intractable and resolutely murderous Islamic State, whose entire recruitment strategy hinges upon more extreme human outrages. Yet they are much more easily contained than the ranks of jihadists now clustered amongst the husk that is the Free Syrian Army. At least IS has bothered with trying to set up borders; formerly Al Qaeda branch al-Nusra is mingled among American, Gulf Arab and Turkish proxies. Will they play nice just because the Americans and Russians say so?

    But really, it’s the wider scene that warrants attention. We’ve learned a lot about American and Russian priorities through this deal. Let’s take a closer look. (more…)

  • Turkey Goes into Syria, Or How to Influence People with Tanks

    Nature abhors a vacuum; so too does geopolitics. The nation state has conquered the world and it cannot abide an empty place on the map for long.

    The collapse of the Syrian state has left behind such a vacuum. The question has never been if it will be filled; short of human extinction, that is inevitable. The question is by who.

    Now Turkey has finally invaded Syria: not to smash and grab but to stay, in one form or another.

    What’s going on here? Isn’t this just another sad mistake in the long series of sad mistakes in Syria?

    Not necessarily. Here’s why. (more…)

  • Turkey’s Intervention in Syria: Why and Why Now?

    Turkish tanks rolled across the border into Syria on Wednesday. Protected by warplanes and flanked by special forces, they quickly succeeded in forcing Islamic State militants out of the city of Jarablus and driving a wedge between their territory and that of the Syrian Kurds.

    President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said Turkish-backed rebels — mostly Arab and Turkmen — had taken control of the city. (more…)

  • Assad Shifts Strategy, Attacks Kurdish Rebel Group in Syria

    Forces loyal to Syrian president Bashar Assad have for the first time bombarded Kurdish rebel positions in the northeast of the country, marking a shift in the regime’s strategy.

    The largely Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) claims that regime forces carried out airstrikes in the Al-Hasakah Governorate and attacked urban areas with artillery, killing and injuring dozens.

    CNN reports that American officials were nearby when the attack occurred.

    The United States support the YPG in their fight against the self-declared Islamic State, a fanatical Sunni Islamist group that occupies territory in between the Assad regime’s and the Kurds. (more…)

  • If Assad Captures Aleppo, Then What for the West?

    Behind the Islamic State’s murderous campaign of jihadi chaos, past the shattered European Union, veiled by America’s police shootings, protests and mass shootings lurks the skulking husk of the Syrian government, still barrel bombing, gaining ground, suddenly, quietly, reconquering Syria.

    What a difference a year makes. Once Bashar Assad was clearly on the ropes: his depleted army unable to put out all the rebellious fires within his domain, his Russian and Iranian allies seemingly unable to save him, the Islamic State’s butchers sharpening their cleaves upon the antiques of Palmyra while his more moderate rebel foes began an offensive toward his Alawite stronghold of Latakia.

    Then came the Russians, who made a point of decisively changing the war’s dynamic. Shoring up the wavering Syrian army battlelines and deploying massive airpower, Vladimir Putin carpet-bombed Assad’s enemies while his officers and soldiers stiffened the Syrian army’s spine. Given such support, the Syrian army began the slow crawl back from oblivion, recapturing key Palmyra from the Islamic State, blunting the rebel offensive into Latakia and even recently entering Raqqa Province, where the capital of the Islamic State lay.

    Now Assad is closer than ever to recapturing the greatest prize of all. Once the largest city in Syria, now, like the country itself, a husk of traumatized survivors and ruined world heritage sites, Aleppo has been under siege since July 2012 — four brutal years now of back and forth sniping across the same bullet-pocked streets, both sides desperately trying to complete an encirclement around the other. Now Assad looks to have cut off the rebels and, if his forces hold, he will be master of Aleppo once more. (more…)

  • Mission Accomplished for Putin in Syria? Yes And No

    Six months ago, Putin stunned just about everyone by sending Russian forces off to a distant war in the Middle East. Folly, cried many, including myself, for the Middle East is an ugly morass of conflict that siphons power and undermines great states.

    Now Putin is pulling most of his forces out. Once more, just about no one saw this coming.

    Has Putin pulled off yet another geopolitical coup de grâce? Has he outfoxed his Western and Islamist foes once more?

    Well yes. But also no.

    Let’s get super. (more…)

  • Why the Free Syrian Army Never Went Anywhere

    As the Syrian Civil War embarks upon an odd ceasefire — one replete with exceptions and violations — it’s worth looking back at some of the failures that led up to this point. There are plenty to choose from and that long sad path is better detailed elsewhere. Instead, we’ll focus on just one: the Free Syrian Army.

    The overarching failure is that Syria, a stable enough place by most accounts, has consumed itself. There is plenty of blame to go around; the Gulf states, the Russians, the Americans, the Iranians, Bashar Assad, the jihadists all have blood on their hands one way or another.

    Yet often overlooked in these recriminations is the flailing Free Syrian Army. Had the FSA ever emerged as a powerful and coherent force, the civil war might have ended years ago or, at the very least, have been considerably less chaotic and murderous.

    As we conduct an informal autopsy, we can find useful lessons in understanding geopolitics and how humans interact with power. (more…)

  • Modest Proposal to End Syria’s Civil War, Destroy Islamic State

    And modest, of course, it will be, involving cooperation on a scale not seen since World War II. But to genuinely destroy the Islamic State and end the regional crisis that fuels it, one must think big.

    Diplomacy has been tried in the past, but diplomacy tends to fail when equally matched powers are unwilling to give ground. For all intents and purposes, every force within the Middle East is capable only of influencing and protecting portions of the region; even the United States has proven unable to impose a solution. This has produced a stalemate and between the partitioned spheres of influence these outside forces have left no man’s lands. Within those no man’s lands, predictably, the madmen are king.

    Now, in the wake of Paris and the downing of a Russian airliner, geopolitical forces are converging that may well make international cooperation possible. (more…)

  • No Good Options: Why America Dithers in Syria

    Recep Tayyip Erdoğan Barack Obama
    Presidents Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey and Barack Obama of the United States meet in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington DC, December 7, 2009 (White House/Samantha Appleton)

    Haters do hate and many of President Barack Obama’s greatest haters despise what he’s done about Syria; or, more accurately, what he hasn’t done. Some of that criticism is fair but much of it is not, for Syria is not worth the blood, treasure or time of the United States when there are much bigger, nuclear-armed fish to fry elsewhere.

    Here’s why. (more…)

  • What the Hell Is Putin Doing in Syria?

    Vladimir Putin
    Russian president Vladimir Putin listens during a meeting in Voronezh, August 5, 2014 (Kremlin)

    And more importantly, what does he want?

    It’s important to remember how swears like that will net the sort of Google-searching folks I very much want here: the sort who want to understand, but who don’t need the gross, and largely unimportant, blow by blows.

    In two years, Vladimir Putin has taken Russia to war in not one but two countries; he’s conquered the strategically vital Crimea, froze a conflict in Ukraine and now has turned his war machine upon Syria’s conflict. The hapless United States under Barack Obama seems paralyzed with handwringing indecision and the Google searches for “World War III” are skyrocketing.

    Yes, we all ought to be worried and we all should try to understand why powerful places choose to seek war in faraway lands.

    So why is Russia now at war in Syria? What the hell happened, and, most importantly, what can happen?

    Let’s get super. (more…)

  • Russia’s Smart-Dumb Move into Syria’s Civil War

    As we are wont to do these days, we cry out, “The Russians are coming!” But their next move is not further into Eastern Europe where too many eyes are trained and a slowly gathering NATO grande armee is being assembled.

    It is into another, older civil war that Russian power is now deployed: Syria.

    And the best way to view such a move is through Newspeak, for this one is, geopolitically speaking, quite the smart-dumb move.

    Here’s why. (more…)