West and Turkey soften tone towards Assad regime

The continued Russian military build-up in Syria appears to be pushing western governments and Ankara to rethink their Syrian policies, writes Josh Wood.

Russian president Vladimir Putin, second left, will meet with his American counterpart Barack Obama when he travels to the United States to speak at the UN general assembly next week. Alexei Nikolsky/RIA-Novosti, Kremlin Pool Photo via APShow less

BEIRUT// As the Syrian government began using newly acquired Russian aircraft to bomb ISIL positions this week, western countries, along with Turkey, have increasingly softened their tone on the Assad regime.

The continued Russian military build-up in Syria appears to be pushing western governments and Ankara to rethink their Syrian policies at a time when refugees are streaming into Europe, ISIL retains control of a large portion of the country and years of talks to resolve the conflict have gone nowhere.

On Thursday, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a fierce critic of Bashar Al Assad, suggested for the first time that the Syrian president could have a role to play in a future political transition.

“The process could possibly be without Assad, or the transitional process could be with him,” Mr Erdogan told reporters in Istanbul, when asked about a possible solution to Syria’s four-year civil war.

But “nobody envisages a future with Assad in Syria,” he added, saying it was “impossible for them (Syrians) to accept a dictator who has led to the deaths of up to 350,000 people.”

Also on Thursday, European foreign ministers met in Paris as part of an effort to build new diplomatic momentum to end the conflict.

“We have to speak with many actors, this includes [Syrian president Bashar Al] Assad, but others as well,” German chancellor Angela Merkel said on Thursday, ahead of the summit.

“Not only with the United States of America, Russia, but with important regional partners, Iran, and Sunni countries such as Saudi Arabia,” she added.

It comes after US secretary of state John Kerry said on Saturday that although Washington still maintains that Mr Al Assad must step down, it is not a prerequisite to coming to an agreement to ending the country’s civil war.

Yezid Sayigh, a senior associate with the Carnegie Middle East Centre in Beirut, said Russia is showing “that by being assertive, they’ll push and prod some of the western powers into going from a sort of tacit acceptance of the premise [of Mr Assad staying in power] to saying it openly”.

However, some powers – like France – still maintain that there can be no settlement to the war in Syria without the departure of Mr Al Assad.

The international community has become increasingly concerned by Russia’s recent military build-up inside Syria.

The US says Russia has deployed troops, tanks, military aircraft and housing units to Syria recently. While Moscow and Damascus maintain that the Russian military assistance is to help defeat ISIL, western nations are worried that the build-up is designed to bolster Mr Assad’s regime – which has lost a significant amount of territory – against rebel forces.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported on Thursday that newly acquired Russian jets had been used by the Syrian government to bomb ISIL positions in Aleppo province. The air strikes began earlier in the week, the Britain-based monitoring group said.

On Monday, US officials said Russia was conducting drone flights inside Syria and on Wednesday, a security source in Damascus said the Syrian army had started deploying Russian-supplied drones.

Analysts say Russia is trying to reassert itself in the Middle East after an absence of decades and to ensure that they are a part of any settlement to Syria’s war.

Russia’s involvement in the Syrian conflict “shows that Moscow is getting more and more important as a player in the region and it will probably be pretty difficult to settle the issue without getting Russia involved,” said Nikolay Kozhanov, a Russian foreign policy expert with Chatham House.

Since upping its military deployments to Syria, Russia has quickly engaged a number of actors in the conflict, increasing ITS diplomatic clout.

Russia and the US are set to hold “military-to-military” dialogue over Syria and Russian president Vladimir Putin will meet with his American counterpart Barack Obama when he travels to the US to speak at the UN general assembly next week. An Israeli-Russian military coordination team is also being set up to avoid accidents and there are reports that Russia will also cooperate with Iran.

The US has been bombing ISIL in Syria since 2014 and has also attempted to deploy a small number of American-trained and equipped Syrian rebels into the country. Israeli warplanes have struck Syrian territory several times targeting Hizbollah forces, while Iran has sent weapons, advisers and proxy militias to aid Mr Assad in his fight.

Russian efforts suffered a setback on Thursday, however, when diplomats said the US had refused to negotiate over a draft statement that Moscow had hoped the UN security council would approve to bolster its position on Syria.

A draft of Russia’s statement urges countries to fight extremist groups “in coordination with the governments of the affected states” – language that can be seen as a reference to the Syrian government.

While there is some optimism that the dialogue resulting from the Russian military build-up may quicken an end to the war, Mr Sayigh said the change of balance may actually slow resolution.

“This will probably only lead to further deadlock because they are restoring the equilibrium in a sense at a time when the regime was weakening,” he said.

How far the Russians are willing to go militarily has still yet to be seen.

“The regime wasn’t about to collapse anyway and the rebels weren’t about to win,” said Mr Sayigh. “The Russians don’t have to invest a massive amount of military force in Syria in order to stabilise the situation. Already by sending just a few tanks and planes initially they got everyone paying attention and wondering about the consequences.”

Mr Kozhanov said the Russian public has little stomach for overseas military engagements these days and that it’s likely Russia’s main contribution will be arms, pilots and advisers instead of troops engaging in combat on the ground.

“The experience of the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, it made the Russian society very negative about any use of force outside of Russia,” he said. “The Ukrainian experience is probably the exception [but] for a large part of the population, Ukraine is still considered to be part of Russia. Syria is definitely a different case.”

* With additional reporting by Agence France-Presse, Associated Press