The Syrian War Will Continue for Years, Unless the US and Russia Agree to
End It
By Patrick Cockburn, The Independent
18 March 18
The Kurds live in fear of once more being betrayed by their great power
allies. But, for good self-interested reasons that have little to do with US
gratitude to the Kurds for their role in the defeat of Isis, Washington is
unlikely to run away from its alliance with the Kurds
Will the war in Syria ever end?" After seven years of conflict, the same
question is being asked by politicians, diplomats, fighters in the front
line, and families cowering in unlit basements to escape devastating
bombardments from Ghouta to Afrin.
When I asked Aldar Khalil, a top Syrian Kurdish leader whose forces control
a quarter of Syria, about the chances of peace in an interview in north-east
Syria, he grimly but confidently predicted that the war would go on "for
another four years, until a new balance of forces becomes clear".
We must speak of multiple armed conflicts in Syria rather than a single war
so that when one military confrontation gets close to its final chapter, it
is swiftly replaced by another. Isis, the greatest threat of 2014 to 2017,
is largely eliminated, but the new focus of violence is the escalating
struggle between Turkey and the two or three million Syrian Kurds.
The Syrian Army is advancing into Eastern Ghouta and the likelihood is that
President Bashar al-Assad will soon have almost complete control of the
capital for the first time since 2012. One outcome could be for the rebel
fighters to leave with light weapons for opposition or Turkish-held
territory in southern and northern Syria, while the bulk of the civilian
population would be amnestied and stay where they are. But the Syrian war is
littered with compromise solutions which never quite came about because
there were too many players to agree on a common course of action.
One siege may be ending in Eastern Ghouta, but another is beginning 200
miles to the north in the Kurdish enclave of Afrin. The Turkish army and its
Arab auxiliaries describing themselves as the Free Syrian Army, but, going
by their own videos much closer to Isis and al-Qaeda, say they have
surrounded the city. It will ultimately fall but it is unclear if the 10,000
Kurdish fighters there will fight to the death. If they do make a last
stand, then Afrin will join the many other Syrian cities which have been
reduced to rubble.
In the sieges of East Aleppo and Eastern Ghouta, there was a propaganda
advantage to the opposition in holding out for as long as they could because
of the international outcry against the Syrian army and government. But
foreign states and the international media are largely ignoring atrocities
in Afrin that would get wall-to-wall coverage if were happening in Eastern
Ghouta.
For the Kurds, there are no good options in Afrin, though it might be better
from their point of view not to resist to the bitter end in the hope that
this would avoid the city being pounded to pieces, as has happened so often
elsewhere.
In Afrin, the Kurds have no foreign allies to come to their rescue as
occurred during the famous siege of Kobane by Isis in 2014-2015. The US said
that it never had an interest in the enclave and the Russians, whose planes
and anti-aircraft missiles control the skies over north-west Syria, have
evidently agreed that Turkey should take Afrin. The reasons behind this
decision illustrate how great power rivalries are fuelling the war in Syria
and stop it coming to an end.
Advantages for the Russians include bringing Turkey into permanent conflict
with the US, which is allied to the Kurds in the great swathe of territory
they control thanks to US backing east of the Euphrates River. The Russians
may also want to teach the Kurds a lesson for putting all their eggs in the
American basket, not that the Kurds have much choice. They cannot hope to
defend the open plains of north east Syria without the threat of a
devastating air strike by the US.
The Kurds have a well-developed sense of victimhood and live in fear of once
more being betrayed by their great power allies. But, for good
self-interested reasons that have little to do with US gratitude to the
Kurds for their role in the defeat of Isis, Washington is unlikely to run
away from its alliance with the Kurds, at least for the moment. The US needs
them as a force on the ground to back up its air power if it is to remain a
player in Syria. The alternative is to accept a Russian victory in the
country. As the last seven years have shown, the only possible force capable
of fulfilling this role is the Kurdish YPG.
The Russians, for their part, know that it was their military intervention
in Syria which in a single stroke restored their status as a superpower or
something like it, a position they had lost when the Soviet Union
disintegrated in 1991. When the Syrian crisis first exploded in 2011, a
senior Iraqi official asked an American general what was so different
between the situation in Libya, where Gaddafi had just been ousted and
killed, and that in Syria. The general replied in a short succinct sentence,
saying that in Syria "Russia is back".
The rivalry of great and regional powers is fuelling the Syrian wars and
preventing them coming to an end. But, paradoxically, the US and Russia also
present the best chance of bringing these savage conflicts to an end. They
alone are the heavy hitters with enough political and military muscle to
push the regional and local players towards a compromise peace.
But we have not reached that stage yet when everybody feels there is nothing
left to fight for and clear winners and losers have emerged on the
battlefield. It is true that some issues have been decided: President Bashar
al-Assad will stay in power and he already controls about 12 million of the
16 million Syrians still in the country. After recapturing Eastern Ghouta,
he will control all of Damascus and Aleppo as well as almost all the other
cities. He may well feel that he is on his way to achieving his ambition to
retake the whole of Syria, however long it may take.
But control of the great powers is not absolute: commentators often
mistakenly imagine that local proxies in Syria and Iraq are more obedient to
their sponsors than they really are. This can be true when the proxies are
under intense political or military pressure, but otherwise they resent too
close compliance to the orders of their outside backers whose interests
frequently diverge from their own. To adapt the American definition of
statesman - "a statesman is a politician who stays bought" - no party in
Syria and Iraq stays bought, if they can possibly avoid it.
It is easy to describe the wars in Syria in terms realpolitik, but it is
wrong to believe that the ongoing turmoil can be controlled by anybody. The
players and wildcards are too many for this to happen. Syria is often
described as "a quagmire", but it is more useful to picture it as a great
poisonous stew in which the ingredients are contending sects, ethnicities
and foreign powers that continually produce new and lethal combinations. In
these circumstances, Aldar Khalil's forecast of another four years of war
begins to sound almost optimistic.
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