Financial Times
Russia last week announced it may have killed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-styled caliph of Isis, in an air strike near Raqqa in eastern Syria last month. Like other reports of the Isis leader’s death, this may be premature. But new fronts are opening and competing forces colliding in Syria and Iraq, and mayhem is foreseeable once the jihadi citadels of Raqqa and Mosul fall and Isis is forced out of its territory. It is none too soon to think about how this is going to play out.
The potential for chaos appears exponential but such thinking as there is about how to fill the vacuum that Isis and other jihadi forces occupied in Syria and Iraq is pretty meagre.
Events at the weekend were ominous. On Sunday, an American jet fighter shot down a Syrian air force warplane. The Pentagon said it had been bombing close to Syrian Kurdish fighters, whom the US-led coalition against Isis has deployed as the strike force to retake Raqqa. The incident follows three recent clashes in which the US air force has bombed Iran-backed Assad regime forces in south and east Syria. Those too were explained away as self-defence and “force protection” by the Americans. But whereas, for example, President Donald Trump’s cruise missile strikes on Assad forces in April — in retaliation for a nerve-gas attack by the regime on a rebel enclave in Idlib — was generally accepted as a one-off, this is different.
Russia, whose intervention in late 2015 turned the tide in favour of Bashar al-Assad when he was at risk of being overwhelmed, is threatening to target US warplanes, or rather “any aircraft, including the international coalition’s planes and drones, discovered west of the river Euphrates”. Yet it is the skies and battlefields of eastern Syria that are becoming as crowded and dangerous.
As if to underline this, Iran on Monday fired a volley of six ballistic missiles into the general vicinity of the Isis-held east Syrian city of Deir Ezzor. This was proclaimed as a reprisal for this month’s twin attacks by Isis in Tehran. It is being more widely interpreted as a message to the US and its Sunni allies led by Saudi Arabia: that Iran intends vigorously to assert its presence on Iraq’s border with Syria. It is from here that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) — and the militias it sponsors from the Hashd al-Shaabi coalition of Iraqi Shia paramilitaries to the Lebanese Hizbollah — are carving out a land-corridor to the Mediterranean.
The US, in response, has insisted on the narrow coalition strategy to defeat Isis in Iraq and Syria: “The coalition does not seek to fight the Syrian regime, Russian, or pro-regime forces partnered with them.” This statement was issued by US Central Command, headquartered in Qatar, which houses the biggest US air base in the Middle East and a 10,000-strong American force. Yet, lest anyone forget, Saudi Arabia and its allies are blockading their erstwhile ally Qatar, egged on by Mr Trump who sees it — or at least tweets it — as part and parcel of fighting “Islamic extremism” and isolating Iran.
Syria, after six years of horrendous conflict, on many fronts with multiple actors, is in a state of fragmented chaos and de facto partition. But a great deal of the confusion clouding any future it may have emanates from the chaos of the White House.
All the other big external actors have more or less clear goals. Russia seeks a return to superpower status on a par with the US and leverage in and against Europe. Iran seeks to consolidate its Shia axis through Iraq and Syria to Lebanon and the Mediterranean. Saudi Arabia and the Sunni camp want to stop Iran. Turkey wants to stop the advance across northern Syria of Kurds allied to Turkish Kurd insurgents.
It is hard to divine anything resembling a coherent US policy towards Syria, or the wider region. American forces find themselves: in battlefield alignment with Iran and its proxies in Iraq; in opposition to Nato ally Turkey in Syria because of their reliance on Syrian Kurds; and after announcing three months ago that removing President Assad was off the agenda, being sucked into a war with his Iran-backed forces in eastern Syria. This is before you add to the mix Mr Trump’s efforts to set fire to Qatar, the most important US base in the region.
The limited initiatives to somewhat attenuate the Syrian disaster are almost all coming from Russia: a tripartite (and ineffective) ceasefire with Iran and Turkey; the “de-escalation zones” Moscow proposed in May, albeit in the four areas where the Assads still face strong challenges from rebels; even a constitutional blueprint to decentralise power in Syria. The US has come up with next to nothing. The common denominator in these three Russian initiatives may be — some western diplomats involved in Syria suggest — that President Vladimir Putin is groping towards an exit strategy from Syria. If so, nothing Mr Trump is engaged in looks likely to help him find one.