BEIRUT – Russia’s expanding military intervention in Syria has the potential to tilt the course of the war in favor of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, leaving U.S. policies aimed at securing his departure in tatters and setting the stage for a new phase in the four-year-old conflict.
Exactly what Russia intends with its rapidly expanding deployment of troops, tanks and combat aircraft in the Assad family heartland on Syria’s northern coast is difficult to discern, according to military experts and U.S. officials, who say they were not consulted on the Russian moves and were caught off guard by the intervention.
Already, however, the Russian move has thrown into disarray three years of U.S. policy planning on Syria, derailing calculations about how the conflict will play out that may never have come to fruition and now almost certainly won’t.
Foremost among those was the expectation, frequently expressed by officials in the Obama administration, that both Iran and Russia would eventually tire of supporting the embattled Syrian regime and come round to the American view that Assad should step down as part of a negotiated transition of power. The conclusion of the nuclear talks with Iran in July further raised hopes that Washington and Tehran would also find common ground on Syria.
Instead, the arrival of hundreds of Russian marines, sophisticated fighter jets and armor at a newly expanded air base in the province of Latakia appears to signal a convergence of interests between Moscow and Tehran in support of Assad.
The intervention has given the regime a much needed boost when government loyalists had been losing ground to the opposition, and has been broadly welcomed by Syria, Iran and its allies.
“The Americans thought that the negotiations with Iran could include a bargain on Syria, but this issue is over,” Hasan Nasrallah, the leader of Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia, whose fighters have been instrumental in securing Assad’s hold on power, said in a television interview Friday. “The negotiations were only about the nuclear issue.”
The sophisticated new weaponry being introduced by the Russians will give a qualitative edge to Assad’s depleted and wearied government forces, thwarting, at least for now, predictions that his demise could be imminent, according to Chris Harmer of the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War.
“This extends Assad’s lifetime indefinitely,” he said. “As long as he’s got major state based support from Iran and Russia he can survive.”
The intervention also risks prolonging, intensifying and perhaps expanding the war, if, as is widely predicted, the Russian force uses its firepower not against the Islamic State but against the rebels seeking to topple Assad, some of them backed by the United States.
