Putin Senses Syria Victory Thatll Cement Assad, Confound U.S.

Vladimir Putin may be on the cusp of a pivotal victory in Syrias civil war that would make it much harder for the U.S. achieve these goals stated goal of deposing Bashar al-Assad without a major military escalation.

Assads troops, backed by Russian air power, are bearing down on rebels entrenched in Aleppo, Syrias most populous city before fighting erupted in 2011. Reclaiming Syrias commercial capital would dedicate Assad control over all major population centers and cement his hold on a contiguous swath of land from Turkey to Jordan that constructs up almost half of the country.

Russia will stick to its handguns in Syria and prove the world we are right, Frants Klintsevich, deputy head of the defense committee in the upper house of parliament, said by phone from Moscow. Driving the last rebel groups out of Aleppo within a few months is now quite realistic, he said.

Its been almost a year since Putin stunned the U.S. and its allies by entering the conflict to battle Islamist militants and prop up an old friend, turning the tables on west and regional powers intent on regime change. What started as a bloody crackdown on peaceful protesters morphed into a multifaceted proxy war that triggered Europes worst migrant crisis since World War II and facilitated the rise of Islamic State and its global campaign of terror.

For a review of such forces involved in Syrias civil war, click here .~ ATAGEND

Opposition militias in Aleppo over the weekend managed to open a road out of besieged eastern neighborhoods where some quarter of a million people live, but renewed strikes by government and Russian forces are preventing them from securing it, according to the U.K.-based Syrian Observatory for Human Right, or SOHR, which monitors the war through activists on the ground.

Turkey, Iran

The joint siege of Aleppo got an unexpected boost last month when a failed takeover in neighboring Turkey accelerated a reconciliation between President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Putin, who called Turkeys downing of a Russian fighter near the Syrian perimeter last year a stab in the back.

With authorities in Ankara accusing the U.S. of complicity in the putsch and officials from Washington to Brussels denouncing Erdogans resultant purge, the Turkish leader is turning to Putin to forge a new strategic partnership. The two leaders will gratify in St. Petersburg on Tuesday, a day after Putin holds talks with the president of Iran, Assads other major benefactor.

Key to the Turkish detente for Putin is get Erdogan to curtail the flow of arms and men to militias fighting his sworn adversary Assad, which hes been doing since the failed takeover, according to SOHR director Rami Abdurrahman. Turkey has slowed weapons shipments from Arab countries for the Aleppo battle, while slashing its own flows dramatically, he said.

The Syrian regime wouldnt have been able to besiege Aleppo had it not been for the Turkish-Russian reconciliation, Abdurrahman said. The military subsistence is not what it used to be.

The capture of Aleppo, whose eastern neighborhoods have been held by rebels since 2012, would dedicate Assad control of more than 40 percent of Syrian province and 60 percent of the population, leaving Islamic State with about 35 percent of the country, mostly desert, according to SOHR calculates. The Kurds have about 15 percent of Syrian land, with the rest split between other groups.

Huge Rethink

Robert Ford, a former U.S. diplomat to Syria, said its now clear that Assad wont be forced out, leaving the next chairman with few good options for dealing with a Kremlin-backed leader at the epicenter of Islamic extremism.

Short of some kind of huge rethink in the U.S. and a whole situate of relationships between the U.S. and partners in individual regions like Turkey and Saudi Arabia, Assads survival is no longer in question, said Ford, whos now a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington. The next administration will likely be left confronting a situation where a weakened but still powerful Syrian government under Assad controls the former population centers.

The two leading nominees in the U.S. presidential election, Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump, have both called for major changes to current U.S. policy for dealing with the conflict in Syria and the emergence of Islamic State, which also controls swaths of neighboring Iraq.

Clinton would order a full review of U.S. strategy to get the murderous regime of Assad out of there while escalating the fight against Islamic State, Jeremy Bash, a Clinton adviser, told the Daily Telegraph last month. Clinton has promised to establish a no-fly zone to protect civilians, which would put her immediately at odds with Putin.

Trump, on the other hand, has said the U.S. has bigger problems than Assad so hed focus on destroying Islamic State, possibly by forging a military confederation with Russia. Trump in June blamed Clintons policies as secretary of state for opening a Pandoras box of radical Islam.

Regional Realignment

With Trump offering the prospect of deeper U.S.-Russia ties, Putin is also courting another important backer of Assads adversaries, longtime American ally Saudi Arabia, whose main concern is countering Irans influence in individual regions. The kingdom is seeking coordination and consultation with Russia to bridge their differences, Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir said July 31.

The regional realignment is happening as President Barack Obama pursues joint action with Russia to fight al-Qaedas former Syrian branch while avoiding forceful steps to prevent Putin from attacking another group opposing Assad. Yet even as Obama explores coordinating with Russia in some areas of Syria, hes condemning it in others, underscoring the complexity of the conflict.

Russias backing for the medieval siege of Aleppo and the unfolding humanitarian catastrophe raises uncertainty about its firm commitment from pulling the situation back from the brink, Obama told reporters last week, reiterating his position that defeating Islamic State requires an aim to the civil war and the Assad regimes brutality against the Syrian people.

Obamas failure so far to either destroy Islamic State or topple Assad has frustrated many current and former U.S. officials who backed a plan to limb rebels with advanced weaponry after a cease-fire negotiated by Moscow and Washington collapsed.

Dennis Ross, Obamas senior Mideast adviser in 2009 -2 011, said last week the U.S. should penalise Assad for breaking the truce by bombing airfields and bases where no Russian troops are present. A former are part of the CIAs advisory board, Michael OHanlon, said the U.S. should arm Islamist groups as long as they arent al-Qaedas former wing in Syria, Jabhat Fath al-Sham, though not with anti-aircraft missiles.

Unprecedented Firepower

Meanwhile, Putin and Assad have been gaining an unbeatable advantage since Russia unleashed an unprecedented sum of firepower, said Faysal Itani, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.

Given that the groups best-placed to break the siege are hard-line Islamists, the United States is likely to do little to lift the siege, Itani said.

Even with a victory at Aleppo, though, Assad would face an rebellion in major cities not unlike what the Americans encountered in Iraq a decade ago, according to Ford, the former U.S. ambassador.

We could hold the cities in Ramadi and Fallujah, but there was still a lot of fighting, a lot of ambushes on the roads, Ford said. There are so many weapons floating around in Syria right now that therell always be an insurgent element able to take those weapons and use them.