by Fabrice Balanche
-- it is clear that only when the two superpowers put aside their differences and pull together their military and diplomatic resources can the Islamic State be defeated and the Syrian civil war ended.
Summary account by Marilyn Stern, Middle East Forum Communications Coordinator.
The
fall of Aleppo was a turning point in the Syrian civil war. In an
impressive feat, the Russian-backed Syrian army dealt a crushing blow to
the rebel forces, driving many of them to entertain a compromise with
the Assad regime.
This
by no means implies that the war's end is anywhere in sight. With the
regime in possession of merely one third of Syria's territory (and two
thirds of the population), it now needs to gain control of the
northwestern province of Idlib, with its 50,000-strong mainly Islamist
rebels, in order to consolidate its Aleppo gains and to establish a
sustainable land corridor to the Alawite region along the Mediterranean
coast.
No
less important, the Kurds seem determined to follow up the summer 2016
occupation of Manbij by seizing the strategically-located town of
al-Bab, so as to establish contiguity between the Kurdish areas of Afrin
and Kobane. This, however, will be anathema not only to the Assad
regime but also to Ankara, which is fiercely opposed to Kurdish
unification and which launched an armed incursion into Syria, with
Moscow's tacit approval, to prevent this eventuality. Should the Turks
respond to the fall of al-Bab by attacking the Kurds, this will greatly
complicate Washington's hopes for a Kurdish offensive against the
Islamic State's capital of Raqqa.
Bashar and Asmaa al-Assad have much to celebrate after the fall of Aleppo.
|
But
even if the Raqqa offensive were to materialize, it is unlikely that
Moscow and Tehran would allow eastern Syria to fall under the sway of
the Western-Gulf-propped rebels (or to remain under ISIS control for
that matter). For one thing, given this area's vast natural resources
(notably oil, gas, wheat, and cotton), it is certain to play a crucial
role in Syria's economic reconstruction. For another, Sunni control of
eastern Syria would disrupt the territorial contiguity of the Shiite
crescent - from Iran to Lebanon - that Tehran has been busy creating for
some time.
As
things are, while the internal Syrian opposition appears to have all
but crumbled after the fall of Aleppo, the regime still confronts an
uphill struggle. Though it looks likely to reassert its authority over
western Syria with the support of its Russian and Iranian patrons
(apart, perhaps, from a small Turkish enclave in northwestern Syria),
the situation in the Kurdish areas and in eastern Syria seems much less
promising. Yet if the limited and indirect Russian-American cooperation
against ISIS's recent Deir az-Zour offensive is something to go by, it
is clear that only when the two superpowers put aside their differences
and pull together their military and diplomatic resources can the
Islamic State be defeated and the Syrian civil war ended. Given the
present international circumstances, this may be a matter of years
rather than months.
Fabrice Balanche, a visiting fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and associate professor at the University of Lyon 2, briefed the Middle East Forum on the Syrian crisis in a conference call on January 31, 2017.
Source: http://www.meforum.org/6519/the-fall-of-aleppo
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Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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