WorldAffairs:The Crisis in Syria: A Geopolitical Reshuffling of Power (Nov 5, 2019)

The withdrawal of US troops from northern Syria has had grave repercussions for the security and stability of the entire region. The Turkish military has invaded northern Syria, killing dozens of Kurdish civilians and forcing over 200,000 Kurds to flee. In the absence of US troops, Russian and Syrian troops have rushed in to fill the power vacuum. Meanwhile, hundreds of ISIS fighters have escaped detention. Brett McGurk, distinguished lecturer at Stanford University and former special presidential envoy for the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS, and David Phillips, director of peace-building and rights at Columbia University and former senior advisor to the US Department of State, make sense of the cascading impacts with WorldAffairs co-host Ray Suarez.

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The New York Review of Books: Between Regime and Rebels: A Survey of Syria’s Alawi Sect

The regime’s heavy reliance on Alawis in the army units and militias dispatched to the front-lines, coupled with the community’s relatively small size, have resulted in disproportionate losses of the sect’s young men. At the same time, this predominance of the sect in the military—combined with the atrocities that some fighters perpetrated, at times in front of cameras—have, in the eyes of many Sunni Syrians, tainted all Alawis with guilt by association. In addition, the corruption and war-profiteering, mainly benefitting high-ranking regime officers and mukhabarat (secret police) agents, who are largely Alawi, reinforced the image of Alawis as corrupt, privileged and rich, in the eyes of Sunnis. The Alawis are fully aware of this image and are quick to reject it. [...]

After Bashar’s father, Hafez al-Assad, seized power in 1970, after decades of political instability in Syria and frequent coups, he worked to stabilize the regime and ouster-proof it. One step he took was to purge anyone who appeared disloyal, creating a core of the regime largely made up of Alawi officers and Assad relatives. That system prevailed for the next forty years. Over the decade preceding the 2011 uprising, about 87 percent of high-ranking Syrian Army officers, such as division commanders, were Alawi. The various branches of the Mukhabarat are dominated and commanded by Alawis, as are all the elite military and militia units, including the 4th Mechanized Division, the Tiger Forces, the Republican Guard, and the Air Force. According to the US researcher Hicham Bou Nasif, who interviewed dozens of Sunni officers in the Syrian military in 2014, “since the early 1980s, Alawis have made up 80–85 percent of every new cohort graduating from the military academy.”

Facing a grave challenge to its monopoly of power from 2011 onward, the Assad regime sought to ensure the loyalty or neutrality of Syria’s minorities. Before the war and the demographic changes it wrought, about 65 percent of Syria’s population of 21 million were Sunni Arabs, 10 percent were Sunni Kurds, another 10 percent were Alawis, and about 5 percent were Christian. To ensure the allegiance of Assad’s base, the Alawi community, the regime employed several tactics. First, in speeches during the early days of the uprising, he portrayed the protesters as Sunni extremists and armed terrorists. Second, in a move apparently designed to ensure a radicalization of the opposition and to weaken its secular-democratic elements, in the first months of the uprising, the regime released hundreds of jihadists from prison, while jailing peaceful activists. Third, the regime staged provocations such as sending men to shoot into the air or cut tires of cars in Alawi neighborhoods to instill fear, and then went about distributing guns and sandbags to Alawi inhabitants to reinforce a sense of their being a community under threat from the opposition—even though, at that stage, there were no armed rebels. [...]

The militarization and religious radicalization of the opposition, and the division of the country’s territory between the warring sides, soon hardened sectarian divisions. Members of non-Sunni, minority communities mostly fled opposition-controlled areas. In areas under regime control, where about 70 percent of Syria’s population now resides, members of different sects do live side by side, but relations are strained. Samira adopted the regime’s narrative, blaming the opposition for the rise in sectarian hatred: “They played the sectarianism card on purpose, to make the different components of society hate each other, and killings were based on that to augment the hatred and sectarianism.”

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The Atlantic: Syria’s New Assad Statues Send a Sinister Message: ‘We Are Back’

Hafez’s statue was also returned, in October 2018, to the center of the eastern city of Deir Ezzor after being removed by the regime in 2011, for fear it would be smashed by protesters. In August 2018, Hafez’s statue in Homs was feted by regime loyalists after it underwent a major refurbishment that included installing new lights and water fountains around it. The city, once called “the capital of the revolution,” reverted to the Assads in 2014 following a crippling siege and military campaign that left much of central Homs in ruins and emptied of its original residents. On April 15, a new bust of Bassel al-Assad, Bashar’s older brother and Hafez’s handpicked successor who was killed in a car crash in 1994, was unveiled in Deir Ezzor; this one was smaller than the one of him riding a horse that was toppled by protesters in April 2011. There are no statues yet of Bashar, who inherited power from Hafez in 2000, but billboards of his face along with defiant slogans are plastered everywhere in Syria. [...]

Using statues as expressions of power, control, and hegemony is not unique to Syria; it is a mainstay of practically all authoritarian regimes, including the former Soviet Union, North Korea, and many Central Asian republics. But while there’s an attempt in these places to rally the nation around a symbol or a leader, in Syria the intent seems to be different: The statues are meant to reinforce fear of a regime crackdown on dissent, especially during and after a crisis. The closest parallel is neighboring Iraq, where statues of Saddam Hussein multiplied in the 1980s and ’90s as he faced internal and external pressures. [...]

Manaf Tlass, Bashar’s childhood friend and a former Republican Guard general who defected in 2012, had his own take on the return of the statues. “Bashar has declared victory, but so far he has not been able to harvest its fruits,” Tlass told me when I met with him in Paris, where he has lived for the past seven years. Tlass points to the fact that the European Union and the U.S. recently increased—not relaxed—sanctions on Assad’s regime, as well as the widespread domestic discontent among large segments of the population over miserable economic conditions and recent fuel shortages. “[Bashar] knows in his heart of hearts that he has not really won, and the statues are a way of convincing himself otherwise.”

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Commune: Syria from Revolution to Civil War

I grew up in Syria. In state-run schools, we were reminded daily that we received free education thanks to the Ba’ath party’s revolution in 1963. We should be grateful, our teachers told us. In the fourth grade, like millions of students across Syria, I memorized songs praising the Ba’ath Party and its leader, Hafez al-Assad: We shine like the morning, we carry the gun / Our blood will water the soil. A loyal Syrian must recite quotes by the party leader, quotes memorized from a 150-page book entitled Nationality. In exams, one could be penalized for misremembering a single word.  [...]

I grew up believing that all other ethnic groups might kill us if they had the chance. And then, one day in eighth grade, it seemed that nightmare was coming true. In 2004, the Kurdish uprising in Qamishli happened. Following the requisite flag salute, the principal announced that our school trip was canceled because “there is trouble in the country.” Later, I overheard someone in the yard exclaim, “The Kurds are coming to kill us!” We were told that the Kurds were planning to target Alawite women. The teacher described an Alawite commander who the Kurds had tied to the back of a car and dragged through the streets of Qamishli until his flesh came off. [...]

Many observers and participants, myself included, argued behind closed doors and on social media platforms that the uprisings would have lost momentum had the president replaced the governor of Daraa and held the murdering police officers accountable. But Assad the Younger followed the dictum established by Assad the Older: just kill them all. This approach poured gasoline on the fire, the brutality of the police swelling the ever-larger and ever-angrier protests. Each day, there was a funeral for a protestor killed the day before. The funeral would turn into a protest, and the pallbearers would find themselves inside the casket the next day, surrounded by an even angrier crowd. People would attend funerals without knowing who had been killed—their main aim became the protest itself.  [...]

You might be forgiven for thinking that, after all this horror, the entire country would be against the government and sympathetic to those calling for justice, reform, and dignity. But, in fact, the majority of the country did not join the uprising. This silent majority comprised three rough categories: the hardliners, the bourgeoisie, and the undecided. Hardliners knew exactly what was happening and supported it unequivocally. Without Assad, they believed, there was no country. The bourgeoisie, unlike the hardliners, cared only about the security of their own families and businesses. They refused to pick a side. People in this category were the first to flee the country. And the undecided, finally, could not figure out what was happening. However, many members of this group made up their minds rather quickly and joined the hardliners. Their conversion to opponents of the uprising was mainly achieved by the media narrative propagated on state television, as well as by the militarization of the conflict. [...]

This was just one take on who had killed the soldiers. Some suggested that the soldiers were killed by fellow soldiers who refused to watch innocent people massacred. It’s important to note here that weapons are abundant in cities on the border. Every house has a gun. Whatever the true story, this incident opened a new chapter in the uprising, with two important consequences. First, many Syrians saw the names of the dead soldiers as confirmation of the government narrative, which aligned undecided Syrians with the regime. Second, these events created a split within activist circles, as parts of the movement took positions for and against the use of arms. 

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Haaretz: The Knesset Candidate Who Says Zionism Encourages anti-Semitism and Calls Netanyahu 'Arch-murderer'

Cassif is third on the slate of Knesset candidates in Hadash (the Hebrew acronym for the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality), the successor to Israel’s Communist Party. He holds the party’s “Jewish slot,” replacing MK Dov Khenin. Cassif is likely to draw fire from opponents and be a conspicuous figure in the next Knesset, following the April 9 election. [...]

“I call it ‘creeping genocide.’ Genocide is not only a matter of taking people to gas chambers. When Yeshayahu Leibowitz used the term ‘Judeo-Nazis,’ people asked him, ‘How can you say that? Are we about to build gas chambers?’ To that, he had two things to say. First, if the whole difference between us and the Nazis boils down to the fact that we’re not building gas chambers, we’re already in trouble. And second, maybe we won’t use gas chambers, but the mentality that exists today in Israel – and he said this 40 years ago – would allow it. I’m afraid that today, after four years of such an extreme government, it possesses even greater legitimacy.

“But you know what, put aside ‘genocide’ – ethnic cleansing is taking place there. And that ethnic cleansing is also being carried out by means of killing, although mainly by way of humiliation and of making life intolerable. The trampling of human dignity. It reminds me of Primo Levi’s ‘If This Is a Man.’” [...]

Cassif voices clearly and cogently positions that challenge the public discourse in Israel, and does so with ardor and charisma. Four candidates vied for Hadash’s Jewish slot, and they all delivered speeches at the convention. The three candidates who lost to him – Efraim Davidi, Yaela Raanan and the head of the party’s Tel Aviv branch, Noa Levy – described their activity and their guiding principles. When they spoke, there was the regular buzz of an audience that’s waiting for lunch. But when Cassif took the stage, the effect was magnetic. [...]

Cassif terms himself an explicit anti-Zionist. “There are three reasons for that,” he says. “To begin with, Zionism is a colonialist movement, and as a socialist, I am against colonialism. Second, as far as I am concerned, Zionism is racist in ideology and in practice. I am not referring to the definition of race theory – even though there are also some who impute that to the Zionist movement – but to what I call Jewish supremacy. No socialist can accept that. My supreme value is equality, and I can’t abide any supremacy – Jewish or Arab. The third thing is that Zionism, like other ethno-nationalistic movements, splits the working class and all weakened groups. Instead of uniting them in a struggle for social justice, for equality, for democracy, it divides the exploited classes and the enfeebled groups, and by that means strengthens the rule of capital.”

Reuters: Explainer: Where do the Kurds fit into Syria's war?

The main Syrian Kurdish faction, the Democratic Union Party (PYD), began to establish a foothold in the north early in the war as government forces withdrew to put down the anti-Assad uprising elsewhere. An affiliated militia, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), secured the region. [...]

SDF influence widened to Manbij and Raqqa as IS was defeated in both. It has also reached deep into Deir al-Zor, where the SDF is still fighting IS. The SDF, which also includes Arab and other groups, says it has more than 70,000 fighters. [...]

The PYD is heavily influenced by the ideas of Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan, a founding member of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has waged a 34-year insurgency in Turkey for Kurdish political and cultural rights. Ocalan has been in jail since 1999 in Turkey. He is convicted of treason.[...]

Syria’s Baathist state systematically oppressed the Kurds before the war. Yet the YPG and Damascus have broadly stayed out of each other’s way during the conflict, despite occasional clashes. They also have been seen to cooperate against shared foes, notably in and around Aleppo.  

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Bloomberg: Turkish Outrage Over Khashoggi Hints at Changing World Order

The contrast with U.S. President Donald Trump’s more tepid response -- Trump said Erdogan had been “pretty rough on Saudi Arabia” -- underscores changes in the post-Cold War order, as Washington’s global dominance declines alongside its promotion of so-called values-based foreign policies. It’s also illustrated by the brazen nature of the killing, carried out by officials of one U.S. ally in the territory of another.[...]

Take this Saturday, when Turkey, a North Atlantic Treaty Organization member, will host a summit to discuss the return of refugees to Syria, with Russia, Germany and France. The U.S. won’t be there. Washington has been similarly absent from the main negotiations on ending Syria’s 7-year-old war, which are led by Russia, Iran and Turkey.[...]

Iran, meanwhile, is finding some succor from America’s European allies, as well as from China and Russia as it resists U.S. economic pressure. None has followed the U.S. in withdrawing from the 2015 nuclear deal that lifted economic sanctions on Iran in exchange for restrictions on its nuclear fuel program. In fact, the other signatories are looking at ways to get around the U.S. sanctions due to be reimposed in November.[...]

Yet weaponizing the oil price to harm the U.S. would penalize American efforts to pressure Iran by sanctioning its oil sales -- a core Saudi interest. The Saudi military, meanwhile, is heavily reliant on a sophisticated air force, built around a core of 170 U.S. F-15 and 150 European Tornado and Typhoon planes. Western sanctions that cut off parts for maintenance would be crippling; the Saudi air campaign in Yemen could, for example, quickly stall.

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Foreign Policy: Syria’s Three Wars

It is not surprising, then, that one of the first firefights in Syria’s ongoing civil war took place near the city of Jisr al-Shughur in western Idlib, where insurgents assaulted a military outpost, killing more than 120 people. After four years of fighting, the Syrian regime lost control of Idlib in 2015. In 2017, as the United States pushed jihadi forces out of Raqqa in Syria’s east, survivors fled to Idlib. Their numbers were swelled more recently by men of all political stripes seeking to evade conscription into the Syrian army, which has been hoovering up all males between 18 and 51. In the interim, Turkey inserted about 1,300 troops and a dozen observation posts into the province. These were meant to contain any threat to Turkey emanating from Idlib, as well as provide the country with a forward base for further operations, as Ankara somewhat unrealistically described its mission. Instead, Ankara was primarily focused on corralling extremists who might otherwise make their way to Turkey, keeping refugees from crossing the border, and attempting to filter hard-core jihadis out of the larger rebel population, even as it sustained more moderate rebels as weapons to be used against the Assad regime. Once the civil war is over, Turkey will likely aim to convert a long-term occupation of Idlib into a permanent arrangement as part of a larger postwar settlement. [...]

Damascus has indicated its readiness to move against the rebels in Idlib soon, but a drumbeat of warnings from the United States, United Nations, Turkey, and others against a reckless offensive seems to have deterred the expected assault for now. From the regime’s perspective, the delay represents pragmatic restraint. A campaign in Idlib would be labor-intensive, and the regime lacks manpower. It would also be difficult—the foreign fighters, especially Central Asians, who have lived and battled in Syria for years have nowhere to go and would fight to the death. Intensive combat would push a wave of desperate refugees toward the Turkish border, which might inject unwelcome vigor into Turkish operations in the province. In addition, neither of Syria’s backers, Russia and Iran, want to be tarred as facilitators of the humanitarian disaster that most observers expect to result from an offensive. It is no wonder, then, that things have been put on hold.[...]

It is hard to know the exact reasons for Iran’s caution. It could reflect a view among regime officials that the targets of Israel’s strikes have been insignificant. Alternatively, Tehran might just not have plans to open a second front. It could also want to avoid doing anything that could diminish European support for the Iranian nuclear deal, or it might believe that it is overmatched. It is also possible that the skeptics are wrong and that the Assad regime has effectively banned counterattacks. Whatever the reason, Tehran could at some point decide that it has had enough and respond either from Syria or Lebanon.

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Haaretz: What Russia and Turkey Really Want in Syria

And last week, Russia struck a bold deal with Turkey that averts a battle for Idlib — at least for now. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will seek broader backing for the accord at the UN General Assembly this week, and try to drum up Western money for Syria’s costly reconstruction.

Syria’s Cold War patron, Russia wants to maintain influence over Damascus once the war winds down, to keep a strategic foothold in the Mideast and a stable client for Russian weapons and commodities — and to warn the U.S. and its allies against future interference. Russia’s announcement Monday that it will supply Syria’s government with sophisticated S-300 air defense systems sent that message loud and clear, depsite Israel's vow to continue to restrain Iranian actions in the country. [...]

As Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan takes the stage Tuesday at the UN, he will be seeking to head off or at least delay new crises along the Syrian border. Turkey wants to avoid a new wave of refugees and stop extremists it once tacitly supported from setting up camp on Turkish soil. And most of all, Ankara wants to keep the region’s Kurds at bay. [...]

Iran is loath to see an expansion of Turkish and U.S. influence in the region, and argues that the West fueled jihadis with past support for the Syrian opposition.

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The Atlantic: No Matter Who Wins the Syrian Civil War, Israel Loses

If you want to understand Israel’s ambivalence about the outcome of Syria’s war, look no further than Avigdor Lieberman. In 2016, Lieberman, Israel’s hawkish defense minister, condemned Bashar al-Assad, the president of Syria, as a “butcher.” He asserted Israel’s moral imperative to oppose genocide, born from the Holocaust, as a reason to oppose the Syrian government’s massacres. It is in Israel’s interest, he added, that Assad and his Iranian allies “be thrown out of Syria.” Fast forward to earlier this month. While touring Israeli air-defense units, Lieberman struck an optimistic note about Assad’s gaining strength, saying it means “there is a real address, someone responsible, and central rule” in Syria. Asked whether he believed this would decrease the possibility of clashes on Israel’s northern border, he said: “I believe so. I think this is also in Assad’s interest.”

Those two positions represent Israel’s conflicted priorities in Syria. On the one hand, Assad is Iran’s most important ally in the Arab world—the state he rules provides Tehran with access to Israel’s northern border, and facilitates the flow of weapons to Hezbollah. On the other hand, Assad—his government’s fiercely anti-Israel rhetoric notwithstanding—represents a known quantity to Israel, unlike the chaotic tangle of Sunni militias and jihadist organizations that would replace him. Until recently, Israel’s border with Syria had been its quietest frontier for four decades. [...]

Israel’s reliance on Russia is a result of President Donald Trump’s hostility to a long-term commitment to Syria. Trump told the military earlier this year to prepare to withdraw all U.S. soldiers from the country, and earlier this month announced that the United States would not spend $230 million that had been earmarked to help rebuild the country’s shattered infrastructure. “If you’re an Israeli policy maker and you’re looking at Syria, you see Russia is there and obviously staying,” Itamar Rabinovich, Israel’s former chief negotiator with Syria in the 1990s, told me. “And you see the United States—the president says one day that he wants to withdraw the 2,000 [American] troops, and the next day he faces some pressure and keeps them there. But is that reliable in the long term? Doubtful.” [...]

As these political and military dramas play out, there is little question about a fundamental fact—Iran and its allies are poised to challenge Israel on multiple fronts in the years ahead. In Lebanon and Syria, Hezbollah boasts more fighters and better weapons than at any point in its history. Earlier this year, in the Gaza Strip, Hamas and Israel engaged in a series of tit-for-tat clashes for months before a cease-fire took hold. And in Iran, there is a growing risk that the Islamic Republic could restart its nuclear program following the Trump administration’s decision to reimpose sanctions on the country.

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The Atlantic: A Cruel Epilogue to the Syrian Civil War

Then, starting in mid-2011, Assad began to kill or capture the main protest leaders, while at the same time releasing Islamist extremists and al-Qaeda-linked militants from his prisons. These people pushed the rebellion toward armed confrontation with the regime, providing Assad with the excuse to ratchet up his violence against protesting communities. Yasmin’s father and brother were among dozens of Daraya activists and protesters, including Shurbaji, abducted by the regime. The tortured and brutalized corpse of one of these activists, a 25-year-old tailor nicknamed Little Gandhi, was sent back to Daraya by the regime, while most of the others, including Yasmin’s father and brother, remained missing. Her brother was released in 2012 but then rearrested in 2013. [...]

There is no precise estimate of the number of dead on the lists. That’s because many families keep the information to themselves after they receive it from the registry, for fear of retribution by the regime. On July 29, the Syrian Committee for Detainees, an opposition group, said that it had counted some 3,270 names, 1,000 of which were from Daraya alone. Another group, the Syrian Network for Human Rights, said at the end of July that it was able to cull the names of 532 forcibly disappeared persons from the state records of the deceased. The group estimated that there had been about 82,000 cases of forced disappearance at the hands of the regime alone since March 2011. [...]

Other Syrians, though, believe the regime wants the lists of the dead to serve as a cruel, macabre epilogue for all those who rose up more than seven years ago to liberate themselves from nearly 50 years of Assad-family rule. Assad’s message to the people of Daraya, a town besieged and bombarded for nearly four years and then emptied of its residents in 2016, is loud and clear: You must lose everything for having challenged me. Nobody is going to hold me accountable for punishing you.

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Haaretz: Assad’s Syria 2.0: A Shrunken State but a Better Neighbor for Israel

But what next? Assad’s victory looks to be about as Pyrrhic as they come. Much of Syria lies in ruins. By some estimates, its economy has shrunk by 60% or even more.  More than 12 million of the country’s pre-war population of 22 million are living as refugees inside or outside Syria.

The cost of rebuilding the country is usually estimated at about $250 billion, of which the regime itself says it can cover maybe $8 billion to $13 billion. Assad’s allies, Russia and Iran, are too cash-strapped to finance a reconstruction effort even if they could perform the construction work that’s needed. 

China isn't a likely source. Anxious about mounting foreign debt, it has been having second thoughts about committing itself to funding infrastructure projects in dubious places where the prospects of getting paid back are poor. The West might be blackmailed into helping rebuild Syria as a way of enticing Syrian refugees back home, but as we will see shortly that is highly unlikely to happen. The Gulf states, the Middle East’s traditional moneybags when it comes to rebuilding, are cash-strapped too and are highly unlikely to help an Iranian client state rebuild. [...]

Cynical as may seem, Assad’s Syria 2.0 will turn out to be a good neighbor for Israel. Shorn of much of its population and with a shrunken economy, it won’t have the people or money to field an army of the size and scale it did before the civil war. It will be more reliant on the Russians as guarantor of the regime’s survival, and Moscow has already made clear it has no interest in its client state stirring up trouble with Israel.

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openDemocracy: Russia’s cautious role in Syria

Endless debates can be had on Syria today, ranging from the US-Russian rivalry to the hunting of Kurdish fighters by Turkey or the Iranian paramilitary expansionism, along with sectarianism, terrorism and many more. However, one of the major conclusions this conflict brought to light is an unusual, more confident Russian participation in the Middle East – in fact, its first since the fall of the Soviet Union. [...]

Facing this chaotic or complex scenario, we cannot deny that Assad’s regime would not have lasted without the support of Lebanese Hezbollah, Iran and most importantly Russia. Russian strikes began overshadowing the Syrian skies in September 2015, as requested by the Syrian government and approved by the Russian parliament. The motto “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter”, perfectly suits the Syrian issue when it comes to the US-Russian debates about it, at least up until the Trump administration, which presented more commonalities with Putin. [...]

Russia has been constantly avoiding direct engagement with the US in Syria, despite having casualties within its own military personnel amid domestic angers and concerns in Moscow by civil society and the families of the victims. If Russia does not have the confidence to directly retaliate against US attacks in a country where it has military agreements with the regime, then when will it ever? The Russian blind eye on the US involvement near its own military forces is another sign of Russian doubtful presence in Syria, and is similar to the US haphazard strikes just to boast their strength. [...]

If there is evidence that Russia avoids retaliation with the US in Syria, then there is also evidence that it is not – and likewise with the other arguments. In today’s Syria, key players created temporary alignments with players who are arguably the enemies of the former’s own allies based on common interests on the battlefield. Therefore it would be inaccurate to consider the conflict’s structure through the lenses of the officially announced alliances. As today’s enemy, can be tomorrow’s friend, and vice versa.

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Haaretz: How Russia Angered Iran in Syria and Had to Pull Its Troops From the Lebanese Border

The situation was resolved on Tuesday when Syrian army soldiers took over three positions where the Russians had deployed near the town of Qusair in the Homs region on Monday, one of the officials, a military commander, told Reuters on condition of anonymity.

It appeared to be a rare case of Russia acting out of sync with President Bashar al-Assad's Iran-backed allies in the war. Iranian and Russian support has been critical to Assad's war effort. [...]

Russia and Iran-backed forces such as Hezbollah have worked together against the insurgency. Hezbollah deployed to Syria in 2012. The Russian air force arrived in 2015 in support of Assad.

But their different agendas in Syria have become more apparent of late as Israel presses Russia to make sure Iran and its allies do not entrench their military sway in the country.

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Al Jazeera: Analysis: What's next for Iran?

In an effort to placate the Americans, Europe's leaders will be looking for concessions on Iran's ballistic missiles programme, and are likely to raise the issue of Tehran's support for President Bashar al-Assad in Syria, groups such as Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Houthi rebels in Yemen. [...]

Iraq under Saddam Hussein invaded Iran shortly after the 1979 revolution. The US as well as many of Iran's Gulf Arab neighbours supported Hussein in the eight-year conflict.  [...]

Iranians say they still remember the sound of air raid sirens on the radio and on TV, whenever an Iraqi jet on a bombing run or an Iraqi ballistic missile would be spotted in the skies over an Iranian city. For eight long years, people here say they looked up at the skies in constant fear.

That conflict shaped the way Iran looks at national security issues. The country's collective trauma changed how civilian and military leaders make decisions about present-day defence policies. [...]

While the US pullout may have given Iran the moral high ground with regards to the nuclear deal, at home the Rouhani administration is in trouble. If Zarif's trip is unsuccessful in achieving even some minor measurable gain for Iran's economy, one MP predicts changes at the top.

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Haaretz: Putin’s Gambit Could Backfire

Now Assad is indebted to Putin and relies on him for further military support, which includes Russian aircraft and missiles. The use of Russian mercenaries for fighting on the ground allows Putin to claim that no Russian ground forces are involved in the fighting and that the Russian military presence on the ground is limited to the Russian naval and air bases. The use of mercenaries is a ruse that was already used to cover the Russian involvement in Ukraine. Although quite transparent, it seems to be working. It has become part of the inventory of methods used to spread Russian influence beyond Russia’s borders. The world seems to be getting used to it. [...]

Undoubtedly a few of the old-timers at the Kremlin remember the effect that the introduction of Soviet surface-to-air missiles in Egypt in 1970 had on the War of Attrition, and then during the Yom Kippur War, when they managed to neutralize the Israel Air Force. They probably hope that now the supply of the S-300 missiles to Syria will have a similar effect. [...]

Is it possible that the Israeli Air Force will know how to deal with the S-300 missile system if it is deployed in Syria? That no doubt is of concern to Putin and his generals. Such a scenario is liable to constitute a harsh blow to Russian weapons technology, hurting the Russians’ marketing efforts for this missile system to other countries, such as Iran, and even raising questions as to the continued Russian-Iranian alliance in Syria.

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Politico: Macron needs the EU to bring peace in Syria

Macron has played a leading role in the military action against Syria; he claims to have had some influence on the posture taken by the U.S. and Turkey. But it would be hard to detect a common EU voice on Syria. Even the three leading figures of the EU institutional scene — Donald Tusk, Jean-Claude Juncker and Federica Mogherini — couldn’t manage to produce a joint statement. [...]

What’s needed to bring peace to Syria is a serious return to talks at the U.N. table. This will require EU-wide resolve — not just Macron’s national posturing — to bear down first on the United States, and second on the negotiations themselves. Adding an EU dimension to the talks would bring Germany squarely on board, help better manage Donald Trump’s unpredictability, open a channel for cooperation with Turkey and contribute to fending off Moscow’s influence in some European capitals. [...]

In the past 30 months, Russian President Vladimir Putin has achieved a lot: Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s survival, a large air base in Latakia, an expanded naval station in Tartus, and a new place on the world diplomatic stage. Now, Putin’s choice is between remaining a permanent spoiler or talking seriously to Western leaders about bringing peace to Syria.

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The Guardian: Look at Syria, and you can see all the elements that have led to world wars

Qhat on earth are we doing? I have not heard a single expert on Syria explain how dropping missiles on that country will advance the cause of peace or lead its dictator, Bashar al-Assad, to back down. It will merely destroy buildings and probably kill people. It is pure populism, reflected in the hot-and-cold rhetoric of Trump’s increasingly whimsical tweets. Heaven forbid that British policy should now, as it appears, be hanging on their every word.

We can accept that the chemical attack on a Damascus suburb was probably by war-hardened Syrian airmen, though rebellions do kill their own to win sympathy. But Britain too has killed civilians in this theatre. No, we don’t poison our own people, but we somehow claim the right to blow other country’s civilians to bits. Theresa May says that the chemical attack “cannot go unchallenged”, but that is a politician’s love of intransitive verbs. Who is to be the agency and under what authority? The time to punish the Syrian leadership is when the war is over. Outside intervention will make no difference to the conflict, except to postpone its end. That is doubly cruel. [...]

May seems trapped by Washington, as Blair was in 2003. It is clear that her advisers do not think bombing Syria is the best way to respond to a chemical weapons attack, but she seems reluctant to admit it. She claims not to need the approval of parliament in firing missiles. That convention dates from when monarchs and their generals needed discretion to ward off imminent threats to national security. There is no threat now. This is not a military but a foreign policy decision. Going to war has serious implications. It clearly merits collective approval, especially from a minority government.

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Politico: How Putin’s Folly Could Lead to a Middle East War

It was all very predictable, the moment that Putin began to partner with Iran and its lethal proxy, Hezbollah. They shared intelligence, patrolled together and fought together against the Sunni jihadists and other rebels who were warring against the Assad regime.

Iran’s motivations for this unlikely marriage were crystal clear: The regime viewed Syria as a crucial territory to maintain a land bridge from their borders to the Mediterranean. For Iran, Syria was key to regional domination. It was also key to maintaining military supply routes to Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Russia, by contrast, had more global ambitions. For one, Putin was putting a finger in the eye of the Obama administration. The message was that Russia could dominate territory once seen as under American influence. Putin also sought to convey to the rest of the Arab world that Russia was a strong and reliable ally for the region, and that Russia was willing to provide advanced weaponry at the right price—and without American-style red tape and oversight. [...]

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov criticized the Israelis on Monday, calling the strike “a dangerous development.” Lavrov is right about that. The Israelis have shown that they can operate repeatedly inside of Syria, with or without Russian deconfliction. And with Trump signaling outrage over Sunday’s chemical weapons attacks in Damascus, the United States is not likely to restrain the Israelis from protecting their interests.

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The Guardian: Only Assad’s victory will end Syria’s civil war. The west can do nothing

Assad’s use of toxic gas in rebel-held Douma last week follows ceaseless outside condemnation of previous chemical bomb attacks. When, after their use last year, 59 American missiles rained down on the Syrian airbase of Shayrat, it clearly had zero impact. Regimes fighting for their existence do not care about condemnation or the niceties of international treaties. Nor do their backers, in this case Russia and Iran. They see only a cynical foreign policy coup in the offing. [...]

Inhumanity lies in the killing of any civilians in war. There is something peculiarly abhorrent in the targeting of civilian areas of suburban Damascus. But for all its denials the west does it too. Last summer, the monitor Airwars estimated that more than 8,000 civilians died in the fall of Mosul, mostly from inevitably indiscriminate Iraqi, American and British missiles. Even the Pentagon accepts that it has killed hundreds of civilians in Iraq and Syria. As the British commander Maj Gen Rupert Jones says, civilian deaths are “the price you pay” for fighting in cities. Assad would agree.

 The laws of war are enveloped in hypocrisy, largely because they are written by the winners. The US has still not signed the convention against delayed-action cluster bombs, one of the most immoral weapons ever devised. They went out of production only last year. Such weapons are still being used by the west’s Saudi allies in Yemen. This whole argument is not over morality, merely degrees of obscenity.

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