"Vladimir Putin Plunges Into a Caldron in Syria: Saving Assad"
Fri Oct 2, 2015 8:02pm EDT
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WASHINGTON/MOSCOW | By Alistair Bell and Tom Perry
U.S. President Barack Obama warned Russia on Friday that its bombing campaign against Syrian rebels will suck Moscow into a "quagmire," after a third straight day of air raids in support of President Bashar al-Assad.
At a White House news conference, Obama frequently assailed Russian President Vladimir Putin, who he accused of acting out of a position of weakness to defend a crumbling, authoritarian ally.
Friday prayers were canceled in insurgent-held areas of Syria's Homs province hit by Russian warplanes this week, with residents concerned that mosques could be targeted, according to one person from the area.
Putin's decision to launch strikes on Syria marks a dramatic escalation of foreign involvement in a more than four-year-old civil war in which every major country in the region has a stake.
It also gives fuel to domestic critics of Obama who say his unwillingness to act on Syria has allowed Moscow to stage its biggest show of force in the Middle East in decades.
But the U.S. president warned that Russia and Iran, Assad's main backer in the Muslim world, have isolated the majority of Syrians and angered their Sunni Muslim neighbors.
"An attempt by Russia and Iran to prop up Assad and try to pacify the population is just going to get them stuck in a quagmire and it won't work," Obama said.
The Syria campaign is the first time Moscow has sent forces into combat beyond the frontiers of the former Soviet Union since the USSR's disastrous Afghanistan campaign of the 1980s, a bold move by Putin to extend Russia's influence beyond its neighborhood.
It comes at a low point in Russia's relations with the West, a year after the United States and EU imposed financial sanctions on Moscow for annexing territory from Ukraine.
Obama on Friday offered to work with Russia to bring peace to Syria, but he took several digs at Putin, with whom he has a frosty relationship. A meeting between the two at the United Nations this week seems to have done little to produce a thaw.
"Mr. Putin had to go into Syria not out of strength, but out of weakness because his client Mr. Assad was crumbling and it was insufficient for him to send arms and money," Obama said.
He played down international support for Moscow's strategy, saying it paled in comparison to the number of countries backing U.S. air raids on Islamic State.
The U.S. president has been deeply reluctant to use more military force in Syria, after America's experience of long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Obama also hit back at critics who say his Syria strategy of bombing Islamic State and supporting moderate rebels is failing.
"I hear people offering up half-baked ideas as if they are solutions or trying to downplay the challenges involved in the situation. What I'd like to see people ask is, specifically, precisely, what exactly would you do and how would you fund it and how would you sustain it? And typically, what you get is a bunch of mumbo jumbo," he said.
BOMBING INSURGENTS
Russia bombed Syria for a third day in a row on Friday, mainly hitting areas held by rival insurgent groups rather than the Islamic State fighters it said it was targeting and drawing an increasingly angry response from the West.
Russian technicians attached a bomb to a plane at a base in Syria on Saturday. Russian officials say their airstrikes are targeting the Islamic State, but they have mainly hit other insurgents. Alexander Kots/Komsomolskaya Pravda, via Associated Press
MOSCOW — Ratcheting up the confrontation over the Syria war, Russia said Monday that its “volunteer” ground forces would join the fight, and NATO warned the Kremlin after at least one Russian warplane trespassed into Turkey’s airspace.
The saber-rattling on both sides reflected a dangerous new big-power entanglement in the war, as longstanding differences between Russia and the United States over President Bashar al-Assad of Syria and his opponents increasingly play out not only in the halls of the United Nations but on the battlefield in Syria.
Russia squared off with Turkey and its NATO allies, calling the air incursion on Saturday an innocent mistake because of foul weather — a claim American officials rejected.
News services said late Monday that a second airspace violation might have been committed on Sunday, but that report could not be immediately confirmed.
The Russian air and ground deployments in Syria challenge the regional policies of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, President Obama and NATO.
A Russian ground force could fundamentally alter the conflict, which has left 250,000 people dead and displaced half the country’s population since it started in 2011.
Although President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia said he would not put troops in Syria, the plan for so-called volunteers was disclosed Monday by his top military liaison to the Parliament, Adm. Vladimir Komoyedov. It seemed similar to Russia’s stealth tactic in using soldiers to seize Crimea from Ukraine in March of 2014 and to aid pro-Moscow rebels in eastern Ukraine.
Moreover, American military officials said they believed that more than 600 Russian military personnel were already on the ground in Syria, not counting aircrews, and that tents for nearly 2,000 people had been seen at Russia’s air base near Latakia, in northwest Syria near the Turkish border.
Russia intensified the airstrikes it began in Syria last week, with new attacks on territory near Palmyra that is indisputably held by the Islamic State. But Russian targets remain a matter of deep contention.
Russian officials say they are targeting the Islamic State, though their bombs have mainly hit territories held by other insurgents who oppose Mr. Assad, Russia’s ally. The strikes have hit the Army of Conquest, an Islamist faction that includes the Nusra Front, Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, as well as more-secular groups that often fight alongside it, including some that have received covert American aid.
The Obama administration, by contrast, says its own airstrikes against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria can succeed only with a political transition that ends with Mr. Assad’s removal.
The administration’s position was ridiculed Monday by Sergey V. Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, who said the American airstrikes, which began more than a year ago, had done little militarily. In comments carried by Russia’s official Tass news agency, Mr. Lavrov said that even the Americans had acknowledged their faltering efforts to create a force of so-called moderate insurgents in Syria.
“Nobody knows about these people,” he said. “Nobody’s really heard about the moderate opposition.”
Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif of Iran, Mr. Assad’s regional ally, was also dismissive of the American efforts in Syria, both to unseat Mr. Assad and to combat the Islamic State. Sounding emboldened by the Russian airstrikes, Mr. Zarif said at a talk in New York that there was a difference between Russia — which was invited by Mr. Assad to help — and the American-led coalition that has been bombing Syria. “Why are you there?” he said. “Who gave you the right to be there?”
The Russian disclosure that so-called volunteer forces might soon be in Syria fueled speculation of an impending ground offensive against insurgents, one that would involve unprecedented coordination among Mr. Assad’s allies.
It could include Syria’s army fortified by forces from Russia, Iran and the Lebanese militia Hezbollah, which has deployed fighters in Syria for years to help Mr. Assad. Likely targets are Army of Conquest insurgents who threaten Mr. Assad’s coastal strongholds from territory they have seized in Idlib Province, in the north.
After the Turkish airspace incident — which, at least in theory, could have escalated into a confrontation between Russia and NATO — an Obama administration official called Russia’s behavior “deliberately provocative,” while Admiral Komoyedov said his country’s “volunteers” on the way to Syria “cannot be stopped.”
As the global powers postured, gaps deepened between local and regional participants in the war, and predictions that the Russian action would strengthen radicals in the Syrian insurgency appeared to be accurate.
Insurgent groups opposing both Mr. Assad and the Islamic State, including some supported by the Americans, declared that they would no longer participate in any peace process sponsored by Russia, which they accused of occupying their country. Some vowed to work more closely with the Nusra Front.
Forty-one insurgent factions said in a statement that Russia’s “brutal occupation has cut the road to any political solution,” the latest challenge to diplomatic efforts by a special United Nations envoy, Staffan de Mistura.
Separately, in a statement laden with sectarian language, a group of prominent Saudi Arabian clerics called on Muslim and Arab countries to support a jihad, or holy war, against Mr. Assad and his Russian and Iranian patrons — even comparing the Syrian war to the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s and the jihad against it that drew fighters from around the world.
The statement followed a declaration from the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, blessing the Russian fight in Syria.
Even the Islamic State, which appeared to be a minor participant in the events of the past week, sought to remind the outside world of its presence, destroying more antiquities. Syrian officials and local activists confirmed that Islamic State demolitionists had wrecked a renowned triple arch at the beginning of a Roman colonnade at the ancient city of Palmyra.
The Russian air offensive turned on Monday to that area, the oasis town of Tadmur and the adjacent ruins of Palmyra, a symbolically important site for the global outrage over the Islamic State’s policy of desecrating archaeological treasures.
A spokesman for the Russian operation, Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, said at a briefing in Moscow that a pair of Su-25 fighter bombers had attacked Islamic State armored vehicles near Tadmur, destroying 20 tanks, three rocket launchers and an ammunition depot. The strike was among the 15 daytime sorties he said Russian pilots had flown.
The potential combination of Russian ground forces and aerial attacks particularly threatens to undermine Turkey’s Syria policy, which aims for the establishment of a “safe zone” along the Turkish border where some Syrian refugees could return in the future.
The Russian air incursion happened on Saturday, when Turkish fighter jets scrambled to intercept a warplane that trespassed into Turkish airspace. On Monday, NATO issued a warning to Russia, as the United States began urgent consultations with Turkey over what they called “next steps.”
Russia’s actions were “an unacceptable violation” of Turkish airspace, NATO’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, said after meeting with the Turkish foreign minister, Feridun Sinirlioglu. Mr. Stoltenberg added, “Russia’s actions are not contributing to the security and stability of the region.”
The Turkish ministry summoned Russia’s ambassador to Ankara, the capital; demanded that the violation not recur; and said that Russia would be responsible for any further escalation, Turkish officials said.
“The steps Russia is taking and the bombing campaign in Syria are quite unacceptable to Turkey,” President Erdogan told reporters at the Istanbul airport on Sunday. “Unfortunately, Russia is making a grave mistake.”
Turkey and Russia have a strong bilateral relationship, but those relations have soured in recent months because of deep differences over Syria and the stalling of a pipeline project to carry Russian gas to Turkey.
Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter, speaking in Madrid during a news conference with his Spanish counterpart, said American officials were conferring with Turkish authorities over the next steps.
The Russian military spokesman, General Konashenkov, said that the Russian jet’s pilot had mistakenly entered Turkish airspace in bad weather as the aircraft approached its base near Latakia, about 18 miles from the Turkish border.
A senior American official rejected the claim. “The pilot would have known where they were,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to comment by name. “I’m not a fighter pilot, but there was no way this was accidental. The notion that this was accidental is far-fetched.”
Did U.S. weapons supplied to Syrian rebels draw Russia into the conflict?
.. a more accurate heading? .. Rebel Gains draw Russia into Syrian conflict. ..
"Vladimir Putin Plunges Into a Caldron in Syria: Saving Assad"
A Lebanese army vehicle fires a TOW-II missile in the village of Taybeh, near Baalbek, eastern Lebanon, Wednesday, June 10. (Bilal Hussein/AP)
By Liz Sly October 11 at 8:20 PM
BEIRUT — American antitank missiles supplied to Syrian rebels are playing an unexpectedly prominent role in shaping the Syrian battlefield, giving the conflict the semblance of a proxy war between the United States and Russia, despite President Obama’s express desire to avoid one.
The U.S.-made BGM-71 TOW missiles were delivered under a two-year-old covert program coordinated between the United States and its allies to help vetted Free Syrian Army groups in their fight against President Bashar al-Assad. Now that Russia has entered the war in support of Assad, they are taking on a greater significance than was originally intended.
So successful have they been in driving rebel gains in northwestern Syria that rebels call the missile the “Assad Tamer,” a play on the word Assad, which means lion. And in recent days they have been used with great success to slow the Russian-backed offensive aimed at recapturing ground from the rebels.
[Syrian forces begin ground offensive backed by Russian air and sea power] .. http://wapo.st/1Zc3nT1
have been posted on YouTube showing rebels firing the U.S.-made missiles at Russian-made tanks and armored vehicles belonging to the Syrian army. Appearing as twirling balls of light, they zigzag across the Syrian countryside until they find and blast their target in a ball of flame.
The rebels claim they took out 24 tanks and armored vehicles on the first day, and the toll has risen daily since then.
“It was a tank massacre,” said Capt. Mustafa Moarati, whose Tajamu al-Izza group says it destroyed seven tanks and armored vehicles Wednesday.
More missiles are on the way, he said. New supplies arrived after the Russian deployments began, he said, and the rebels’ allies have promised further deliveries soon, bringing echoes of the role played by U.S.-supplied Stinger antiaircraft missiles in forcing the Soviet Union to withdraw from Afghanistan in the 1980s.
The hits also plunged Washington into what amounts to a proxy war of sorts with Moscow, despite Obama’s insistence this month that “we’re not going to make Syria into a proxy war between the United States and Russia.”
“It’s a proxy war by happenstance,” said Jeff White of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, who counted at least 15 tanks and vehicles destroyed or disabled in one day. “The rebels happen to have a lot of TOWs in their inventory. The regime happened to attack them with Russian support. I don’t see it as a proxy war by decision.”
Whether it will become one is one of the key questions confronting the Obama administration in the wake of President Vladimir Putin’s decision to throw Russia’s support behind Assad’s regime.
The TOW missile program overseen by the CIA is entirely separate from a failed program run by the Pentagon that was intended to influence the outcome of the other war being waged in Syria, the one in the northeastern part of the country against the Islamic State.
The CIA program got underway before the Pentagon one, in early 2014, with the goal of propping up the flagging rebellion against Assad’s rule by delivering training, small arms, ammunition and the antitank missiles, which have proved instrumental in eroding the government’s key advantage over the lightly armed rebel force — its tanks and heavy armor.
Supplied mostly from stocks owned by Saudi Arabia, delivered across the Turkish border and stamped with CIA approval, the missiles were intended to fulfill another of the Obama administration’s goals in Syria — Assad’s negotiated exit from power. The plan, as described by administration officials, was to exert sufficient military pressure on Assad’s forces to persuade him to compromise — but not so much that his government would precipitously collapse and leave a dangerous power vacuum in Damascus.
Instead, the Russian military intervened to shore up the struggling Syrian army — an outcome that was not intended.
“A primary driving factor in Russia’s calculus was the realization that the Assad regime was militarily weakening and in danger of losing territory in northwestern Syria. The TOWs played an outsize role in that,” said Oubai Shahbandar, a Dubai-based consultant who used to work with the Syrian opposition.
“I think even the Americans were surprised at how successful they’ve been,” he added.
It was no accident, say U.S. officials and military analysts, that the first targets of Russian airstrikes in Syria were the locations where the rebels armed with TOW missiles have made the most substantial gains and where they most directly threaten Assad’s hold over his family’s heartland in the coastal province of Latakia.
Those areas were also where the first offensive since the Russian intervention was launched, with columns of Syrian armored vehicles and tanks setting out from government strongholds into the countryside of the provinces of Hama and Idlib.
What the TOWs have done, White said, is “offset the regime’s advantage in armor. The TOWs have cut away at that edge, and that’s what we’ve seen playing out. It’s like the Stingers in Afghanistan.”
It is unclear whether the TOWs will be able to change the course of the war, as did the Stinger antiaircraft missiles introduced in the 1980s by the CIA in Afghanistan, where they were used by the mujahideen to shoot down Russian helicopters and paralyze the Soviet army.
Now that the Russians have introduced more intensive and heavier airstrikes and, for the first time, combat helicopters have been seen in videos strafing villages in the Hama area, the TOW missiles may only be able to slow, but not block, government advances.
The rebels have appealed for the delivery of Stinger missiles or their equivalents to counter the new threat from the air, but U.S. officials say that is unlikely. The Obama administration has repeatedly vetoed past requests from the rebels, as well as their Turkish and Saudi allies, for the delivery of antiaircraft missiles, out of concerns that they could fall into extremist hands.
But the TOW missile program is already in progress, and all the indications are that it will continue. Saudi Arabia, the chief supplier, has pledged a “military” response to the Russian incursion, and rebel commanders say they have been assured more will arrive imminently.
Under the terms of the program, the missiles are delivered in limited quantities, and the rebel groups must return the used canisters to secure more, to avoid stockpiling or resale.
The system appears to have helped prevent the missiles from falling into extremist hands. Robert Ford, who was serving as U.S. envoy to Syria when the program got underway, said he was aware of only two TOWs obtained by the al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra, while “dozens and dozens” have been fired by moderate groups.
“Nusra made a big public display of having these two missiles,” said Ford, who is now a fellow at the Middle East Institute. Had they acquired more, he said, “they would be using them now.”
The supplies of the missiles, manufactured by Raytheon, are sourced mainly from stocks owned by the Saudi government, which purchased 13,795 of them .. http://www.dsca.mil/major-arms-sales/kingdom-saudi-arabia-tube-launched-optically-tracked-wire-guided-2a2b-radio .. in 2013, for expected delivery this year, according to Defense Department documents informing Congress of the sale. Because end-user agreements require that the buyer inform the United States of their ultimate destination, U.S. approval is implicit, said Shahbandar, a former Pentagon adviser.
But no decision is required from the Obama administration for the program to continue, Shahbandar said. “It doesn’t need an American green light. A yellow light is enough,” he said. “It’s a covert effort and it’s technically deniable, but that’s what proxy wars are.”
Read more:
Syrian forces begin ground offensive backed by Russia air and sea power http://wapo.st/1Zc3nT1
Liz Sly is the Post’s Beirut bureau chief. She has spent more than 15 years covering the Middle East, including the Iraq war. Other postings include Africa, China and Afghanistan.
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