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And next, Syria?

teqniq said:
UN under pressure to set up inquiry into Syria aid programme
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Further to the above

Aid groups suspend cooperation with UN in Syria because of Assad 'influence'

More than 70 aid groups have suspended cooperation with the UN in Syria and have demanded an immediate and transparent investigation into its operations in the country because of concerns the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, has gained “significant and substantial” influence over the relief effort.

The coalition, which includes some of Syria’s most widely known aid organisations, told the UN it intends to withdraw from the UN’s information-sharing programme in protest at the way some of its agencies are functioning within the country.

In a letter to the UN (pdf), the 73 groups made clear they could no longer tolerate the “manipulation of humanitarian relief efforts by the political interests of the Syrian government that deprives other Syrians in besieged areas from the services of those programmes”....
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On Syria Comment The Virtues of Sham: The Place of Syria in the Muslim Sacral Imagination

Places the attraction of emigrating to Sham on Jihad as central to the mainstream Muslim imagination not just a Salafi-Jihadi thing. It's not just a just Jihad against the despotic Assad but a quest for a destined post-nation state utopia.

It's often occurred to me there are ideological parallels to 19th century Zionism. A very big tent ideologically containing secular progressives and reactionary Orthodox but seeded with ideas of a purifying Messianic return to the Holy Land. And that probably did look like a hopeless cause to any rational observer.
 
On War On The Rocks WHAT I GOT WRONG ABOUT ASSAD’S MILITARY PROSPECTS

The author thinks he over estimated the regime's ability to win earlier this Summer. There has been no part of this war when either side really looked within a year of wining. It flows back and forth as meddling foreign hands escalate and counter escalate. At the moment it's what's happening round Damascus that's most significant.

I'd say he probably missed Assad's ability to squander opportunities and a certain incoherence in Russian moves. Putin's sham "mission accomplished" moment made little sense militarily, it merely stalled momentum and gave the rebels a time to prepare a counter offensive. The grabbing Palmyra from IS while the Homs countryside was insecure made little sense. The shock effect of airpower also tends to wear off. The Salafi-Jihadi parts of the rebellion have proved resilient. But they are suffering an awful lot of attrition and the more moderate elements of the rebellion crumble. The regimes military assets may be rotten but so are the revolt's. Iranian advice had been to abandon the defending in all corners strategy and consolidate within a defensible perimeter and yet they've escalated and IRGC officers are dying in three figure numbers for Aleppo. And the biggest success of the Russian mission they requested seems to have caused Jordan to go cold on the rebellion in the South and to flimflam the Americans into sulky alignment. Mainly triumphs of intimidating Russian diplomacy not a couple of dozen air frames dropping dumb bombs. It looks to me like Assad is the over reaching twit demanding all his provinces back and there is little sign his allies have much leverage over him. It was the same in his father's day with the Soviets.
 
I dunno. I just remembered that this meeting happened a few days ago when I saw he'd written an article about it. The regime is quick to exploit any potential situation to bolster it's legitimacy imo so perhaps the meeting was ill-considered for that alone. Whether it constitutes appeasement is another matter. Perhaps that is too strong a word, you tell me. :)
 

There's an old adage that every defence should have a tempting weak spot. I doubt if that was the regime design in Aleppo but it's the effect. Heavily supplied by Turkey the best forces the rebellion had stormed in out Idlib led by AQ and were drawn in to be bled. They failed to open a viable GLOC to the Eastern Aleppo pocket just worry Western Aleppo with a counter-siege.

Then pot-coup Ankara reconsidered its priorities and possibilities in Syria and stopping the PKK unifying their cantons was number one. To do that they started draining Idlib's reserves and they'll need to syphon off even more than the couple of thousand they've taken. As the previous WOTR article points out the rebel assault force wasn't that big, less than ten thousand men. That two front war probably isn't sustainable for Idlib's beards.
 
Assad has a certain legitimacy with Syrian Christians as he's often seen as the only viable guarantor of their community's survival. This is a pretty bleak prospect as many Christians have exactly the same problems with corrupt Baath rule as their Muslim neighbours. Unsurprisingly Christians are fleeing the wrecked country in disproportionate numbers.

They might have a chat with some folk in Mecca instead:

He's never going to get through his next diversity audit is he.
 
On citeam.org Here’s why Assad’s army can’t win the war in Syria
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The actual fighting against opposition groups is mostly done by Syrian militias, the Lebanese Hezbollah Shia units, Iranian and Iraqi volunteers and Private Military Companies (PMCs).

The main military actions Assad’s army engages in is extorting a tribute from the locals. The Syrian armed forces have not conducted a single successful offensive during the past year.

Apparently Syria’s General Staff has no coherent short-term or mid-term strategic plans. Assad’s generals do not believe their troops can bring the country to order without military aid from foreign states. They do not plan large-scale operations, giving the reasoning of ostensibly high combat capabilities of the illegal armed groups, lack of ammunition and modern equipment, a fear of heavy losses and a negative outcome of the fighting.

The Syrian army’s junior officers, NCOs and privates have little enthusiasm to charge and fight for their motherland. The general morale deterioration is exacerbated by the fact that the history of the modern Syrian army has known no military victories.
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A retired Russian Colonel on the mushy rottenness of the SAA. An army of demoralised FOBbits and not even ones alert enough to defend fixed positions. He reckons the SAA has constantly been defeated and isn't likely to win this one. I'd agree with the latter and at its best it never gave the IDF more than a week or two of gyp up on the Golan but the MB rebellion was crushed at Hama in 82 which I'd call a victory.

And domestic security is what it's for of course. It's there to keep the Assad clan in power and it does clog up rebel offensives. The self funding extortion rackets are part of its design. It doesn't need to be much use militarily to do that and if it was more effective it might threaten the regime. The fact is after half a decade facing a revolt with heavy external support they've only ever lost one Divisional HQ, Raqqa. Assad still rules most of the population. In that way the SAA is fit for purpose.

He mixes up the very different opposition formations into a monolith. It's not the Viet Cong. IS does have experienced Iraqi Staff officers able to plan complex campaigns, tactically competent Chechens who often had prior military training and excellent intelligence folk long experience of the savagely ingenious Iraqi insurgency. This is a small army that incredibly had a fair go at toppling Shia Baghdad. AQ has a similar cadre of veteran Jihadis in Syria and provides excellent training. Ahar al Sham and Jaish al Islam are impressive military bureaucracies. The former survived a near total loss leadership in a bombing the latter has built a military industrial base. There are other examples. These people are well led and highly motivated revolutionaries. But they are all short of manpower. They do not have a unified command and without that unity they can't win either.

Much of the larger rebellion isn't that competent, in fact it rather resembles the sticky fingered SAA and NDF. Few groups can mount a battalion sized offensive away from their home turf. Some are more like a Dads Army of locals who got together to fend of bandits when the state retreated. Some are simply taking some foreign powers shilling as its the only job going. These guys can and do lose even to the SAA.

He's right, it's a quagmire the Russians should probably try to gradually get out of but it's also become a matter of face for Putin. I reckon they'll be there permanently.
 
In Al Monitor Turkey reaches critical crossroads in Syria
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Turkey wants to prevent the Kurds from establishing a corridor and, more importantly, it wants a major role in determining Syria's future. Strategist Ali Nihat Ozcan warns in his recent Milliyet article that Turkey might have to deploy a force of 35,000-40,000 (six to eight brigades) in northern Syria for the next 10 years to accomplish these goals, given the political and military prerequisites, topographical features, the FSA's capacity for combat and the existence of asymmetric threats such as IS and the YPG.

Is Ankara planning such a strategic engagement, or will we forget about Operation Euphrates Shield in a month or so?

Given Syria's complexity, with its long list of players and conflicting interests, I am not sure even Ankara knows the answer yet.
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You could double that number and still be under resourced. The usual COIN planning metric is a counterinsurgent-insurgent ratio of 4:1. The SDF claims 60K fighters, though it's likely half that size. IS is reckoned to be down to 20K fighters and is stretched elsewhere. Though CIA estimate have been low by a factor of three or four in the past conflicts. IS still has a substantial body of beards and has a lot of expertise in making life Hell for heavy brigades in Iraq. The Turks do seem more PKK focussed but could end up fighting both. I don't think Turkish voters are going to have much taste for a decade of that.

Article reckons the Turks are intent on trading with the Americans. They'll take al Bab for the handover of Manbij to the FSA. The forces they've currently got deployed, a Heavy Brigade of 40 tanks, some SF and a ragtag of a couple of thousand rebels are inadequate to retain even the band of territory along the border.
 
In CTC Centennial THE DAWN OF MASS JIHAD: SUCCESS IN SYRIA FUELS AL-QA`IDA’S EVOLUTION

Lister on the rise and rise of AQ in Syria; meticulous as always. He still thinks the problem is insufficient support to the moderate opposition.

I've thought for some time the revolt's a dead loss. The Syrian call to Jihad in 2012 was a mistake that got a lot of people killed. One consequence was IS taking Raqqa and getting itself some nice Syrian rear basing. We are having to tidy that up and have created the basis for another civil war in Syria and Turkey involving the PKK. Another consequence was AQ and other radical Salafi infesting the revolt.

The opposition have had a great deal of covert support. It compares with support to the Afghan Muhj. The US just hasn't stepped in to smash the regime's defences for them and hunt down and kill the leadership as we did in Libya. I doubt we'd be looking at a much better AQ/IS situation in Syria if that had been done. We might well have seen an earlier Russian intervention to stop that. The Iranians would have a bloody nose but would likely still be fighting to maintain their GLOC to HA. The components of the revolt and the remnants of a collapsed Syrian state would almost certainly be fighting for mastery. If Iraq hadn't happened we might be prone to attempting a grand nation building experiment but we tried that at great expense.

I think the problem's more that the moderate opposition has never really coalesced into a national revolution. It is fragmented (as he says "69 such vetted factions") and therefore vulnerable to being muscled by large radical Salafi groups that it seem reading this are edging toward a coalition that could dominate the revolt. These guys have a cause that goes beyond toppling Assad.

It reminds me of HA's style of nation building. That too was just a start. It ends at al Quds, not soon but onwards to Jerusalem is the mission. Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, the front for conquest of the Levant is what it says on the side of the can. We've made a lot of enemies in Syria. I doubt the assurances that they will stay focused within Syria's borders. What we finally do with that probably won't look that much different to what the Russians are doing. There's no easy fix it's just damage limitation.
 

...
He said that this shows that anyone supplying weapons to Syrian opposition groups has “absolutely no control” over where they end up. Often, foreign powers think they are supplying one group with weapons but the agenda of the many opposition factions overlaps with that of IS. “Some of them are backing pretty hard line Islamist forces, and it’s very difficult to distinguish between them and Islamic State. They are subsumed within Islamic State, or have a deal with them, or the group will fracture and its fighters will leave with their weapons and join Islamic State.”

“It means that anyone supplying Syrian opposition groups has absolutely no control over the ultimate destination of those weapons. It’s almost a mirror image of what happened in Afghanistan in the 1980s, in the sense that the US, Saudi Arabia and allied states were supplying weapons to the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence Agency. They then had discretion as to who to give them to. They picked the winners, which were the hard line Islamist forces that were the origins for Al Qaeda and the Taliban.”

The shocking reality is that these Eastern European countries probably know that their weapons are reaching IS, he claims. Saudi Arabia favours light, American-made, expensive guns for its own armed forces, yet what it is buying ‘Soviet calibre’ heavy guns from Eastern Europe that it is obviously not planning to use itself, according to Bevan.

“What we are doing is to go back to those [Eastern European] governments and saying actually, you’ve got a really significant problem because you exported 7,000 rockets to Saudi Arabia which are all Soviet calibres, and you know full well that Saudi Arabia doesn’t use that stuff, so why did you export that to them because they are obviously giving it to someone else?”
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The parallel to Afghanistan always strikes me.

There are other kinds of problems with this than arms given to proxies going astray.

We've tried to pick the winners in Syria by heavily arming what Langley judges to be the moderate opposition with masses of small arms and highly effective TOWs. Few of these antitank missiles end up in the hands of people we are scared of. However offensives spearheaded by AQ that have greatly increased the group's prestige in Syria have been provided with fire support by the groups we supplied. This is how our rebels have won battles in Northern Syria as auxiliaries of radical Salafi. And now we would attempt to pull their teeth joining the Russians in targeting the Syria focused part of AQ.

All that got us was the fall of Idlib to Jaish al Fateh and a Russian airpower intervention that makes deeper US involvement much more risky and Assad much more secure. And the logic of continuing? To force the brutal despot to terms he has never shown any sign of seeking.

And consider Afghanistan, a poor revenge for Vietnam. A million Afghans died and the exhausted 40th Army withdrew after a decade claiming tactical victory. The leadership of the Taliban was made up of often maimed veterans of this conflict. Men like Mullah Omar who would reluctantly host AQ and then fight an even longer war against us in the same highlands. Bin Laden, a minor bag man for Saudi intelligence and a useful construction engineer with an almost comical short career fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan would declare war on the House of Saud and the US. Eventually dragging the US into the multi-trillion dollar conflicts of the GWOT.

Did all the Muhj groups the Pakistani ISI armed for Langley and Saudis come to love us? Did we foresee some would not? Is it not likely threats will emerge out of the wreckage of the Syrian revolt as well? One thing is certain we did not learn much from our Afghan adventure.
 
On TNI The Folly of Urging Even Greater Syria Intervention
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Where to begin? America did intervene in the Syrian conflict through at least two operations, one run by the CIA and one run by the Pentagon, to arm the anti-Assad rebels, a strategy that proved wildly ineffective and lucrative for terrorists. All the way back in 2013, intelligence officials were warning that the Nusra Front, then Al Qaeda’s franchise in Syria, was the strongest and best equipped of the rebellious factions, and the future Islamic State was lurking nearby, too. A better question to pose is: what would have been the consequences of deeper intervention, as originally mulled by President Obama? It likely would have made matters worse by bolstering the side that’s teeming with Sunni jihadists.

Further, it doesn’t follow that because we didn’t intervene more abundantly, we own what’s happened in Syria. If this was a sin of omission on America’s part, and by extension its government, then other presidential administrations have some serious penance to do. FDR must be faulted for not intervening in the Spanish Civil War, even though both sides were guilty of atrocities and neither was compatible with American liberalism (death toll: five hundred thousand). Ronald Reagan should be asterisked with the Lebanese Civil War, from which he withdrew American troops (death toll: 150,000). But the blood is most viscous on the hands of George W. Bush, elected in the middle of the Second Congo War, the deadliest conflict since World War II: death tollbetween three million and 7.6 million.
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Trouble is with Syria several US allies were encouraged to intervene covertly in Syria by the Obama administration which eventually decided a collapse of the Syrian state would just echo Obama's self admitted greatest mistake being chivied into regime change in Libya by the twits in Paris and London. The idea in Syria was the regional powers would own it not a USA that had burnt its fingers in Iraq.
 


There's a lot of daft talk of holding Mosul with tiny numbers of Sunni Arab militia. When the Americans took the Mosul area for the first time they had a holding force of 20K of their own regulars plus support from thousands of KRG Peshmerga.

Of course the Turks might just be talking up their ambitions towards the Caliphate's cities just to keep the Americans distracted while they duff up the PKK.
 

...
Hours before the deal went into effect, Assad reiterated his determination to reconquer all of Syria from what he termed “terrorists,” signaling that he has no plans to stop fighting to crush the five-year-old rebellion against his regime.

“We as a nation . . . are delivering a message that the Syrian state is determined to recover all regions from the terrorists and restore security, infrastructure,” Assad said in remarks after attending prayers marking the Muslim Eid al-Adha holiday in Darayya, a Damascus suburb that was recently recaptured from the rebels after a four-year siege.

“We come today here to replace the fake freedom they tried to market at the beginning of the crisis . . . with real freedom,” he added, “not the freedom that begins with them and is sustained by dollars . . . and by some promises of positions.”
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Bashar is like a clockwork, Lavrov and Kerry get another cessation together and he's yammering about conquering all of Syria again. Promptly bombs Aleppo. Opposition reaction basically just short of an outright rejection. Kerry telling the rebels they have to ditch AQ. AQ's rebranded JFS is looking on the bright side.
 
CrabbedOne said:
On War On The Rocks WHAT I GOT WRONG ABOUT ASSAD’S MILITARY PROSPECTS

The author thinks he over estimated the regime's ability to win earlier this Summer. There has been no part of this war when either side really looked within a year of wining. It flows back and forth as meddling foreign hands escalate and counter escalate. At the moment it's what's happening round Damascus that's most significant.

I'd say he probably missed Assad's ability to squander opportunities and a certain incoherence in Russian moves. Putin's sham "mission accomplished" moment made little sense militarily, it merely stalled momentum and gave the rebels a time to prepare a counter offensive. The grabbing Palmyra from IS while the Homs countryside was insecure made little sense. The shock effect of airpower also tends to wear off. The Salafi-Jihadi parts of the rebellion have proved resilient. But they are suffering an awful lot of attrition and the more moderate elements of the rebellion crumble. The regimes military assets may be rotten but so are the revolt's. Iranian advice had been to abandon the defending in all corners strategy and consolidate within a defensible perimeter and yet they've escalated and IRGC officers are dying in three figure numbers for Aleppo. And the biggest success of the Russian mission they requested seems to have caused Jordan to go cold on the rebellion in the South and to flimflam the Americans into sulky alignment. Mainly triumphs of intimidating Russian diplomacy not a couple of dozen air frames dropping dumb bombs. It looks to me like Assad is the over reaching twit demanding all his provinces back and there is little sign his allies have much leverage over him. It was the same in his father's day with the Soviets.
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Irgc officers are dying in three figure numbers for aleppo? Source pls
 
Pickman's model said:
Irgc officers are dying in three figure numbers for aleppo? Source pls
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According to this long detailed report on Iran Tracker up to 80 Iranian officers died in Syria from October 15 to February this year alone. The main action has been around Aleppo. Officers have been 60% of reported Iranian casualties which reflects their role leading militias on front lines. Been a good few since then as more than one Iranian position around Aleppo has got overrun. Some notable losses of very senior officers included. Not that it much worries the mental Persians the Teheran IRGC is reported to be flooded with requests to Jihad in Syria by eager martyrs. This isn't even a scratch compared to a week in the Iran-Iraq war.
 
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Advocates for a decentralised Syria as the only way to hold the country together. As there is no Syrian actor apparently able to conquer the place and the PKK will accept nothing short of that this may be what Syria ends up looking like. It's drifting in that direction; even in regime areas sub-state actors often are relatively autonomous.

It might work with the Russians who've already floated such an idea and to some extent with the Iranians. Trouble is the Assad clan won't wear it. Bashar has never demonstrated much political flexibility and I think the power of the Russians to bend him is frequently overstated. The Turks and Saudis probably won't like it either. Radical Salafi and PKK ambitions don't stop at a little autonomy. I doubt it would be peaceful.

Another point is the roots of the revolt may lie in Bashar's divisive reforms which reversed subsidies to poor rural areas and pumped funds into areas of regime support in the West and developing a service sector packed with cronies. This hasn't changed according to the report partially devastated Aleppo gets a fraction of the state budget that peaceful Latakia does. Not a positive sign for decentralisation.
 
CrabbedOne said:


Advocates for a decentralised Syria as the only way to hold the country together. As there is no Syrian actor apparently able to conquer the place and the PKK will accept nothing short of that this may be what Syria ends up looking like. It's drifting in that direction; even in regime areas sub-state actors often are relatively autonomous.

It might work with the Russians who've already floated such an idea and to some extent with the Iranians. Trouble is the Assad clan won't wear it. Bashar has never demonstrated much political flexibility and I think the power of the Russians to bend him is frequently overstated. The Turks and Saudis probably won't like it either. Radical Salafi and PKK ambitions don't stop at a little autonomy. I doubt it would be peaceful.

Another point is the roots of the revolt may lie in Bashar's divisive reforms which reversed subsidies to poor rural areas and pumped funds into areas of regime support in the West and developing a service sector packed with cronies. This hasn't changed according to the report partially devastated Aleppo gets a fraction of the state budget that peaceful Latakia does. Not a positive sign for decentralisation.
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It would still be preferable to partition - and I'm not just saying that because I'm Irish. The recent precedents - Somalia and Sudan - suggest that partition would not end the conflict, but set the stage for renewed fighting, and renewed war.
 
Idris2002 said:
It would still be preferable to partition - and I'm not just saying that because I'm Irish. The recent precedents - Somalia and Sudan - suggest that partition would not end the conflict, but set the stage for renewed fighting, and renewed war.
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I doubt if it would even stop the fighting. Imagine if Dev had continued to be a big enough head the ball to try and take the Loyalist filled North by force. There are too many major actors in Syria that are as beyond compromising politically as IS.

What I can imagine is locally negotiated hudnas that leave elements of rebel administrations in place in interim merely because Damascus is too exhausted to crush them just yet. After all Assad tactically tolerated PKK autonomy for most of the last half decade over which time the old enemies sometimes helped each other. The irreconcilable radical Salafi have to be destroyed for this to happen which seems to be the Russian plan.

Though partition sometimes is the only way. Look at Yemen once two rather different countries then legally glued together in a moment of post-Cold War hubris and now de facto divided into North and South again. Only a bloodbath on the Syrian scale is likely to unite if the GCC backed forces head to Sanaa and the Houthi highlands.
 
On War On The Rocks TURKEY’S KURDISH RED LINE IN SYRIA AND THE FIGHT AGAINST ISIL
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While Kurds and some western pundits can turn to history and charge the United States with betrayal, the current circumstances in Syria are nothing of the sort. On the contrary, PYD/YPG forces have been the biggest beneficiaries of the anti-ISIL campaign and have much to gain from an ongoing U.S. alliance. Some YPG fighters may continue to over-reach territorially, however, other Syrian Kurds, including some PYD members (I have spoken to) know full well of the transactional nature of their partnership with the U.S. and the limitations of their role in the anti-ISIL campaign. Many Syrian Kurds recognize that they cannot realistically connect all of their cantons given Turkish opposition and Sunni Arab populations in the area, and realize the need to reconcile with Ankara to keep borders open. This is why, instead of snubbing U.S. support or pushing West of the Euphrates en masse, YPG forces vacated areas around Jarablus, even if they insisted that they have the right to remain “as Syrians.”
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Well it's worth considering that Uncle Sam saved the Syrian PKK's arse at Kobane. IS had them whipped; it was US airpower that broke the siege and what PKK infantry often did after that was act as a pinning force so air could hit them. There always were limits to the relationship.

The above snip is also correct uniting Rojova's cantons may be a romantic dream but makes little sense faced with a hostile Turkey on one side and a Arabist Syrian revolt and regime on the other. The Syrian PKK needs a supportive relationship with at least one of those.
 
On The Washington Institute What Will Year Two of Russia's Syria Intervention Bring?
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Unless the U.S. presidential election brings a major change in Washington's Syria policy, Russia and Iran may be able to establish a condominium that controls nearly the entire country. In this scenario, Putin might grant the PYD a narrow corridor connecting Afrin to the rest of Rojava, which he could cut off whenever he wishes. If he does so, it would not be out of love for the Kurdish cause, but rather because such a move might halt the progress of Turkish-supported rebels in the north, thus protecting Aleppo and facilitating the retrieval of the Euphrates Valley, especially Raqqa.

Now that Russia has air and submarine bases just outside Latakia (Hmeimim and Jableh, respectively) to go with its naval base in Tartus, the coastal Alawite heartland appears to be its favored region. For their part, local Alawites need Moscow's protection in the long run. Their population has been declining since the 1980s, and wartime deaths have accelerated the trend, so they will be in no position to resist future uprisings by the country's Sunni majority; even an Alawite rump state would need Russia's protection for demographic and other reasons.

Russia appears to be nurturing a similar dependency among the Syrian Kurds in the north. It can also be expected to reinforce its presence in Palmyra, which is the ideal place to install a radar base covering all of the Middle East.
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Well it's one option and the threat of that would be a useful counter with Ankara for Moscow. The Russians have permitted a weak TSK thrust into Syria to head off any bid for Rojava unification; it's a balancing act. Just like threatening to snatch the price of IS's capital Raaqa from Uncle Sam's hands. However there are merits in leaving the Americans distracted and hungry for that victory. Undermining the fragile tactical US-Syrian PKK relationship is what I'd be doing. Having to run away from a TSK armoured brigade after bleeding for Manbij while being lectured to get back East of the Euphrates by Biden probably wasn't a PKK happy time.

Of course if the PKK did choose Moscow it would probably mean the abandonment of the Syrian PKK's current dependency relationship with the US air power that's allowed them to seize a lot of Arab turf from IS. This has it's limits due to the US relationship with their arch enemy Turkey being a far bigger factor in geopolitics than a short boutique war against IS. This was always liable to wane once Raqqa fell. The PKK might be more prone to trust it's old Russian friends than the American global hegemon. The Russians can offer to keep the peace with the Assad clan a still dangerous enemy. They're also invested in crushing another: the Syrian Arab revolt.

I'd bear in mind Moscow abandoned lefty Kurds before in a brief state building project. They are a pawn in the great game not a player and liable to be sacrificed.
 
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