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The Islamic State being largely eliminated militarily and the regime of Bashar al-Assad controlling the densely populated western regions of Syria and pausing before a major campaign to take over Idlib, an important rebel stronghold, the Syrian civil war between in a new phase. Iran, Israel, Russia, Turkey and the United States are still engaged in the conflict, while Qatar and Saudi Arabia appear to be out. Three separate regional battles between the remaining actors – in Idlib, in the Golan Heights, and in eastern Syria – will determine the future of the country.
President Donald Trump has been explicit about his desire to reduce US involvement as quickly as possible. In March, he told political supporters that "we are fleeing ISIS. We will leave Syria very soon. Let others take care of it now. … We will return to our country, where we belong, where we want to be. The government he chairs however adopts a different point of view. The United States now has a "new policy," said James Jeffrey, the US Secretary of State's new special representative to Syria. Washington Post in September. "We are not at the end of the year." Jeffrey said the administration was aiming for a "more active approach" to ensure ISIS's "enduring defeat" and to drive Iran out of Syria. "That means we're in no hurry," he said, adding, perhaps to convince himself, "I'm sure the president agrees with that."
Whether or not the President is on board, the truth is that the United States has virtually no influence in Syria and lacks the resources, capabilities and political will to maintain a major military and diplomatic engagement to shape the future of the region. In this last phase of the war, restraint would be the best thing.
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For the moment, the most important of the three fights – over the province of Idlib – is in its infancy. This province, located in northwestern Syria, is almost two-thirds the size of Lebanon and is very mountainous. To the west, its heights overlook the Syrian coastal plain, the city of Latakia, a Russian naval base and a largely Alawite population. In the east, Idlib is located in Aleppo, the largest city in Syria before the war and the subject of a brutal struggle between the regime and the Islamic State in 2016. Looking to the south, the territory adjoins the city of Hama, destroyed in 1982 by the president. Hafez al-Assad in his campaign to exterminate the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood. In 2016-17, villages just north of the provincial capital changed hands several times until the Syrian army secured them, apparently for good. To the north is the Turkish border.
Like mountainous terrain, Idlib has attracted settlers for whom isolation is essential to survival. This is the natural environment of dissidents. Conservative Sunnis rejected the secularism of the Baathist regime and heterodox Alawism of the Assad family. For decades, they resisted Damascus and provided a safe haven for religious malcontents.
Not surprisingly, one of the first fights in the civil war in Syria took place near the city of Jisr al-Shughur in western Idlib, where more than 120 people were attacked by insurgents. After four years of fighting, the Syrian regime lost control of Idlib in 2015. In 2017, as the United States pushed jihadist forces out of Raqqa in eastern Syria, the survivors fled to Idlib . Their numbers have been inflated more recently by men of all political stripes seeking to evade conscription in the Syrian army, which has sucked all men between 18 and 51 years old.
In the meantime, Turkey has inserted about 1,300 soldiers and a dozen observation posts in the province. These were to contain any threat to Turkey emanating from Idlib and provide the country with an advanced base for other operations, with Ankara describing its mission somewhat unrealistically. Instead, Ankara focused primarily on extremists who might otherwise go to Turkey, preventing refugees from crossing the border, and attempting to filter hard-core jihadists from the largest rebel population, even though being used against the Assad regime. Once the civil war is over, Turkey will probably aim to convert a long-term occupation of Idlib into a permanent arrangement as part of a broader post-war settlement.
For its part, the Assad regime has taken the trouble to reinstate Idlib for months. Assad is determined to bring Syria together in a unified whole under his rule, and Idlib has long been considered his next mark after his victory in Aleppo and Daraa. The deployment of Turkish forces in Idlib has probably increased the urgency of this goal, as has the strategic threat posed by jihadists. Activists often speak of using Idlib as a stepping stone for a perpetual battle against Assad. The way militants would lead this threat without air cover, armor or heavy artillery is a mystery, of course, but the regime has taken their position seriously.
Damascus said it was ready to mobilize against the rebels in Idlib soon, but a beating of warnings from the United States, the United Nations, Turkey and others against an imprudent offensive seems to have deterred the attack planned for the moment. From the point of view of the regime, the delay represents a pragmatic restraint. A campaign in Idlib would require a lot of work and the scheme lacks manpower. It would also be difficult – foreign fighters, especially Central Asians, who have lived and struggled in Syria for years, have nowhere to go and would fight to the death. Intensive fighting will drive a wave of desperate refugees to the Turkish border, which could inject unwanted vigor into Turkish operations in the province. In addition, none of Syria's supporters, Russia and Iran, want to be the facilitators of the humanitarian catastrophe that most observers expect from an offensive. It is therefore not surprising that things have been put on hold.
For the moment, Turkey and Russia have reached an agreement to reverse the situation. They plan to install a demilitarized zone 10 miles deep around Idlib. The area will be monitored by the Russian military police on the Syrian side and by Turkish forces backed by drones within Idlib. Turkey will move all extremist combatants and heavy weapons out of the demilitarized zone. The way this will be done remains unexplained, but the Turks have evoked an increase in numbers within Idlib. According to the text of the agreement, at the end of the year, the M4 and M5 highways that pass through Idlib and are frequently cut off by the rebels will be open to traffic. Meanwhile, Russia has promised to send new S-300 missile defense systems to Syria.
At first glance, it's a good deal for Russia and for the regime. But it is unclear whether the hard-core rebels trapped in Idlib will actually attack Assad-controlled territory, as well as the degree of force that the Turks would use to stop them. The implementation of the agreement will involve a kind of kabuki theater, where the Turks claim to apply the terms of the agreement and the radicals pretend to disarm by changing the image. In the long run, the strategic interest of the Assad regime in territorial unification and the destruction of a rebel stronghold is likely to outweigh the risks of aggression, and the agreement will collapse. The fact that the last agreement has made Damascus seem to have yielded obediently Syrian territory to the Turks is probably enough to motivate Assad. Indeed, the resemblance between the situation in Idlib and the forced acceptance of Israel's occupation of the Golan Heights since 1967 must be too difficult for Assad to consider.
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This brings us to the lower Golan Heights and adjacent Syrian territory. This plateau is the second major theater in activity. At the beginning of the civil war, the Assad regime lost control of the region. But over the past year, he has reaffirmed his authority. Israel and Iran, however, are still competing for operational freedom.
Israel fears that Iran and Hezbollah are using this area to try to establish a second front – the first being the Israeli-Lebanese border – against that country. In 2015, the Israelis announced their intention to prevent Iran or its proxies from entering the Syrian Golan by killing a General of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and a senior official. of Hezbollah.
Israel has also taken full advantage of the lawless conditions in Syria to open a free-fire zone. Since 2012, it has launched hundreds of air strikes against Syria to put an end to the arms movement in Lebanon and to provide Iranian military assistance to the Assad regime. Over the past year, Israel has also begun to support a group of so-called moderate Islamist forces on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights to prevent the encroachment of Iran. Israel attempted to do something similar in Lebanon in the 1980s, when it supported the Christian army of southern Lebanon as a buffer on the Lebanese side of the border. The arrangement proved unsustainable and led to a long-term presence of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in southern Lebanon. The Israeli army was withdrawn in 2000 when public aid to pay the cost of the mission in blood and treasure collapsed. Maybe the strategy will be more sustainable in Syria.
Russia, for its part, has made a good attempt to bring Iran and Israel into an arrangement that would keep Iran and its band of rather wacky proxies from Afghanistan and Iraq at least 60 miles from the border Israeli. Israel appears to have rejected the proposal, calling for the total withdrawal of Iranian forces from Syria. With respect to Israel, access to Syrian airspace and unlimited supply of ammunition being almost unlimited, it makes more sense to attack Iran and its affiliates than to accept a partial withdrawal that would tacitly legitimize Iran's role in the conflict. Syrian Civil War.
The Assad regime, meanwhile, would like Iran to stay because its forces are still useful and Iran is a reliable ally. He does not want to see Iran provoking a war with Israel that would hurt the regime itself. Thus, Assad is theoretically urged to keep Iran and other anti-Israeli forces near the Golan Heights. Both Israel and the Trump administration remain skeptical about Assad's power over Iran, but it should be noted that there has not been a single attack on Israel since the regime's return to the region. In addition, Iran's response to Israeli strikes on Iran's holdings in Syria has been largely limited to threats of retaliation rather than retaliation.
It is difficult to know the exact reasons for Iran's caution. This may reflect an opinion among regime officials that the targets for Israeli strikes have been insignificant. Tehran may also not intend to open a second front. He might also want to avoid doing anything that could diminish European support for the Iranian nuclear deal, or he might think he is out of date. It is also possible that the skeptics are wrong and that the Assad regime has effectively banned counter-attacks. Whatever the reason, Tehran might at some point decide that he had enough and that he was responding either from Syria or from Lebanon.
At the same time, Israel can not know what bomb launched on an Iranian agent in Syria will trigger the barrage of Lebanon which is degenerating into a devastating war. Israel is confident enough in its ability to dismantle Hezbollah and destroy its missile inventory, although the government admits that Israel will pay a high price to do so. Lebanon, on the other hand, would be devastated.
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Finally, in eastern Syria, 2,200 American soldiers, working with a much larger cohort of Kurds and Arabs under the banner of the Syrian Democratic Forces, broke the fighting capacity of the Islamic State. Many Islamic State fighters are still there – the battle for Raqqa was not, as the Trump administration announced, a war of annihilation – but their ability to seize and retain territories is over. During the process, however, the coalition destroyed much of the city of Raqqa, leaving the immersed inhabitants plowing the rubble. The United States has refused to finance the reconstruction, helping to create favorable conditions for the eventual return of the Islamic State or something equally harmful under a different name.
Now that the campaign against ISIS is largely over, US forces are expanding. They are currently conducting an exercise in Tanf, a town on the border with Iraq, likely to signal the US's determination to deny Iran a "land bridge" to western Syria and Lebanon that could threaten Israeli interests. (Israel has already attacked the area from the air). Yet the presence of the United States is not really sufficient to control access to Syria from Iraq, and Iranian movements across the border seem largely unrestrained. We will see soon if the administration's new policy of remaining in Syria for an extended period of time results in an increase in the US military presence and redeployment of forces from their current transit zones in the north to the Iraqi border. and Syria to the south. If such an adjustment were made, a direct confrontation between the United States and Iran would become more likely.
The other open question is whether the Kurds of the region can count on the perpetual protection of the United States now that they have achieved their goal in the campaign against the Islamic State or its own government. they should start preparing for a possible withdrawal from the United States. The Assad regime on one side and paranoid Turkey on the other. Presumably, they will choose to take their risks with the Assad regime, which has been quite direct in its invitation to discuss with Kurdish representatives of the Kurdish place in a reconstituted Syria.
In the foreseeable future, foreign forces will be a feature of the Syrian landscape. A relatively small number of Iranian troops, roughly equal to the US presence, will remain in the region, with more Shiite fighters under Iranian control. The deployment of these young men at some point will depend on where the regime needs the body to stop the bullets. A large part of the IRGC staff will be stationed in Syrian bases and some forces will probably remain as close as possible to the Israeli border. At one point, the many battles in Syria could move east, and these militias, along with their Iranian officers, will move in the same direction. Turkey will maintain a presence along the border with Syria to defend itself against Kurdish antagonisms and to attract the attention of Assad. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan began appearing in military combat gear, suggesting an ambition for a long-term presence in Syria.
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As it stands, a regime of Assad with powers is determined to reunify Syria under its regime. The opposition is fragmented, friendless and ineffective. Russia and Iran continue to support a voluntary and sometimes uncooperative client to promote their own regional goals. Turkey has accepted responsibility for a boiling cauldron of violent rebels. And Israeli air operations on Syrian territory are largely unrestrained. At this point, it is worth asking if it is possible to intervene significantly in the United States.
The answer seems to be no.
"No" also seems to reflect the mood at the White House. Although the Trump administration has taken into account the Idlib agreement, the consensus among the parties involved is that the United States played neither a direct role nor a tacit role in threatening force. In fact, the American message on Idlib was, at the very least, confusing. In early September, US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley said:[Idlib] is a tragic situation and if [the Assad regime] want to[s] to continue to take over Syria, they can do it. … but they can not do it with chemical weapons. They can not do it by attacking their people, and we will not do it. It was a classic moment of April Glaspie, as the administration quickly understood. For those who do not remember, Glaspie, then-US. The ambassador to Iraq had the misfortune to tell Saddam Hussein in 1990 that "we do not have any opinion on Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait". .
Haley, a week after his previous remarks on Idlib, told Bret Baier in an interview on Fox News: "Do not test us anymore. … Any offensive on Idlib civilians was going to be dealt with, whether chemical weapons were used or not. What she meant by "treating" was anyone's idea, but she was careful to differentiate between an idlib-centric attack on jihadists and another that threatened civilians. For the moment, it is academic, but if the regime enters Idlib and abstains from using chemical weapons, the options of the administration will be limited by the risk of A conflict with Russia and by the absurdity of a humanitarian intervention that benefits wonderfully. violent jihadists.
Although US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Rex Tillerson have both announced ambitious targets for the United States in Syria: to pressure the regime to weaken oil resources until relief efforts disappear . State and expel Iran from Syria – the country's appetite and its ability to do any of these things seem pretty small. As a result, the administration has declared a mix of things, including the fact that it is not the job of the United States to get rid of Assad; that he can not get rid of Iranians alone there; that he will continue to focus on the fight against the Islamic State; and that it will withdraw existing funds for reconstruction activities and retain future funding until Assad's disappearance. He made no commitment to the Kurds in any way, and when the Syrian regime used chemical weapons, he reacted in a superficial and ineffective way. And not surprisingly, US policy on the ground reflects the president's preference to spend as little as possible and get out as quickly as possible.
It could change. Israel or Iran could drag the United States into a war against Iran in Syria. The Assad regime could commit a hideous atrocity that is pushing the United States and possibly the UK and France to risk a clash with Russia in order to punish Assad decisively.
Apart from these scenarios, the Trump administration's derisive commitment to Syria is proportionate to the real strategic interests of the United States. Humanitarian intervention, unlike strategic intervention, is a political issue. The White House Trump clearly does not believe that popular support exists for a long-term humanitarian campaign. And from a strategic point of view, Syria is only one problem among others in the competition between the United States and Iran. The Russians have maintained close relations with the Assad regime and its predecessors for decades. American interests did not suffer, except when Washington walked on Assad's feet in Lebanon in the 1980s and they will not suffer anymore. The fight against the Islamic State still seems worthwhile to pursue a relatively inexpensive effort. Thus, the "new policy" announced by Jeffrey's appointment as Special Representative will likely resemble the old one.
