Putin has been in a tight spot for the past few months. The Russian economy is struggling because of the low oil price and western sanctions. The war in Ukraine has undermined his international standing. By shifting his and the world’s attention from the Donbas to Syria, however, Putin is once again writing the script for international politics, and forcing his opponents to recalibrate.
“The war in Syria was seen as a regional affair between Iran and Saudi Arabia-Turkey-Qatar, but now it is a bigger game between Russia and the west,” says Bassma Kodmani, a thoughtful expert on relations with the Middle East and former spokeswoman for the Syrian National Council, the opposition coalition-in-exile. By entrenching President Bashar al-Assad of Syria in power, Putin is also compelling western countries to engage with Moscow in a different way. Barack Obama, who had been trying to shun the Russian president, was forced to meet him at the UN General Assembly last month. Germany’s federal minister for economic affairs, Sigmar Gabriel, claimed that “you can’t stick to sanctions permanently on the one hand and ask for co-operation on the other hand”: so far, however, Chancellor Angela Merkel has refused to link the situation in Syria to sanctions on Ukraine.
In Syria, Putin is executing his war on revolutions both on the practical level and as a battle of ideas. For some time, he has been building links with authoritarian powers in the Middle East – with President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in Egypt and Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi in Iraq, as well as the Iranian government. And his Syrian gambit has bolstered the Assad regime at a time of increasing weakness. Putin’s campaign, supposedly against Isis, does not live up to its billing: most of the Russian attacks so far have been against other anti-Assad armed opposition groups (including forces backed by the west, Saudi, Turkey and Qatar).
There is a parallel between Putin’s plans for Syria and the long war he fought in Chechnya from 1999 to 2009. The first war in Chechnya, from 1994 to 1996, was between a moderate, largely secular opposition and the Russian state.
In order to win the second conflict, however, the Kremlin started to marginalise the moderates – starting with the legitimate president Aslan Maskhadov – while at the same time helping the factions that did not obey Maskhadov, and which committed kidnappings and were linked to the Middle East. Then, after the 9/11 attacks, Putin sold the Chechnya war to the west as “a common struggle with Islamic terrorism”. In Syria, a similar dynamic was already in motion – Islamist groups having gained the upper hand over the moderate rebels of the Free Syrian Army who helped launch the revolution in 2011 – but now Putin is accelerating it, using familiar tactics.
http://www.newstatesman.com/world/mid...tin-vs-isis-russia-s-great-game-syria
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