Russian forces take over America’s N. Syria bases, E. Syrian airspace, and concern for Kurds

T. Belman.  Just as I forecast,Trump and Putin have cut a deal. Russia is now responsible to rein in Turkey and to protect the Kurds. Exactly what Putin has agreed to with respect to Iran, will soon be evident.  Trump is now focused on pushing back Iran in Iraq.

DEBKA  

Esper made no reference to negative Turkish or Syrian military steps or the situation of the Kurds. Washington has evidently shunted those problems over to the new reigning power in eastern Syria, i.e. Moscow.

The Putin-Erdogan meeting takes place at the end of the five-day ceasefire negotiated between the US and Turkey for Kurdish forces to retreat from an agreed security zone along the Syrian-Turkish border.

DEBKAfile’s military sources report that Tabqa air base, taken over by Russian forces on the heels of the Syrian army, is large enough to accommodate Russian bombers and air cargoes. Located near the largest Syrian dam on the River Euphrates and 40km from Raqqa, it offers Moscow complete control of eastern Syria including the Kurdish regions of the northeast and the Syrian-Iraqi border, excepting only the large US garrison at al Tanf which sits athwart the intersection of the Syrian, Iraqi and Jordanian borders.

The radical realignment of strength in these regions was almost certainly coordinated between Washington and Moscow, like the other military steps emanating from the Turkish incursion of Syria against the Kurds.

Having appealed to Moscow and Damascus to halt the Turkish intrusion into their lands, Syria’s Kurdish leaders understand that responsibility for their fate has passed from Washington to Moscow. Their bitter complaints of betrayal and abandonment by America, and appeals for aid from Israel, are therefore aimed at raising popular sympathy in the West, knowing that Moscow is their only realistic address for claiming support.

Putin therefore finds himself in a similar situation to that of President Donald Trump at the outset of the Turkish operation (on Oct. 9). He must evade the charges leveled against the Trump administration of abandoning the Kurds of Syria to a genocidal Turkish army, after their gallant fight against the Islamist State, an enemy shared by the US and Russia.

The Russian leader will therefore need to confront Erdogan’s demand to occupy a “security zone” in northern Syria, to which Washington acceded, and lean hard on the Turkish president to start pulling all his troops out of the Syria and ending his military venture there. Kurdish forces have meanwhile complied with the US-Turkish truce stipulation and begun withdrawing from the besieged border town of Ras al-Ayn with their wounded civilians and fighters. This as a signal of their willingness for compromise, so long as one of the two big powers offers them military protection.

Moscow’s expanded military and air force control over northern and eastern Syria, following the US pullback, calls for an extension of the Israeli-Russian military cooperation deal that limits Israel’s air strikes against Iran to the north and the west. Addenda to these understandings will need to be negotiated.

Therefore it may be assumed that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu will soon be flying to Sochi discuss coordinating with Putin and his defense chiefs in which parts of eastern Syria the Israeli Air Force is allowed to hammer Iranian and its allied forces and which are barred.

October 21, 2019 | 9 Comments »

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  1. @ Bear Klein:
    Bear,

    I appreciate your insight, and often look forward to your posts. When you start talking about “good”, “bad” and “morality”, however, please give me a break. War is an amoral exercise, generally perpetrated by immoral people with ulterior motives — on BOTH side. War has often been compared with chess, a game I used to play with keen interest. People who seem ever concerned about “peace”, are like chess players who insist that the board positions always stay the same, and no pieces are taken. In other words, they make for dreadfully boring chess players.

    Donald Trump made an interesting gambit in Syria, in pulling back some pieces. The other players (Turkey, Syria, Russia, Iran, the various Kurdish factions and others) have made counter-moves. This happens in chess, and it happens in war. There is no reason here, to wring one’s hands. The main players are Trump and Putin. The others are kibitzers.

    God bless and keep you and yours, God bless Israel, and God bless America!

  3. If you are a brave Kurd who fights along side of the US to get rid of terrorists it does not pay because in the end the US betrays you and allows Islamic Terrorists aligned with Turkey to attack you. The US POTUS says you can not pay us so we are leaving. Trump is all about the money and some of these soldiers are being sent so the US can claim the oil fields in eastern Syria.

    ANALYSIS – How the US killed the Kurdish autonomy project

    Trump’s pullout from Syria and green light to Turkish invasion is latest US betrayal of Kurdish efforts to achieve autonomy, independence

    US Special Forces were pelted by angry Syrian Kurds with rotten vegetables and fruits on Monday when they retreated from their positions in Rojava the Kurdish autonomous region along the Turkish border in Syria.

    The Kurds accused the US for abandoning them after President Donald Trump suddenly decided to pull out American military forces from Rojava.

    By doing this Trump effectively gave Turkey’s strongman Tayyip Recep Erdogan green light for launching his long-anticipated assault on the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) along the Turkish border.

    Erdogan wasted no time and sent his military and their Syrian Sunni Islamist allies into the remaining two Kurdish cantons of Rojava where they already have caused a humanitarian disaster when more than 300.000 people fled their homes.

    The Turkish autocratic leader agreed to a temporary ceasefire after a US delegation led by Vice-President Mike Pence and Secretary of State visited Ankara and made clear Trump would unleash heavy sanctions if Erdogan continued his aggression against the Syrian Kurds which he justifies by using trumped-up charges such as “terrorism” by the Syrian Kurds.

    The Kurdish YPG militia, which forms the backbone of the SDF, has no history of terrorist activity in Turkey and was the main force responsible for the defeat of the ISIS Caliphate in Syria.

    In fact, it was Turkey which launched 35 cross-border attacks against the Kurds in Syria in contrast to one cross-border attack emanating from Rojava since the beginning of this year.

    Under the US-brokered ceasefire agreement, which came into effect last Friday, the SDF had five days to vacate the so-called ‘safe zone’ which would go 32 kilometers into northern Syria and according to Erdogan is needed to resettle the bulk of the 3.6 million Syrian refugees in Turkey.

    The Turkish dictator has now decided that the ‘safe zone’ will run along the entire 440 kilometers-long border between Syria and Turkey and not only the north-western region.

    During a press conference in Ankara on Friday, Erdogan claimed he will set up ‘observation posts’ in northwest Syria but a map used during the meeting with reporters showed that these posts will stretch from the Iraqi border along the 440 kilometers-long Turkish-Syrian border.

    If he follows-up on his decision, Erdogan will breach the ceasefire-deal and risks a confrontation with the Russian-Iranian-backed Syrian Army which has already started to invade US/SDF vacated areas and has set its sights on the oil fields in eastern Syria.

    After the US decided to abandon their former ally in the war against ISIS the Kurds were forced to strike a deal with the Assad regime which will most likely mean the definitive end of Kurdish independence dream in Syria.

    Back in 2012, the Syrian Kurds used Assad’s unilateral withdrawal from the area along the Turkish border to establish an autonomous entity but had to fight for their lives from the very beginning.

    “They are no angels,” Trump wrote in one of his many Tweets about the Syrian Kurds in which he defended his controversial decision.

    Maybe they weren’t in the eyes of Trump but many experts who actually worked with the SDF or are familiar with the situation in Rojava say they were the only sane and disciplined local military force acting in Syria during the now more than 8-year-old civil war.

    Take, for example, Jonathan Spyer an Israeli Middle East expert who went to Rojava multiple times during the Syrian war.

    Spyer says the Kurds have been betrayed by “their allies” and claims that the moment two Syrian Army divisions will cross into Rojava supported by Russian warplanes the Kurdish autonomy project in Syria will be over.

    “The last six years were in vain” a Kurdish SDF fighter told Spyer after the Kurdish autonomous government was forced to strike a deal with the Assad regime to frustrate Erdogan’s attempt to carry out ethnic cleansing in Rojava.

    Trump calls this ethnic cleansing “the resettling of the Kurds” while he made clear that his new policy for Syria is to “save the oil” (fields) in eastern Syria.

    Article Continues at http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/270401

  5. A population transfer of Kurds out of NW Syria, and up to two million Arab refugees out of Turkey and into the vacated region, might unwittingly set a useful precedent in a peace plan between Israel and the palestinians.

  6. I’m with Ted on this. I think Trump has a plan that will be a win-win for everybody, except possibly Iran, which may find that these developments hinder their expansion.
    Consider:

    1. The U.S. extricates itself from Syria, which was doing us little good. Saves money, and saves lives.
    2. We turn the NW Syria mess over to Russia. They are already there, supporting Assad, anyway. Let them deal with Turkey and the other factions. If they can broker peace…good, if not, at least we’re out of there, and Russia is further enmeshed.
    3. The Kurds of NW Syria were never our responsibility. Yes, we supported them against ISIS, but they were to a large extent rogue. In any case, we facilitated their evacuation. There will be no bloodbath.
    4. Our pulling back to Iraq still leaves us close enough to react if necessary, and bolsters our forces in Iraq, which is a smart strategic move, securing the oil, and raising the ante for Iranian aggression.
    5. Israel has a working relationship with Russia, who understands Israel’s issues with Iranian bases in Syria. Russia would be just as happy to have Iran out, since they are a destabilizing influence.
    6. With the prospect of gaining back part of his country, not to mention the Turkish incursion, Assad’s attention is turned northward, away from Israel.
    7. If a safe zone is established in Syria, a large number of Syrian refugees can be repatriated, from Turkey to Syria…a good thing for both countries, one would think.
    8. What about the ISIS prisoners, formerly in Kurdish, (SDF), custody? It would be a great surprise if the doors were opened and they all walked. Nobody wants that to happen. There will be an orderly transfer of custody.

    For all of these reasons, and more, the U.S. redeployment, from Syria to Iraq, is a good move. By taking the initiative, Trump was able to control the chain of events . Those who objected to his move, in knee-jerk fashion, can now do little besides wonder at Trump’s ability to think outside of the box.

  9. Deal??? Really?? Sounds like Russia stepped into the void left by the US retreat and abandonment of the Kurds.

    U.S. once stopped ethnic cleansing, now it excuses it in Syria – Analysis
    One unarmed female politician, a victim of what Turkish media called a “successful neutralization” was dragged by her hair by jihadists and shot to death.
    By Seth J. Frantzman – October 21, 2019

    In the 1990s the US was adamantly opposed to ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, leading efforts to prevent it. In the wake of US President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from parts of Syria it increasingly looks like Washington will sign off on the population transfer of Kurds from areas that Turkey has demanded. Already 200,000 people have been displaced, mostly Kurds, because of the US decision and Turkey’s invasion.

    On Sunday Trump tweeted that the ceasefire the US helped broker was “holding up very nicely. There are some minor skirmishes that have ended quickly. New areas being resettled with Kurds.” These “new areas” are areas that Kurds have been forced to flee to by the fighting and Turkish-backed jihadists who have indiscriminately shelled. One unarmed female politician, a victim of what Turkish media called a “successful neutralization” was dragged by her hair by jihadists and shot to death.

    Trump says the new US plan is to “secure the oil.” In the process the US sent Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to Ankara to negotiate a pause in Turkey’s offensive. In that pause the civilians of Sere Kaniye were removed in a convoy of ambulances, the end process in ethnic cleansing of civilians from areas that Ankara calls a “safe zone.” Into that area Turkey says it will settle millions of Arab refugees from other parts of Syria, a plan Ankara showed to the UN in September.

    full article at https://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/The-US-once-stopped-ethnic-cleansing-now-it-excuses-it-in-Syria-Analysis-605263