Foreign Affairs
Related: About this forumMap of Rojava Kurdistan hanging on the wall in the office for Rojava Administration in Moscow.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Highlight:
NoneDon't highlight anything
5 newestHighlight 5 most recent replies
bemildred
(90,061 posts)The past week has seen major developments on the ground in Syria which imperil the entirety of rebel held Syria. The regime has launched an offensive in the north Aleppo countryside which has cut the major rebel supply line from Turkey to Aleppo, leaving Free Aleppo almost completely encircled and 400,000 civilians potentially trapped. At the same time the regime is pursuing offensives in Daraa and Latakia province that are creating tens of thousands of refugees and driving back rebel frontlines. Iranian, Iraqi and Lebanese sectarian militias backed by Russian air power are employing scorched earth tactics reminiscent of Russia’s attack on the Chechen capital Grozny in 1999, reducing towns and villages to rubble to secure military victories, at immense cost to civilians.
70,000 civilians have fled north Aleppo, 100,000 have fled Daraa, and tens of thousands are being displaced from Latakia, fleeing into Idlib province. This is the continuation of the regime’s strategy of depopulating and ethnically cleansing rebel held areas to make them easier to conquer.
These offensives are aimed at tipping the balance of the conflict decisively in the regime’s favour, destroying the nationalist-democratic opposition so that the choice of who to support in Syria is between the regime and ISIS. Timed to coincide with Geneva “peace” process, the attacks have lead to the collapse of these talks. The Syrian opposition Higher Negotiation Committee (HNC) initially refused to go to the talks until two preconditions were met; the aerial bombardment of civilians had ceased, and humanitarian access was granted to besieged areas. They were placed under immense pressure by US Secretary of State John Kerry to attend, with the US government threatening to withdraw all support from the opposition if they did not participate. The HNC eventually agreed to attend, but only to discuss its humanitarian preconditions for talks to begin. With the ongoing military offensives by the regime and continuing sieges on rebel held towns, the talks quickly broke down.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/10/syria-peace-talks-collapse-aleppo-encircled-disaster-looms/
bemildred
(90,061 posts)Last week’s game-changing triumph in northern Syria has moved the Russian-led coalition to within striking distance of a decisive victory in Aleppo. After breaking a 40 month-long siege on the cities of Nubl and Zahra, the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) has encircled the country’s industrial hub and is gradually tightening the noose. Crucial supply-lines to the north have been cut leaving the Sunni extremists and anti-government militias stranded inside a vast, urban cauldron. It’s only a matter of time before these disparate renegades are either killed or forced to surrender. A victory in Aleppo will change the course of the war by restoring government control over the densely-populated western corridor. This is why the Obama administration is frantically searching for ways to either delay or derail the Russian-led juggernaut and avoid the impending collapse of US policy in Syria.
Recent peace talks in Geneva were convened with one goal in mind, to prevent Syrian President Bashar al Assad and loyalist forces from retaking Aleppo. The negotiations failed, however, when Washington’s mercurial allies, the so called “moderate” rebels, refused to participate. According to the Wall Street Journal, the Syrian opposition withdrew “under pressure from Saudi Arabia and Turkey, two of the main backers of the rebels.” The WSJ’s admission was later confirmed by Secretary of State John Kerry who according to a report in the Middle East Eye “blamed the Syrian opposition for leaving the talks and paving the way for a joint offensive by the Syrian government and Russia on Aleppo.”
“Don’t blame me,” Kerry said, “Blame the opposition. It was the opposition that didn’t want to negotiate and didn’t want a ceasefire, and they walked away.”
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/10/putins-aleppo-gamble-pays-off/
bemildred
(90,061 posts)Russian military intervention in Syria has turned the course of that country’s civil war against U.S.-backed rebel groups, increasing the likelihood that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his loyalists will remain in power, U.S. intelligence officials testified Tuesday.
The assessment amounts to an acknowledgment by U.S. spy agencies that Russian airstrikes have derailed the Obama administration’s aims of pushing Assad aside as part of a political settlement to the nearly five-year old conflict.
“The Russian reinforcement has changed the calculus completely,” Lt. Gen. Vincent R. Stewart, head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, said in Senate testimony. Assad is “in a much stronger negotiating position than he was just six months ago,” Stewart said. “I’m more inclined to believe that he is a player on the stage longer term than he was six months to a year ago.”
As recently as last summer, U.S. intelligence officials were openly talking about an “endgame” for the Syrian leader, who is also supported by Iran.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/spy-chief-warns-that-us-could-face-attacks-inspired-by-terrorism-in-paris/2016/02/09/29f172c8-cf2f-11e5-b2bc-988409ee911b_story.html
bemildred
(90,061 posts)AN EXTRAORDINARY new crisis is beginning to unfold in Syria, a country that already has suffered through some of the worst war crimes, humanitarian depredations and refugee flows in recent history. Russia, Iran and the Syrian government are conducting a major offensive aimed at recapturing the city of Aleppo and the rebel-held territory that connects it to the border with Turkey. They have cut one supply route to the city and are close to severing another, trapping rebel forces along with hundreds of thousands of civilians. Tens of thousands have fled to the border, where Turkey is denying them entry.
This campaign is being waged in open defiance of a U.N. Security Council resolution adopted in December, which required the Syrian government to provide humanitarian access to areas under siege and demanded an end to the shelling and bombing of civilian areas. Russia, which voted for the resolution, is indiscriminately bombing civilian targets in the Aleppo area, using banned cluster munitions, according to Human Rights Watch. Iranian commanders are on the ground, directing attacks by Shiite fighters from Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan.
In the face of this onslaught, which promises to destroy any chance of an acceptable end to the Syrian civil war, the Obama administration has been a study in passivity and moral confusion. President Obama is silent. Secretary of State John F. Kerry has been reduced to reading the text of Resolution 2254 aloud, as if that would somehow compel a change in Russian behavior. Mr. Kerry on Tuesday faulted Moscow for “making it much more difficult to be able to come to the table” for the peace talks he has been trying to broker, which were stillborn last week in Geneva.
ttps://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-deadly-results-of-russias-free-rein-in-syria/2016/02/09/e6fa74ba-cf56-11e5-b2bc-988409ee911b_story.html
bemildred
(90,061 posts)GAZIANTEP, Turkey — The Islamic State claimed its first attack inside the Syrian capital on Tuesday, asserting responsibility for a car bomb that destroyed a police officers’ club and left several people dead and dozens wounded.
The bombing, witnesses and regional news reports said, struck Masaken Barzeh, a neighborhood on the northern edge of the city that had been largely secure and quiet. Within hours the Islamic State, using its official media channels, said it had orchestrated the blast. The Islamic State had said it was behind an assault last month on the Sayeda Zeinab shrine on the outskirts of the capital that left dozens dead.
The blast on Tuesday came amid government advances against insurgents in northern Syria, a signal that even as the leadership goes on the offensive in some parts of the country, government-controlled areas, including those believed to be secure, remain vulnerable.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/10/world/middleeast/isis-syria-car-bomb.html?_r=0
bemildred
(90,061 posts)The U.S. and Russia are seeking to revive Syrian peace talks as President Bashar al-Assad’s advances against rebels shift the focus to the battlefield.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov will meet with foreign ministers from Europe and the Middle East in Munich on Thursday after talks between the government and opposition broke down last week and Assad’s Russian-backed encirclement of Aleppo stokes an exodus of Syrian refugees.
“The peace process isn’t dead, but it’s not clear if it will yield anything or when,” said Irina Zvyagelskaya, senior fellow at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Oriental Studies. “We are facing major problems. The approaches are quite different.”
The talks in the Bavarian capital, which include United Nations envoy Staffan de Mistura, are the first in that format since December in New York, when the UN Security Council passed a resolution aimed at establishing a cease-fire in Syria. Most participants will stay on for this weekend’s Munich Security Conference, an annual event where foreign-policy, defense and intelligence officials meet to discuss global crises.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-10/u-s-russia-make-syria-cease-fire-push-as-assad-regains-ground
bemildred
(90,061 posts)BEIRUT -- Late in the night on Feb. 2, the news hit: "all communication and supply line[s]" between Turkey and Aleppo had been severed, according to a Elijah Magnier, a renowned Arab war correspondent with Alrai Media Group. It seems to be so: the Syrian army and allied militias, backed by Hezbollah and Russian air power, took control of a tendril of territory that cuts off Aleppo-based rebels from the Turkish border. See the map below. Eastern supply lines for the so-called Islamic State appear to have also been cut.
Of particular strategic importance is the village of Murassat Khan and adjacent towns north of Aleppo: by taking control of the area, Damascus ended the main Turkey-Aleppo insurgent supply line. The tourniquet around Aleppo can be pulled off the city -- and at the same time, one of the main ISIS oil corridors to Turkey is cut. If things proceed as they have been, with the regime advancing further into rebel-held territory, the red swathe of Syrian government forces will shortly expand to encircle all opposition forces (predominantly Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS), who themselves have been encircling Aleppo in the east.
Edward Dark, a pseudonym for a respected commentator on Syrian affairs living in Aleppo, tweeted on Feb. 3, "This is the beginning of the end of jihadi presence in Aleppo. After 4 years of war & terror, people can finally see the end in sight."
But if we were to step back and take a look at more of Syria, as shown in the (slightly older) map below, a bigger picture emerges.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alastair-crooke/syria-putin-assad_b_9169998.html
bemildred
(90,061 posts)Saudi Arabia is discussing plans to deploy ground troops with regional allies, including Turkey, for a safe zone in Syria, in a last-ditch effort to keep alive a rebellion at risk of collapse as a Russian-backed offensive by Syrian regime forces encroaches on the northern province of Aleppo.
Although western officials have dismissed the plans as lacking credibility, they are a sign of the desperation that many of Syria’s opposition backers feel towards what looks like an increasingly bleak outcome in the war. Two people familiar with Saudi plans told the Financial Times that high-ranking Gulf officials are in Riyadh meeting Turkish officials to discuss options for deploying ground troops to head a coalition of fighters inside Syria.
Aleppo city, Syria’s former business hub, is the last significant urban centre controlled by the rebels. Its countryside, on the northern border with Turkey, is their lifeline.
President Bashar al-Assad’s forces, bolstered by Iranian-funded Shia militias, advanced last week into opposition-held territory in Aleppo’s northern countryside under the cover of Russian air strikes. The violence prompted thousands of civilians to flee, exacerbating the already vast humanitarian crisis.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2c06c718-cf28-11e5-92a1-c5e23ef99c77.html
bemildred
(90,061 posts)One Turkish soldier was killed and another wounded when security forces clashed with Kurdish militants crossing over from Syria, the army said on Wednesday, hours after Ankara summoned the U.S. ambassador over Washington's support for Syrian Kurds.
The latest clash could add to Turkish frustrations with its NATO ally Washington which supports the PYD Syrian Kurds in the battle against Islamic State in Syria.
Ankara sees the fighters as terrorists, citing their links to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has carried out a violent, three-decade insurgency for Kurdish autonomy in Turkey's southeast.
As well as battling both a Kurdish insurgency and Islamic State, Turkey has been grappling with an influx of more than 2.5 million refugees since the start of the Syrian civil war.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-turkey-kurds-idUSKCN0VJ0E3
