By Duke Omara
It is becoming increasingly clear that the civil war in Syria is now at a stalemate, as no one side seems to have been able to strike a decisive blow against its adversaries. The regime of Bashar Al-Assad appears to have exhausted most of the military advantages that come with being a legitimate state. Instead, it has floundered and turned, often ceding territory and often unable to contest the ownership of key military assets it has lost to anti-regime forces.
On the other hand, the confusing array of anti-Al-Assad forces have proven themselves unable to topple the government. It is hard to tell who is fighting who at any particular moment. Added to this mix has been the entry of Western militaries into the conflict with the latest to publicly flex its muscles being the United Kingdom, which has in recent days conducted air raids against some of its wayward citizens operating inside Syria.
Now, according to Reuters, the United States has asked Greece and Bulgaria to deny over flight access to Russia which is reportedly ramping up its military build-up inside Syria. US Secretary of State John Kerry has gone as far as to warn the Russian foreign minister that any further escalation of Russian presence inside Syria runs the risk of triggering a confrontation between the US-led coalition and Moscow.
And then, of course, there is Iran and Turkey, both major players in the war and both pulling Syria in opposite directions. All the while, money is pouring in from Gulf States in the form of armaments and other supplies and whose final destination is rebel-held strongholds.
Sadly, that is not even half the story. Tens of thousands of war refugees from this and other regional conflicts have now reached the shores of Europe and the West’s previously waning sense of urgency to intervene has again been reignited.
These new calls for intervention should be seen in perspective: they are nothing more than an effort to stem the flow of refugees into Western Europe. It should then not come as a surprise that once this particular problem is solved, Western powers will go back to the same holding pattern vis-à-vis Syria that they have adopted in one form or another for the last four or so years.
At the civil war gained momentum, President Barack Obama publicly declared that Al-Assad must go and towards that end, the US embarked on a clandestine mission to train anti-Al-Assad rebels. That programme is turning out to be nothing short of a failure, as the New York Times reported this Tuesday. With $500m of American funds as it operating budget, the programme has so far managed to turn out fewer than 60 fighters. Many of the fighters in this initial group, according to the same report, have already been killed, captured, or unable to rejoin their unit due to border closings.
This is the kind of deadly incompetence that would, in normal circumstances, get people fired and the US Congress up in hackles. But whether these are normal circumstances or not is hard to say anymore. It would be easy to assume that after a decade and hundreds of millions of dollars spent raising up and training an army in Iraq, the US military command would have learnt a thing or two about what not to do in circumstances such as this.
The whole training debacle is a testament to the lack of overall strategic focus on the part of a White House that seems to be pursuing a confused and confusing policy in Syria. For example, questions regarding who the greater enemy is, (Al-Assad, “Islamic State” or Al-Qaeda affiliated groups) and who therefore to target without helping the wrong side, have never been answered as clearly as they should be.
The half-hearted coalition airstrikes being conducted inside Syria don’t seem to be turning the tide of war against or for one group or other, although it could very well be said that the coalition presence inside that country is fast becoming background noise to the warring factions. The US, it appears, is just there for the sake of being there.
This suggests a certain expectation in Washington that nothing concrete or dramatic will be done by the current American administration to militarily disturb the swinging pendulum of a struggle that has no end in sight. The hope being, judging from the lack of coherent American policy towards Syria, that the antagonists will fight their way to the negotiating table, a unlikely prospect to say the least.
Which is why increased Russian involvement should be welcomed. The reluctance of the US to lead in this issue has become intolerable both from a political and humanitarian point of view. A forceful entry of the Russians into the fray is good news because it fills a yawning chasm in international leadership that has so far been filled by a disinterested and risk-averse US.
If the Russians become more intimately involved, it raises the hope that they will shepherd Syria towards a less cataclysmic path that would mitigate the usual post-conflict reprisals that follow wars of this magnitude and makeup. Without them, it is a sure bet that whichever side wins or gets the upper hand, the other side will pay a terrible price.
As things stand, Al-Assad is clearly the least worst option to lead Syria away from this disastrous chapter of its history. Who else is there? The Syrian rebels are so fragmented and so leaderless, it is not hard to imagine them turning their guns on each other in a new phase of the civil war if Al-Assad were to be removed from power. If this were to happen, the biggest beneficiary would undoubtedly be the so-called “Islamic State”.
The question will no doubt be asked: Where are the Arab countries in all this? And the simple answer will remain that, if history is any indication, and with the exception of the few who have taken in refugees, they will be nowhere to be seen and will probably continue to be absent for a long time to come. Which is precisely why they can’t be relied upon to offer any meaningful mediation to this conflict.
Perhaps the replacement of the US by Russia as arbiter will galvanise some of them to action and away from their perch as curious observers of a war that is likely to spill into their own borders if they do not take steps to contain and finally stop it once and for all.
