When Russian President Vladimir Putin gave the green light to Russian aerial bombing of rebel-held positions in southwestern Syria two weeks ago, he knew he was asking for trouble.
And he appears to be getting plenty of it.
Putin knows that in approving the operation, he wasn’t simply enabling Syrian President Bashar Assad and his Syrian military forces to extend the regime’s control to an area that has been controlled by various rebel militia for seven years.
The Syrian military is an empty shell. Russia effectively serves as the Syrian Air Force. Iran and Iranian-controlled groups control Syria’s ground forces.
Israeli intelligence assesses that thousands of Iranian forces are deployed in Syria. The troops Iran commands are not predominantly Syrian. Rather, most of the ground troops in the so-called Syrian military are Iranian-controlled Hezbollah terrorists from Lebanon, and members of Iranian-controlled Shiite militia, which is in turn comprised of fighters from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran. Israeli intelligence estimates that some seven thousand Hezbollah forces and 9,000 Shiite militia members are deployed to Syria to fight on behalf of Assad’s regime.
In other words, when Putin ordered the operation against rebel-controlled Deraa province along Syria’s border with Jordan, and signaled that once Deraa was conquered, the operation would extend to Quneitra province along the Syrian border with Israel, he knew that he was fighting to enable Iranian forces and Iranian-controlled forces to take over Syria’s borders with Jordan and Israel.
Since the Russia-led operation against Deraa began, Israeli commentators have assessed that Putin wished to wrap up the offensive ahead of his July 16 summit with President Donald Trump in Helsinki so that he could present Trump with a fait accompli. A Russian triumph would convince Trump that U.S. operations in Syria are futile, and he would have accept Russia’s predominance, with Iran in the war-torn country.
At the outset of the attack, Putin’s assessed position made perfect sense.
The implication of the Deraa campaign is that Putin disregarded the ceasefire deal he concluded with Trump last July. In that deal, Putin agreed not to attack southwestern Syria and the U.S. effectively acquiesced to Iranian control of the rest of the country through its proxies – including Assad himself. Rather than stridently object to the operation, as the administration did in May when Assad began a similar one, and so end it before it got off the ground, the Trump administration’s response was muted.
These early responses empowered the Russians and their Iranian partners to push forward and extend their control over much of Deraa province, causing some 270,000 civilians to flee their homes and run to the Syrian borders with Jordan and Israel.
But over the past two or three days, there have been indications that both the U.S. and Israel adopted positions regarding the offensive that, according to some reports have stopped the Russian-Syrian-Iranian advance in its tracks. Putin, these reports intimate, has become convinced there is no reason to continue because the operation will extend past July 16.
His plan to negotiate from strength has failed, and now he is looking for an escape hatch.
To that effect, on Wednesday, Jerusalem and Moscow announced that five days before his meeting with Trump, Putin will host Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Moscow. The situation in Syria will be the focus of their discussions.
What has changed in the last several days to convince Putin that he will not arrive in Helsinki as the all-powerful power broker in Syria? What has made him turn to Netanyahu for a way out of the crisis he instigated with his bombing campaign? And what can he expect to hear from Netanyahu?
Bolton argued that Iran is the strategic threat to U.S. interests in Syria, not Assad. In Bolton’s words, “I don’t think Assad [i.e., the Assad regime and the Syrian armed forces] is the strategic issue. I think Iran is the strategic issue.”
Bolton intimated that during Trump’s July 16 meeting with Putin, he will not try to convince the Russian leader to conform with the de-escalation agreement from last July. Certainly, he won’t be adding more sweeteners to the deal – like the Tanf air base – to convince Putin to stop betraying his word.
Rather, Bolton said, the administration is interested in making a completely different deal. In his words, “There are possibilities for doing a larger negotiation on helping to get Iranian forces out of Syria and back into Iran, which would be a significant step forward.”
Also Tuesday, the Israeli Air Force reportedly bombed an Iranian weapons depot that served Hezbollah and Shiite militia forces in Deraa. Israel also reportedly attackedHezbollah positions in the city. If these reports are accurate, the Russia-led Syrian-Iranian advance was halted after it was met by an Israeli-supported defense by rebel groups.
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