Syrian President Bashar Assad is growing only more defiant as
negotiators prepare to descend on Geneva once again in an attempt
to broker the terms of a political transition and end the five-year
civil war. The opposition’s central demand heading into the negotiations is that
the embattled Assad relinquish his hold on power and cease bombing
rebel-held territory. On the contrary, the regime will hold parliamentary elections on Wednesday and is evidently preparing a major new offensive to retake Syria’s largest city, Aleppo, from opposition forces.
As such, it appears that Russia’s attempt last month to force Assad into a corner — by announcing a partial withdrawal
of advisers and warplanes — has backfired. Assad appears to have
realized that Russia’s reputation as a leader in the Middle East
depends, at least for now, on maintaining the status quo and keeping the
regime intact.
Russia’s intervention in the war on Assad’s behalf in late
September was followed by a regime offensive to recapture Aleppo from
the rebels throughout the end of 2015. But that task was largely left
unfinished by the time Russia decided to “withdraw” last month,
even after pro-government forces won a
major victory in January by breaking a rebel siege on two villages
northwest of Aleppo that served as Turkey’s supply line to rebels there.
The fact that Putin ordered Russia to
de-escalate at such a pivotal moment for Assad may have been part of a
broader Russian strategy to maintain Moscow’s leverage at the
forthcoming peace talks in Geneva — over Assad as much as over the US. But the embattled president now seems prepared to call Russian President Vladimir Putin’s bluff.
Russia is “afraid if somebody else removes him or they remove him, the whole state will collapse,” Paul Salem, the vice president of policy and research at the Washington-based Middle East Institute, told The Wall Street Journal last weekend.
“They are hostage to his continued survival,”
Salem added. “He [Assad] can withstand Russian displeasure and
irritation. He feels under no compulsion to make major concessions.”
‘Some of the worst this war has seen’
Russia denied reports on Monday that it was planning any
kind of joint operation with regime forces to retake Aleppo. Ultimately,
however, “Moscow is unlikely to forgo its interests in Syria,” Charles Lister, a resident fellow at the Middle East Institute, tweeted.
It may force Russia to reescalate its presence in the northeast to help Assad, Lister said.
Boris Zilberman, a Russia expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), told Business Insider that “if
an offensive on Aleppo is in the works, there is no reason to believe
that Russia could not add the man- and air-power to help conduct such an
operation.”
He continued:
It was clear, at least to me, that
Russia was scaling down but maintaining the capabilities to keep the
status quo and pivot to a higher-tempo operation. The Russians
have shown time and again complete and utter disregard for mass
civilian casualties and collateral damage as part of their aerial
operations. I expect that if Putin and Assad do as they say, those in
Aleppo might yet experience some of the worst this war has seen.
Mark Galeotti, an expert on Russian security affairs and professor of global affairs at New York University, told Business Insider that “if
the Russians and Syrians do commit themselves to retaking Aleppo, they
will prioritize military expediency over civilian safety.”
He added, however, that “there
is no evidence that Russia would seek to be destructive for its own
sake,” and that it remains unclear whether Russia will partake in a new
offensive.
Even if Russia doesn’t participate in a “pitched battle” for Aleppo, however, “helping the regime complete the isolation of the city is something else,” said Jeff White, a military analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
“The Russians may take
advantage of a crumbling CoH [cessation of hostilities] to do this,
blaming everything on ‘Nusra’ and terrorists,” White told Business
Insider in an email, referring to Jabhat al-Nusra, the Al Qaeda
affiliate in Syria.
Russia already seems to be making that case. The
Russian military said on Monday that 8,000 Nusra militants were
amassing around the city and preparing to cut off the main road from
Aleppo to Syria’s capital, Damascus.
Sergei Karpukhin/ReutersLt.
Gen. Sergei Rudskoi, chief of the Main Operational Directorate of the
General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, attends a news briefing with a
map of Aleppo, Syria, and its surrounding areas in the background, in
Moscow, Russia, on April 11.
If true, that would mark a dramatic escalation of
Nusra’s activities in southern Aleppo. And it would give Russia an
excuse to help the regime isolate the city from the rebels while
maintaining — at least on paper — the “cessation of hostilities”
agreement, to which Nusra is not a party.
“If Russia is signaling an offensive against Nusra, you can be
sure other rebel groups will be targeted,” Nadav Pollak, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute, tweeted on Monday.
Zilberman, of the FDD, added that
the threat of an impending offensive also gives Assad and
Putin valuable leverage over the US at Geneva, where a new round of
peace talks is set to begin on Friday.
Lister, of the Middle East
Institute, noted that while Assad “is playing games with Geneva, Russia,
and the UN, Putin is ultimately unlikely to abandon Assad and thus lose
[Russia’s] influence in Syria.”
To that extent, Putin remains a
“hostage” of the regime — even if it means getting sucked back into the
war at its most brutal, and critical, stage.
“If Russia joins a major regime offensive on Aleppo, there’ll be little going back,” Lister wrote. “The city will be besieged, and only death and destruction will result.”
