Aftermath of Syrian Civil War (JR 153)

Aftermath of Syrian Civil War (JR153)

Introduction

The unrest in Syria, part of a wider wave of the 2011 Arab Spring protests, grew out of discontent with the Syrian government and escalated to an armed conflict after protests calling for Assad's removal were violently suppressed. The war, which began on 15 March with major unrest in Damascus and Aleppo, is being fought by several factions: The Syrian government's Armed Forces and its international allies, a loose alliance of majorly Sunni opposition rebel groups (including the Free Syrian Army), Salafi jihadist groups (including al-Nusra Front), the mixed Kurdish-Arab Syrian Democratic Forces(SDF), and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), with a number of countries in the region and beyond being either directly involved or providing support to one or another faction (Iran, Russia, Turkey, the United States, as well as others).

Iran, Russia, and Hezbollah support the Syrian Arab Republic and the Syrian Armed Forces militarily, with Russia conducting airstrikes and other military operations since September 2015. The U.S.-led international coalition, established in 2014 with the declared purpose of countering ISIL, has conducted airstrikes primarily against ISIL as well as some against government and pro-government targets. They have also deployed Special Forces and artillery units to engage ISIL on the ground. Since 2015, the US has supported the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria and its armed wing, the SDF, materially, financially, and logistically. Turkey, on the other hand, has become deeply involved against the Syrian government since 2016, not only participating in airstrikes against ISIL alongside the U.S.-led coalition, but also actively supporting the Syrian opposition and occupying large swaths of northwestern Syria while engaging in significant ground combat with ISIL, the SDF, and the Syrian government. Between 2011 and 2017, fighting from the Syrian Civil War spilled over into Lebanon as opponents and supporters of the Syrian government traveled to Lebanon to fight and attack each other on Lebanese soil, with ISIL and Al-Nusra also engaging the Lebanese Army. Furthermore, while officially neutral, Israel has conducted airstrikes against Hezbollah and Iranian forces, whose presence in southwestern Syria it views as a threat.

The total population in July 2018 was estimated at 19,454,263 people; ethnic groups – approximately Arab 50%, Alawite 15%, Kurd 10%, Levantine 10%, other 15% (includes Druze, Ismaili, Imami, Nusairi, Assyrian, Turkmen, Armenian); religions – Muslim 87% (official; includes Sunni 74% and Alawi, Ismaili, and Shia 13%), Christian 10% (mainly of Eastern Christian churches – may be smaller as a result of Christians fleeing the country), Druze 3%, Jewish (few remaining in Damascus and Aleppo).

The Shape of Syria to Come 

After seven years of war in Syria, the endgame is here. All major frontlines have been frozen by foreign intervention, and military action now hinges on externally brokered political deals. The result could be a de facto division of the country. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s Russian-backed forces spent the past two years taking out isolated rebel strongholds, like Eastern Aleppo and Ghouta. Recently, they recaptured the area along the border with Jordan and territory near the Golan Heights—but at that point; they ran out of low-hanging fruit.  

Americans to ease Assad’s return to the 1967 cease-fire line in the Golan was a sign of things to come. Israel finally relented, accepting a Russian-monitored restoration of the pre-2011 status quo, but it’s not clear things will be as easy in the rest of Syria, where the three remaining areas outside Assad’s control are shielded by soldiers from NATO member states and wrapped up in complex diplomacy. The smallest area still outside state control is Tanf. In this 55-kilometer bubble around a border crossing with Iraq, a few hundred U.S. forces and allied Syrian rebels remain, ostensibly to hunt remnants of the Islamic State. Russia has agreed not to challenge the American presence at Tanf, but what the United States wants to do with the place is unclear. Tanf has lost most of its relevance as the fight against the Islamic State has wound down, but a strong strand of thought in Washington wants the U.S. military to hang on to this pocket of territory simply to spite Damascus, Moscow and Tehran. As long as the White House can convince itself that this is money well spent, for one strategic reason or another, Tanf will remain outside central government control.

In northeastern Syria, the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, have set up a semi independent, socialist entity fighting the Islamic State, backed by some 2,000 American soldiers. The SDF is made up of Kurds, Arabs and Syriacs, but it is not-so-secretly controlled by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, the PKK, an arch-foe of Turkey. Over the past few years, U.S. envoys have struggled to dissuade the Turks—who are about as comfortable with a PKK stronghold on their southern border as the United States was with Soviet missiles in Cuba—from attacking.

The U.S. deployment doesn’t just keep the Turks out; it also prevents Assad’s forces from entering SDF-controlled areas. But the fact that U.S. President Donald Trump keeps saying he wants to bring the troops home has spooked the SDF’s leaders. They have no air force, no armor, no viable economy and no powerful friends apart from the United States. Left alone, they couldn’t fend off Assad or Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Of the two, however, they prefer Assad. Senior SDF representatives recently visited Damascus to propose a system of decentralized rule in Syria, integration of SDF units into the Syrian army, and an end to anti-Kurdish discrimination by the government. Assad won’t accept genuine power-sharing, but he may be willing to satisfy some of the SDF’s less intrusive demands and fudge others, while offering protection against Turkey. In return, the SDF would be asked to show America the door and hand Assad the keys. That sort of plot twist might seem like a good fit with Trump’s desire to leave Syria, but U.S. policymakers are also wary of a jihadist resurgence and unenthusiastic about public humiliation at the hands of Damascus. Unless or until Trump says otherwise  some combination of inertia and ideology is likely to keep the United States engaged in northeastern Syria, making it off-limits to Assad.

Meanwhile, Syria’s northwest is dominated by Turkey, as part of the joint Russian- Turkish-Iranian Astana Process that seeks to resolve or freeze the conflict on terms favorable to those three nations. But Turkey can’t operate safely in the northwest without Russian cooperation.

Seven years in, the Syrian war is no longer a struggle over Assad’s future, but over the shape of the country he will continue to rule. In the summer of 2016, Erdogan sent his army into the city of al-Bab outside Aleppo, supporting a Syrian rebel coalition. Two years later, Turkish forces seized the nearby Kurdish enclave of Afrin. Moscow facilitated both interventions, allowing Erdogan to carve out a border enclave as long as his rebel clients did not attack the Syrian government. It’s a good deal for Russia, since it makes a key member of NATO dependent on Moscow.

Assad seems less enthusiastic, having watched with dismay as al-Bab and Afrin mutate into Turkish dependencies: Electricity is now wired in over the border, Turkish is taught in schools, Ankara pays rebel salaries, Turks oversee police and local administration, and public squares are named after Erdogan instead of Assad. South of Afrin in Idlib, the last remaining province in Syria outside of the regime’s control, Turkish influence is more diluted. Erdogan has been trying to change that, but Idlib is a hard nut to crack. The area is larger than Afrin and al-Bab combined, and has absorbed hundreds of thousands of displaced Syrians, many under so-called evacuation deals that have transferred populations from besieged areas near Damascus, Aleppo and other former rebel strongholds. U.N. officials warn that an attack could trigger a mass exodus. Even so, the presence of al-Qaida-inspired jihadists in Idlib is seen as unacceptable far outside the pro-Assad camp.

Between October and May, some 1,300 Turkish soldiers built a dozen outposts on the edges of the province, after Russia and Iran green-lighted a plan hatched in Astana to freeze fighting between rebels and the regime while Ankara tries to put more palatable, Turkey-friendly Islamists in charge. For Erdogan, keeping Idlib calm is about preventing a refugee crisis; Turkey already hosts 3.5 million Syrians. Fearing that Assad is about to pivot north, Turkish officials are now signaling to Moscow that attacking Idlib would cross a “red line” and violate the terms of the Astana accord. Moscow wants Idlib’s jihadists gone, especially after a string of drone attacks on the nearby Russian air base, south of Latakia. But the Russians also have strong incentives to uphold the Astana-brokered status quo. They know Assad can survive without Idlib, Afrin or al-Bab, and Russian diplomats see no pressing reason to end a stalemate where both sides compete for Moscow’s favor. A large-scale offensive on Idlib would be “out of the question,” Russia’s special envoy for Syria, Alexander Lavrentyev, said on July 31, contradicting his Syrian counterpart.

These Turkish-Russian understandings put Assad in a tough spot. His army would have trouble retaking Idlib without Russian support, and forcing the Kremlin to pick sides would not necessarily work out in his favor. Still, Russia might want to throw Assad a bone, and there’s a lot of gray area between total reconquest and doing nothing. Russia could very well support an attack on outlying areas like the strategically located town of Jisr al-Shughour, south of the Turkish border, or others near Aleppo. If the fallout seems manageable, that kind of limited offensive could even be acceptable to Turkey, as the coming days may reveal. With Syrian tanks rolling north and tensions mounting, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov is heading to Ankara this week. What he ends up agreeing to with his Turkish counterpart will help determine many of these outcomes in Syria. Some pieces of Idlib may be handed over to Assad, but if Russia then decides to put its thumb on the scale in Turkey’s favor, large parts of Syria’s northwest could be out of Assad’s reach for the foreseeable future. It wouldn’t be a clean end to the war, but does Moscow really need that? From Moldova to South Ossetia and eastern Ukraine, the Kremlin has a habit of letting messy situations linger to its advantage. As seen in Cyprus, Turkey is also no stranger to the concept of endless interim solutions.

Seven years in, the Syrian war is no longer a struggle over Assad’s regime and his future, but over the shape of the country he will continue to rule. The fate of the areas that still elude his control is now in the hands of foreigners.

 Socio Economic realties  

An estimated 4 million children have been born in Syria since 2011, according to UNICEF, which means that half of the children in Syria today have grown up only knowing war. “Every 8-year-old in Syria has been growing up amidst danger, destruction and death,” Henrietta Fore, the executive director of UNICEF, said after a five-day visit to the country in mid-December. Since the government first crushed a popular uprising and precipitated the civil war that still shows little sign of ending, a third of the schools in Syria have been destroyed or damaged, or they have been turned into shelters for displaced families

 We’re talking about a country where a large part of the children on the scale of a whole society have not been going to school for three years. This is something we’ll pay a price for, for years to come. Half the country’s urban fabric has been destroyed; a large part of its industrial base. This is not a country that’s going to recover. And we’re far from seeing any movement towards a solution, so it’s going to be years of this.  

Things have gotten even worse in Syria since 2015, and with another year of war and suffering ahead, the country may look to a casual observer like a never-ending story. Cities have been “liberated” from the regime and then pounded into rubble and retaken. There are intermittent peace talks in foreign cities while the fighting goes on. Cease-fires are declared and soon broken. And what exactly are “de-escalation zones 

Reconciliation between Assad and his neighbors would be the war’s denouement. An entire generation of children not going to school may seem more concrete. So does being told that you’ve resigned yourself to never going home, as one Syrian academic told me last month. He has made his opposition to the Assad regime clear. But now that means he’ll probably never return to Damascus. Yet the uproar in Washington over Trump’s decision to remove the 2,000 or so American forces currently in Syria didn’t touch on any of this, which wasn’t surprising. It was simply another reminder of what the U.S. has hoped to salvage in Syria as Assad and his forces—regular and irregular, Syrian and increasingly foreign—carried out a simple edict to hold on to power: “Assad, or we burn the country down.”

Since 2011, the conflict in Syria continues to take a heavy toll on the life of Syrian people and on the Syrian economy. The death toll in Syria directly related to the conflict as of early 2016 is estimated between 400,000 (UN, Apr 2016) and 470,000 (Syrian Center for Policy Research, Feb 2016), with many more injured, and lives up heaved. More than 6.1 million people, including 2.5 million children, are internally displaced and 5.6 million are officially registered as refugees (UNHCR, September 2018).

The social and economic impacts of the conflict are also large—and growing. The lack of sustained access to health care, education, housing, and food have exacerbated the impact of the conflict and pushed millions of people into unemployment and poverty.

In addition, a severe decline in oil receipts and disruptions of trade has placed even more pressure on Syria’s external balances, resulting in the rapid depletion of its international reserves.  

The Toll of War report assessed the economic and social impact of the conflict Syria-wide, including its effects on physical and human capital, as well as its effects on the aggregate well-being of Syrians. The World Bank study examines the drivers of these impacts—physical destruction, losses in human lives, demographic mobility, and economic disorganization—to assess the relative importance of the impact on each. It found that:

·         The human toll of the conflict (casualties and forced displacement) and damage to productive factors and economic activity has been extensive, damaging capital stock (e.g. about one-third of housing stock and one half of health and education facilities damaged or destroyed), while disrupting economic activity. From 2011 to 2016, cumulative GDP loss is estimated at $226 billion.

·          Disruptions in economic organization are the most important driver of the economic impact, superseding physical damage. Conflict has disrupted economic activity by diminishing economic connectivity, reducing incentives to pursue productive work, and disconnecting networks and supply chains. Cumulative GDP loss due to disruptions in economic organization exceeds that of physical destruction by a factor of 20. This contrast is explained by how the economy reacts to different shocks. A “capital destruction only” is like some natural disasters: in a well-functioning economy, its effects on investment are limited (-22% in simulations) as capital can be rapidly rebuilt and repercussions contained. In comparison, economic disorganization reduces investments significantly (-80% in simulations); and effects propagated over time.

·         The longer the conflict lasts, the more difficult recovery will be, as effects of economic deterioration become more persistent over time. Should conflict end in its 6th year, GDP is estimated to recoup about 41% of the gap with its pre-conflict level within 4 years, with cumulated GDP losses 7.6 times 2010 GDP by the 20th year. In comparison, GDP recoups only 28% of the gap in 4 years if it ends in its 10th year, with cumulated GDP losses 13.2 times 2010 GDP by the 20th year. Simulations also show that outmigration could double between the 6th and 20th year of the conflict.

The assessment and analysis together underscore the Bank’s ongoing dialogue with the UN, the EU, and other development partners, and provide an important understanding of Syria’s economy, infrastructure, service delivery, and institutions. The assessment and analysis do not provide, however, a picture of the reconstruction that will be needed once the conflicts in Syria stop.

The impact of the Syrian crisis has been significant in Lebanon and Jordan, where conservative estimates put the proportion of Syrian refugees at 25% and 10% of the countries’ populations respectively. The Bank’s operational response in these countries has included: (i) analytical work on the social and economic impact of the conflict; (ii) the rapid preparation of projects to assist hosting communities and refugees; and (iii) the mobilization of substantial grant funding from donor partners to support the host countries.

To date, the World Bank has supported around US$3 billion of projects in Jordan and Lebanon, mostly on concessional terms, directly addressing the impact of the Syrian refugee crisis and to help refugees and host communities. Such projects are addressing jobs and economic opportunities, health, education, emergency services and social resilience, and infrastructure.

The Bank also manages the Lebanon Syria Crisis Trust Fund (LSCTF), established in 2014 to provide grant financing to projects that mitigate the impact of the Syrian crisis. The LCSTF is funded by the UK, France, Norway, Finland, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, and Denmark, and has supported emergency projects including education, health, and municipal services.

Assad’s Rule

Assad won his war to stay in power. Granted, he rules a challenging, fragile, and fragmented Syria; one where violence will not cease in the coming years nor will efforts to unseat him. Despite the emphasis on Syrian unity and territorial integrity enshrined in the Geneva Communiqué, in United National Security Council Resolutions, and in statements by numerous regional actors, zones of control are gradually solidifying across Syria, making de facto partition more likely. Partition is not a stable end state; it will be characterized by continued violence. Surely the regime in Damascus will seek to regain control over all of Syria, but doing so will be a difficult and costly effort. There exists a surfeit of worrisome implications of Assad staying in power. Among them include the shattering of any lingering expectations for a different, more open, and democratic Syria. Assad’s continued use of chemical weapons demonstrates that he hasn’t been deterred whatsoever from committing atrocities. And, opponents of Iran and Hezbollah have warily realized that countering them cannot be a halfhearted affair. They are not pushovers and, as the continued bloodshed in Syria underscores, are willing to sacrifice mightily to protect their interests.   

Russian bases in the Middle East; also bought Moscow a permanent seat at the table in any negotiations to end the war, and increased influence more broadly in the region. Just a few years ago, one did not overwhelmingly focus on “whither Moscow” when analyzing regional developments; today, it would be foolhardy not to do so. Nevertheless, as Assad grows confident, Russia’s role in Syria may become knottier.

Iran, despite profound and persistent domestic political and economic vulnerabilities, has demonstrated an unwavering commitment to its mission in Syria, increasingly purchasing another strategic border with Israel. Working by, with, and through Hezbollah, Iranian power projection across the Middle East has skyrocketed. Both Iran and Hezbollah are entrenched in Syria, which will make any U.S. efforts to counter their regional influence that much harder.

Turkey, which has been turning away from the west for years, and with whom U.S. views are increasingly diverging, further complicates the picture in Syria. For a period of time, Turkey and the United States saw Syria through a somewhat common frame: counter-ISIS. That frame is blurring as the fight against ISIS winds down and with it comes serious questions about the justification for future U.S. support to the Syrian Kurds. The conflict between Turkey and the People’s Protection Units (YPG) in northern Syria threatens not only to distract from efforts to conclusively y defeat ISIS; it also risks a confrontation with U.S. forces that would be extremely dangerous for NATO. While debating the circumstances under which two NATO allies may both invoke Article V is academic for some, the increasing salience of that debate is troubling. Indeed, Turkey’s drift toward Russia, particularly evidenced by its recent arms purchases, highlights just how far this NATO ally has fallen.

The “easy” part is over. A number of disparate parties involved in the Syria conflict—internal to Syria, regionally, and globally—largely agreed that ISIS must be crushed. It’s difficult to list another national security challenge that has brought together such radically dissimilar entities like the United States, Russia, Iran, the Assad regime, and Hezbollah, among many others. To be sure, parochial interests for fighting ISIS varied among these actors. And, in some ways, the next phase of countering ISIS—militarily as it goes underground and politically to ensure a capable successor does not fill its place—will be tougher. Nevertheless, this emphasis on militarily defeating ISIS enabled these powers to put tricky issues like reconciliation, rebuilding, and governance on the backburner. With ISIS largely routed militarily, this can no longer be the case. A race to claim the last territory under ISIS control is now giving way to jostling for influence over a potential settlement in the broader war. And that’s very dangerous.

Refugees

In the years since, Assad’s reign over much of Syria has continued, and he has lived up to his reputation as a venal, vicious, and murderous thug. Civil war erupted across the country—which outsiders have cynically manipulated and destabilized—in addition to ISIS’s horrific emergence. With the support of Tehran, Hezbollah, and in particular, Moscow, Assad’s rotten regime has stayed entrenched. The ghastly humanitarian costs of the war keep rising, to include the largest refugee crisis in the world emanating from a region already suffering in a multitude of ways.

Russia intervened in Syria, but the war’s overall status quo and what fueled it still didn’t really shift, even if President Bashar al-Assad got a lifeline. 2015 was also the year that Europeans were forced to reckon in some measure with the reality in Syria, given the record number of Syrians seeking refuge and asylum at Europe’s borders any way they could. In response, though, many European countries put up fences or quotas and the European Union eventually cut a deal with Turkey to essentially act as the gatehouse for asylum-seekers and migrants trying to reach the continent.

Since the Syrian civil war officially began March 15, 2011, families have suffered under a brutal conflict that has killed hundreds of thousands of people, torn the nation apart, and set back the standard of living by decades. About 13.1 million people in the country need humanitarian assistance.

Healthcare centers and hospitals, schools, utilities, and water and sanitation systems are damaged or destroyed. Historic landmarks and once-busy marketplaces have been reduced to rubble. War broke the social and business ties that bound neighbors to their community. Millions scattered, creating the largest refugee and displacement crisis of our time. More than 5.6 million Syrians have fled the country as refugees, and another 6.2 million people are displaced within Syria. Half of the people affected are children.

The Syrian army and various militant groups are fighting to control territory in the country’s northeast and northwest. The civil war has become a sectarian conflict, with religious groups opposing each other that affects the whole region and is heavily influenced by international interventions.

Kurdish enclave

American soldiers weren’t on a humanitarian mission in Syria, although they were operating as the backstop for an increasingly assertive Kurdish proto-state in the northeast of the country, in the name of fighting the Islamic State. Abandoned by the U.S., Syria’s Kurds no longer have their buffer between Assad, on one side, and Turkey on the other. Syrian Kurdish leaders have already reached out to Assad for protection, at least in some of the territories they control near the Syrian-Turkish border, fearing an impending attack from the Turks. Retaking corners of the country that have been under Kurdish control since the war’s early days would be another milestone for Assad, at a time when there is growing diplomatic outreach toward his regime from Arab states that once supported his opponents. “The rebels’ former backers have not only given up on challenging his regime, they now actively want to embrace it—whether in public or in private,” Hassan

Victory and Acceptance

 The United Arab Emirates and Bahrain reopened their embassies in Damascus. Seven years after being expelled from the Arab League, it looks like Syria is about to be let back in. On top of recent military advances in southern Syria, including taking back the city of Daraa, the rebel stronghold where the popular uprising began, these diplomatic overtures, leave no room for doubt: Assad has decisively won the conflict

Reconciliation between Assad and his neighbors would be the war’s denouement. Many of those neighbors are fellow autocrats who are keen to see their brand of control consolidated across the Middle East, as the hope and brief momentum of the 2011 Arab uprisings further recede.  Unlike the geopolitical winds that buffeted Saddam Hussein in the 1990s after the first Gulf war, everything is blowing strongly in Assad’s favor

That means just the opposite for many Syrians, especially the most vulnerable, who have borne the brunt of the world letting Syria slip this far. Amid ongoing talk of reconstruction, including Trump’s seemingly bogus claim that Saudi Arabia would foot an unspecified amount of the bill, there is little actual mention of another word for this traumatized society: recovery.

 Daesh

In Syria, the self-proclaimed Islamic State, or ISIS, was always treated as a problem with an essentially military solution. At least for the U.S.-led international coalition, there was no positive end state or program of political change that could be joined to the military campaign against the jihadi group. The general repulsiveness of the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad meant that, unlike in neighboring Iraq, Washington and its allies could not simply invest in the Syrian state. And none of Syria’s nonstate armed factions represented a plausible governing alternative, at least not for more than piece of the country. The result was a counter-ISIS military campaign absent a coherent, viable political vision for a post-ISIS Syria. Now that post-ISIS Syria has arrived, and the West still has no satisfactory answer for what a good, stabilizing post-ISIS political order in Syria should actually look like. So Syria will be defined not by what should be, but what is: a political map that has been redrawn by the fight against the Islamic State.

But even that map is not indelible, and Syria’s broader civil war goes on. And while the West lacks a compelling vision for the country, Assad and his allies do not. The Islamic State lost its de facto Syrian capital in Raqqa last month and, in short order, nearly all of its remaining territory in the country’s eastern province of Deir el-Zour. What had been the “Caliphate” in eastern Syria has been mostly divided between the Assad regime and the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, led by the Kurdish People’s Protection Units, known as the YPG.

The regime availed itself this year of a strategically timed “de-escalation” agreement covering western Syria and critical support from its Russian and Iranian allies to launch its drive into the Islamic State’s eastern territory. In doing so, it demonstrated its bona fides against the Islamic State and reasserted itself as the only party to the conflict operating on a truly national scope. The YPG, for its part, has proved itself as a disciplined, effective military force and the U.S.-led coalition’s preferred local partner against the Islamic State. The YPG has gone from a leftist curio on the margins of Syria’s war to one of the conflict’s central players and the dominant force in northeastern Syria.

Mar., 22, 2019: The U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces on Tuesday announced full control over the remaining IS enclave of Baghuz in eastern Syria after hundreds of IS militants surrendered overnight. The capture was a significant step in the fight against IS, but not a complete victory over the terror group as fighting continued with some jihadists along the Euphrates River.

Some experts said the final push in Baghuz was the end of Islamic State's self-declared caliphate, but IS and other radical Islamist organizations will continue to attract new members because the West has made little progress on the ideological battlefield. .

We will see this with ISIS going underground. We have seen this with al-Qaida adapting and going underground. They will rationalize the loss … in part because they have very long-term visions of their own movements in history. So they will see this as just one chapter, whereas we in Washington who are thinking in two-year cycles, maybe at most in four-year cycles, see this as the end of [IS], or the killing of [Osama] bin Laden as the ending of al-Qaida," Zarate said, speaking Tuesday at the Washington Institute. Zarate said the defeat will most likely encourage IS to revisit its actions and implement an al-Qaida-style strategy of insurgency while hiding among more vulnerable Muslim communities."Part of the ideological clash between al-Qaida and Islamic State was al-Qaida saying, 'Look, we've learned lessons of how to go about doing these terrorist movements. We've learned some very hard lessons that if you pop your head up too much, if you expose yourself too much, you're going to get whacked by the American and the counterterrorism forces aligned with them,' " he said.

Experts say the loss of IS territory or caliphate is likely to prompt the terror group to step up efforts to spread its ideology and recruit followers on the internet. That is because the lost caliphate was an effective tool for inspiring prospective recruits and spreading ideas, and the IS leadership will have to replace that if it is to survive. IS has shown considerable skill in online recruiting, and Western powers have been ineffective in countering IS propaganda, they say.

IS online communication and propaganda over the years has declined as the group lost territory in Iraq and Syria. Nevertheless, the jihadists have continued to recycle old propaganda messages and even create new ones. IS on Monday released a 44-minute audio recording of its spokesman, Abu Hassan al-Muhajir, calling followers to take revenge for the two attacks targeting mosques in New Zealand that left 50 people dead last Friday."The scenes of the massacres in the two mosques should wake up those who were fooled, and should incite the supporters of the caliphate to avenge their religion," he said.

Levitt said IS most likely would try to restore its image among the vulnerable Muslim communities.

"As we get farther and farther away from what that [IS] caliphate really was in terms of the barbarism, et cetera, they will continue and will have a greater effect at presenting it as, 'Maybe we weren't perfect, but it was a caliphate. Therefore, you need to come and join us again and get back in line to be like the original followers of the Prophet Muhammad,' " he said.

According to Farah Pandith, a former U.S. envoy to Muslim communities, the U.S. and other Western powers need to make sure they step up their efforts to fight back against IS and other extremist groups ideologically.

Pandith said the counter terror strategy after the Sept. 11, 2001, al-Qaida attacks on the U.S. underestimated the importance of battling extremism on the ideological front, leading in part to the emergence of groups like IS.

Daesh: Apr., 2019: On March 23: Kurdish-led SDF, backed primarily by American fighter jets and British and French Special Forces, captured the last few hundred square meters of the village of Baghouz in a godforsaken corner of eastern Syria.  Not since tribal leader Ibn Saud's army of horsemen conquered what is now Saudi Arabia some 100 years ago has a group of jihadis managed to seize, hold and administer a vast area. In short: to govern. But IS did exactly that. Something al-Qaida and others only dreamed of. It was a different story with IS, that Janus-faced monstrosity that portrayed itself in its propaganda as the devout executor of God's will. Meanwhile, it was being directed from within by engineers of power who placed little trust in a supreme deity and instead relied on highly intelligent planning, taking inspiration from the maze of tunnels built by the Viet Cong and the army established by Zionist Israelis with recruits from around the world. Thanks to their experience as military and intelligence officers -- nearly every top-ranking IS commander had been one or the other in Saddam Hussein's Iraq until 2003 - as well as some astonishing creativity, IS was able to conquer large swathes of eastern Syria by summer 2014. In June, it began a blitzkrieg offensive, seizing Mosul, Tikrit and large parts of western Iraq. In July 2014, IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi stood in the pulpit of the Grand al-Nuri mosque in Mosul and proclaimed the so-called caliphate. It was a seemingly unfathomable triumph. At the height of its power, IS controlled an area the size of Jordan and ruled over millions of subjects. Now, nearly five years later, after countless battles and a seemingly endless reconquest, it's over.

The battle over Baghouz was not the suicidal finale that many expected. IS' disciples did not collectively don their suicide belts and charge enemy lines in order to ascend to paradise in a sea of flames. On the contrary: Tens of thousands of them emerged and allowed themselves to be captured.  In late February, IS began getting rid of any extra mouths to feed, sending away anyone who couldn't or wouldn't fight, thus leaving the remaining provisions to be divided among fewer people. Women, children, the elderly and the wounded -- all the useless stalwarts who until then hadn't wanted to leave their delusional paradise -- left.

Judging by those who stumbled by on the last day that the Kurds allowed a few journalists in, it looked as if the gates of hell had been opened. For hours, an exodus of hunched, filthy and mute escapees lumbered up a narrow path to a low plateau, where they were searched with hand-held metal detectors and brought to collection points before being transported away.It was a surreal sight. Journalists with TV cameras and telephoto lenses stood on rooftops and walls, while only 20 to 30 meters (65 to 100 feet) away, a stream of surrendering people shuffled by. Women laden with luggage and plastic bags stumbled on the precipitous, rocky ground. The one-legged man walked by. Injured people with blood-soaked bandages made their way supported by others. Two men carried a battered cot with an inanimate body on it. A girl, perhaps 13 years old, hair and face covered with the fine gray dust of a bomb explosion at close range, lurched forward as if in a trance and stared off into space. She stopped for a moment, walked back a few steps and didn't respond when spoken to. Kurdish fighters moved in and out of the line, lifted babies out of women's arms and carried them up the steepest stretches.

After much insistence, journalists were allowed to get as close as 2 to 3 meters from the line of people. But they were still not allowed to speak to any of the lurching escapees. "They're dangerous!" the Kurdish squad leaders shouted. "Here come the fanatics!" Even though nothing had happened yet. A day later, it became apparent just how right they had been. Once again, hundreds of people passed through the checkpoint at the base of the cliff, between palm trees and ruins. This time no journalists were present. Around noon, a mother with two children blew herself up. Seconds later, a man dressed in women's clothing ran toward the would-be rescuers and detonated a second suicide bomb. A third attacker was shot and killed before he could trigger his explosive belt.

"We thought a woman with two children would be harmless," said one of the wounded SDF men, all of whom survived. One of the two children died instantly, the other was evacuated with severe burns. Were they even the woman's children, or was she taking care of them because their parents were dead? And what moves a woman, who has already given up, to want to kill herself, two small children and as many other people as possible as a final statement?

DER SPIEGEL was able to speak with a number of people who fled Baghouz in recent weeks. Their accounts paint a picture of sheer madness -- or, more precisely, of a murderous struggle between two camps, the "traitors" and the fanatics, those who intended to blow themselves up after capitulating and the many others who cast aside their suicide belts, which could be seen lying around everywhere. The conflict even continued in the prisons and detainee camps, which explains why nearly everyone who spoke with the "infidels" asked to remain anonymous for fear of being attacked at night.

"The hard core are a sect, completely insane," said one of the "traitors," a woman, describing the others before adding: "they call us idol worshipers and refer to themselves as Khawarij," a group whose members view themselves as the only true, albeit misunderstood followers of the Prophet Muhammad in accordance with early Islamic models. This deep divisions extend across all nationalities; men and women from Tunisia are included, so are those from Iraq, though less so those from Europe. A Swedish woman living with several children in an internment camp was quoted as saying that it was better for a child to starve in the Islamic State than "to be sent to the land of the infidels, where it will be raised by homosexuals." They are immune to all logic. They have walled themselves off in their utopia and the memories of the euphoric success of 2014.

Back then, they wanted to declare war on the entire world -- on the infidels, of course, but also on fellow Muslims who would be forced to first submit to pass the test of faith. Everything went according to plan, the gradual infiltration and conquest of northern Syria, the rapid attacks on western Iraq. It was all God's plan, they said. The conquered lands were predominantly inhabited by Sunni Muslims, the religious community that also gave rise to the extremists of IS. Hence not everyone there fled; at least part of the population remained. Without them, the self-declared state would not have been able to function.

But the jihadi military campaign was only successful as long as the world ignored this declaration of war. After the international community idly watched in dismay as Mosul was seized in June 2014, this led IS to make a decisive miscalculation two months later. In the northern Iraqi town of Sinjar, the jihadis attacked the enclave of the Yazidis, an ancient religious community that, in addition to God, reveres seven angels, including one in the form of a peacock. In the eyes of IS, they fulfilled all the conditions to be enslaved and annihilated. And this community had the misfortune of living near the city of Tal Afar, where at least two of the most powerful IS emirs originated.

If the world didn't care about Mosul, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and the other IS leaders reasoned that it probably wouldn't come to the Yazidis' rescue either. But with this attack, IS had suddenly threatened Erbil, the capital of the Kurdish autonomous zone in northern Iraq. The almost biblical scene of tens of thousands of Yazidis on the plateau of the Sinjar Mountains, surrounded and dying of thirst, moved the hesitant U.S. government under President Barack Obama to intervene. It launched airstrikes against IS and forged an international coalition. The subsequent executions of American and British hostages by IS, some of whom had been held for two years without any signs of life, were intended to deter the aggressors, but had the opposite effect.

It was the beginning of the end. In open confrontation, IS stood no chance against sweeping phone surveillance, armed drones and precision-guided bombs that could unleash enormous firepower with an accuracy of several meters. The jihadis lost city after city, region after region, until finally Baghouz had also fallen. There, a Kurdish field commander gave a sober analysis: "They attacked us as a conventional force. That was their mistake. As a guerrilla force it would have been far more difficult, perhaps impossible, for us to beat them."

But why in the world did they choose Baghouz, this village on the border with Iraq? Was it merely the topographical consequence of an ongoing retreat, deeper and deeper to the south, to the most far-flung corner of the country, where the Assad regime's area of control and the Euphrates to the west ultimately run up against the Iraqi border? Where tens of thousands who retreated here and parked their trucks, pickups, cars and vans with all their possessions, dug trenches and transformed the final square kilometers of the "caliphate" into a huge, chaotic parking lot?

Or was there, again, some plan behind it all? SDF spokesman Adnan Afrin recounted how his people, approaching from the desert, had attacked Baghouz once before in late September: "The resistance was immense. We even lost some ground again. We retreated and from then on, only advanced from the north." The version that IS gave its supporters was the usual hocus-pocus: A small Iraqi boy reportedly dreamed the "caliphate" would lose town after town, but never the mountain near Baghouz. Here they would win their decisive victory, after all the hypocrites and sinners had left.

The Many Tunnels of IS

There is another possible explanation. Baghouz was once a smugglers' nest. Immediately behind the steeply rising hills at the edge of town lies the border and the desert of the Iraqi province of Anbar where, according to reports from multiple intelligence agencies, IS leader al-Baghdadi headed after he left Baghouz in early January.

IS was a master of long-term planning and tunnel construction. As early as 2014, the jihadis began digging sophisticated networks of subterranean passageways, some as deep as five or six meters, wherever they thought they might be attacked. They dug in towns like Raqqa, Tabqa and around Mosul. The tunnels had electrical wiring, infirmaries, storage warehouses, command centers, hidden exits and holes for sniper nests. The excavated material was hidden in mosques and houses. In 2016, Iraqi soldiers in Mosul even found specially designed tunnel drills: monstrous machines, several meters long, with huge milling heads and multiple motors. In the hills of Baghouz, the jihadis' final retreat, IS had also dug tunnels. By the middle of last week, it was still unclear whether they had been completely discovered, searched and cleared.

So far, the advancing forces have found none of the group's leading emirs nor any trace of the last three Western hostages held by IS. They also haven't found any gold or sign of the presumed reserves of between $50 million and $300 million (between 44.5 million and 266.7 million euros). According to an IS informant, some of the money is hidden in refrigerators buried in the Iraqi desert.

Baghouz is apparently not only the site of the "caliphate's" demise, the end of its territorial rule. It is also a gateway back to the underworld, to invisibility, where the military superiority of its opponents is meaningless. Terror attacks, murders, racketeering: All the things IS was doing in Iraq before it suddenly overran Mosul -- it's all much easier than maintaining control over an entire state.

IS has long since resumed its underground existence; in some regions, it has returned, in others, it never really left. Like the fertile district of Hawija, west of Mosul, an area crisscrossed by two rivers with banks covered with thick vegetation, where IS fighters retreated in 2017. Here, they were never truly beaten and have been terrorizing the population ever since. It helps that fighting between the central government in Baghdad and Kurdish forces has flared up again, since the frontlines of that conflict create a wide no man's land in which the jihadis can operate virtually undisturbed.

In southern Syria, a region that dictator Bashar al-Assad's troops recaptured last year, several IS groups seemed to disappear into thin air. For years, roughly 1,200 IS fighters were entrenched in the Yarmouk Valley in the southern province of Daraa. After Daraa was seized last summer, more than 500 surrendered and, according to several sources, 80 of them were recruited by the 4th Armored Division of the Syrian army. The military intelligence agency brought the remaining IS fighters to the desert, near the city of Sweida, in the Druze region.

For years, the Druze minority had refused to allow their sons to serve in the army, endeavoring instead to remain as neutral as possible and protect only their own region. In late July, the same IS militants who had been transferred to the area took part in a devastating attack on Druze villages that left nearly 240 dead, after which the Druze leaders dropped their resistance to Assad's rule over their region.

After years of discreet collaboration and hostility with Assad's intelligence services, IS remains a useful enemy for the Syrian dictator, who presents himself to the West as a bulwark against the beheaders. To this day, hundreds of IS combatants continue to operate undisturbed in the desert region east of Sweida, and several emirs from Daraa were released after being only briefly detained by the Syrian authorities.

In other countries, where IS has honored affiliated terror groups with the coveted cachet of "wilayah," meaning an administrative division of a caliphate, a distinctive pattern can be discerned despite the disparate nature of the various movements:

In Libya, probably IS' most important project outside its core region, the group may have lost control over the city of Sirte, but little is known about the number of sleeper cells that exist in the cities along the coast and in the south of the country, where the government has little influence.

In the Sinai, where in November 2014 most of the already existing terrorist group Ansar Beit al-Maqdis allied itself with IS, Egyptian troops may not have been able to break the resistance, but they did manage to keep it in check. It has helped Cairo that the former alliance between Hamas in Gaza and the IS group in Sinai has descended into open hostilities fueled by opposing interests. Hamas is now cooperating with the Egyptian government to prevent the complete obstruction of its smuggling tunnels. Meanwhile, IS has mobilized some 2,000 supporters to fight against the Egyptian state, feeding rumors that Israel is using the jihadis as a tool against Hamas.

In Afghanistan, the IS offshoot "Khorasan Province" has occupied an unexpected political niche and operates primarily in Nangarhar Province in the eastern part of the country, where it fights not only U.S. troops and the Afghan army, but also the Taliban, who seek to eliminate their ruthless rivals. The more the Taliban lean toward negotiating a settlement, however, the more attractive IS becomes for those Taliban who categorically reject all negotiations.

Most alarming of all, although it has gone almost unnoticed by the world, is the situation in northeastern Nigeria and neighboring countries. The Boko Haram terror group, under its unpredictable leader Abubakar Shekau, was successfully fought with international assistance. Even IS criticized the indiscriminate massacre of civilians by its offshoot in 2016 and revoked its "membership." But ever since IS gave its blessing that same year to a faction that had split off under the more savvy leadership of Abu Musab al-Barnawi, who now heads the "West Africa Province," this new group has managed to massively expand the territory under its control and now rules over it like a state -- without ever proclaiming one. Markets and trade routes are taxed and protected, even large military bases are attacked, and the government in Abuja appears powerless against this enemy that is far more elusive than Boko Haram.

None of the countries concerned offer their citizens a dignified existence in a society where everyone enjoys the same basic rights, which would be the surest way to eliminate the breeding grounds for groups like IS. But at least in places where a central state government exists, such as in Egypt, it's possible to stop the further spread of IS, which feeds on the loss of control, collapse and withdrawal of the state like a parasite living off its host. Indeed, the jihadis first operated within the Syrian rebellion clandestinely, then openly, as early as late 2012 -- ignored by the West because they did not (yet) threaten it.

It's this narrow, shortsighted perspective that poses a risk, especially with the demise of the so-called caliphate: the belief that the Islamic State has been defeated merely because its visible manifestation has disappeared. To wit, there are tens of thousands of jihadis from Baghouz, and the villages that were captured shortly beforehand, who find themselves indefinitely detained in camps and prisons run by a Kurdish administration that is overburdened by the task. Roughly 70,000 women, children and elderly alone are held in the Al Hawl refugee camp, while the fighters are detained in prisons and military bases scattered across the region.

The ongoing threat has even been confirmed by the U.S. regional commander in the Middle East, General Joseph Votel, a man who sounds far more pessimistic than his president: "What we are seeing now is not the surrender of ISIS as an organization," as Votel testified before the House Armed Services Committee, "but a calculated decision to preserve the safety of their families and the preservation of their capabilities by taking their chances in camps for internally displaced persons and going to ground in remote areas and waiting for the right time to resurge." "Baqiya wa tatamaddad," Arabic meaning to remain and expand, has been the organization's cryptic rallying cry for years -- and is just as applicable to victories as defeats. IS supporters hastily graffitied the word "baqiya" on numerous walls before they retreated. Two circles and three dots in Arabic encapsulate the ultimate threat: to return as an underground terror network and a source of endless fear.

Iraqis, especially those from Mosul, Tikrit and Baghdad, have been familiar with this fear for a decade and a half. They have been living a powerless existence with no protection against indiscriminate terror and targeted murder because the police themselves are threatened or have been bought off. It remains to be seen what consequences the defeat in Baghouz will hold for IS. The actual existence of the "caliphate" is already being romanticized by many in the internment camps. Fictitious, dazzling prophecies are making the rounds with predictions that the demise of this first "caliphate" was merely a test before it returns -- and remains -- as an even greater power.

History has seen a number of devastating militarily defeats that ultimately engendered tremendous power as myths for centuries thereafter: Masada for the Jews of Palestine, Karbala for the Shiites, the Alamo for the Texans. The logic of identity does not necessarily follow the rational pattern of military successes and defeats. On the day of the victory in Baghouz, it only took a few hours before the mood turned again among the SDF fighters as well as the Kurdish interpreters and drivers. In the early afternoon of March 23, the improvised "Comrade Rostom" media center at the edge of the village was nearly deserted when the driver for the U.S. broadcaster NBC entered the storage room on the ground floor. He was killed on the spot by an explosion that even destroyed the floor above him and the minibus he had parked outside.

In the weeks preceding this deadly attack, boxes of potatoes, tomatoes and bread had been stored there, while uniformed officials and members of the TV crews regularly entered the building to grab something to eat. No believed in a coincidence or in the negligence of the soldiers who assured that they had personally checked the empty room on the ground floor in early March: "There was nothing inside, no wiring, no cabinets, only walls, a window with no booby-traps, the floor."

Syrian Revolutionary Opposition

Syria’s revolutionary opposition to the Assad regime, meanwhile, played a tertiary part in the fight against the Islamic State and will reap few of the political spoils. The mixed nationalist-jihadi opposition could never be reliably motivated or organized to fight the Islamic State, or made to interface effectively with a great power military. They were sidelined as a result, while their local enemies proved themselves more useful proxies for foreign powers concerned, mostly, with killing jihadis. The case for involving these opposition factions in the fight against the Islamic State was that they could claim to be a more resonant, locally acceptable force in eastern Syria. The thinking was that these almost entirely Sunni Arab rebels had unique authenticity that could rally Sunni Arab residents in ISIS-held areas to their side, spurring defections and minimizing local resistance. It could also, ideally, help them stabilize these areas with a popular, representative political order.

Yet it is unclear that the opposition was necessarily a superior force against the Islamic State, even on these terms. Rebels’ factionalism, corruption and inability to police themselves for extremists initially helped the Islamic State infiltrate areas before it   defeated these rebels outright and scattered them in exile. In the one large section of territory rebels captured from the Islamic State—eastern Aleppo, taken in 2016 with extensive Turkish support—they failed to attract mass defections that might have spared al-Bab, on the eastern edges of Aleppo, from extensive destruction. In post-ISIS Aleppo, they have so far mostly replicated old patterns of militia dysfunction, instead of creating a rational, stabilizing political order.

For the Assad regime, the fight against the Islamic State has only been a single episode in a longer struggle against insurgency and terror. It seems impossible to say which of the combatant parties to Syria’s war, if any, truly represent the Sunni Arab residents living under the Islamic State in eastern Syria. It is not clear to what extent that representativeness even really matters, as opposed to locals’ more prosaic concerns like security and normal economic life. These easterners have now been distributed between the Assad regime and the YPG-led SDF, each of which have projects that are officially defined in broadly inclusive, ecumenical terms, even if they have distinct sectarian or ethnic tones in practice. These projects have little place for Islamism, Sunni Arab chauvinism or a post-2011 revolutionary identity. But are those identifiers, as political categories, genuinely absolute and immutable, or are they something more transient? So long as Sunni-sectarian grievance persists in Syria—defined in sectarian terms, as opposed to Syrian disenfranchisement more generally—some manifestation of the Islamic State seems likely to survive. As scholars such as Hassan Abu Hanieh have pointed out, the Islamic State’s message is still the purest, most readily understandable version of Sunni revanchism among the various militant ideologies today. The Islamic State has a track record of spectacular violence and conquest, and, for angry sectarians, it promises a fairly straight line to revenge and death.

As for the actual organization of the Islamic State—not its mass membership and symbolic appeal, but its individual commanders, its structures and institutional knowledge—that too will persist in some form. The circumstances of its rapid collapse in Deir el-Zour are still unclear. It is not obvious whether the group’s cadres deliberately melted away, or if it was just terminally depleted by a multiyear war of attrition. But the group has survived underground before, and it has had time to prepare for a stretch of militant austerity. Its future in Syria is also inseparable from its prospects across the border in Iraq, its real home, which will remain restive and unsettled. Still, the Islamic State will inevitably be much reduced. The Assad regime and the SDF may not have perfect local legitimacy, but they both have effective security apparatuses that can mostly control a brutalized, fatigued populace and suppress jihadi insurgents.

The Islamic State is unlikely to really roar back or to recover the sort of strength it had in 2015. The group’s rise to proto-statehood was the product of exceptional circumstances: the sudden collapse of Syrian state authority, wide-open borders and a sluice of material support and foreign manpower for an unruly insurgency. These conditions are not replicable, at least not any time soon. Syria’s war will go on, though, even as the Islamic State becomes an insurgent phantom. Once it has sufficiently pacified Syria’s east, the Assad regime will turn back west and, with Russia and Iran’s help, resume crushing the revolutionary opposition. Eventually, it will also come after the SDF, although likely not before the Americans and their coalition partners withdraw. There still is no clarity about the extent and duration of the U.S. commitment to the SDF, but, presumably, it is not unlimited. The Islamic State’s defeat only returns to the fore the central political question of Syria today: How to reconcile Syria’s periphery with the Damascus-centered Syrian state, which, under the regime, emanates destabilizing resentment and grievance. The West has no way forward for Syria other than a U.N.-sponsored peace process based on a binary regime-opposition dynamic that is now defunct. The West is still holding onto a panacea political solution that is basically unreal. Damascus and its allies have a different goal: a restoration of central state authority through mostly unilateral, nonconsensual means. It is an uglier course, but one that at least makes sense on its own terms.

 Status Quo

The Associated Press noted the new welcome signs in a cautiously optimistic report from Damascus late last month, where “many of the checkpoints that for years have snarled traffic are gone.” The outlying suburbs held by various rebel factions, recently retaken by the regime at a staggering cost, are again connected to the city center. “There’s a new feeling of hope that an end is near to Syria’s seven-year civil war,” the AP explained. What does “an end”—not the end—mean? For one thing, it means that the government is issuing hundreds of death notices to families whose detained and missing relatives, it now says, have been dead for years. They are “the first public acknowledgment by the government that hundreds if not thousands of prisoners died in state custody,” according to The New York Times. Some of the notices suggest mass executions; others indicate torture in prison. The release of information has been unexpected and haphazard. “In some towns, the government has posted names of the deceased so their relatives can get death certificates,” Ben Hubbard and Karam Shoumali reported. “In other cases, families have obtained documents that attest to their relatives’ deaths. In some cases, security officers have informed families personally.”

It’s an exceedingly grim and cynical attempt by the regime at closure. “The regime is closing one chapter and starting a new one,” Emile Hokayem, a Middle East analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, told the Times. “It is telling the rebels and the activists that this chapter is gone, that whatever hopes in some surviving revolutionary spirit has been crushed.”

As Sam Dagher wrote in The Atlantic this week, reporting from Lebanon, many Syrians “believe the regime wants the lists of the dead to serve as a cruel, macabre epilogue for all those who rose up more than seven years ago.” He interviewed Syrian refugees from the town of Daraya, outside Damascus, who were starved and besieged until the rebels there surrendered in 2016. Dagher says the message to the survivors of Daraya from Assad “is loud and clear: You must lose everything for having challenged me. Nobody is going to hold me accountable for punishing you.”

“For Syrian society itself, there must be a reckoning with these abuses if there is to be any prospect of a stable future.” There are other demonstrations of Assad’s renewed confidence and strength. In July, his forces, backed by Russia and Iran, retook the dusty town of Daraa, where the 2011 uprising essentially began, and the rest of southwestern Syria, which had been under the sway of different opposition and jihadist groups since the early days of the civil war.  

A new offensive looms in the northwestern province of Idlib, along the Turkish border. The last Syrian province outside regime control, Idlib has been, in the words of the United Nations, a “dumping ground” for rebel fighters and their families, given the terms of so-called evacuation deals imposed by the regime on Homs, Aleppo, the Damascus suburbs and other devastated battlegrounds once declared “liberated.” There is nowhere else for the displaced of Idlib to go. In his big picture briefing for WPR this week on the current landscape of Syria’s war and what’s to come, Aron Lund explains why the fate of Idlib, like two other pockets of the country that Assad’s forces have not retaken, “is now in the hands of foreigners.” In Idlib, that means Turkey, which now has some 1,300 troops stationed in a dozen outposts on the edge of the province, and Russia. They have competing interests, between Moscow’s aim of eliminating the sizable jihadist presence in Idlib and Ankara’s worry of another exodus of refugees into Turkey if there’s a full-blown military offensive. “Some pieces of Idlib may be handed over to Assad,” Lund writes, “but if Russia then decides to put its thumb on the scale in Turkey’s favor, large parts of Syria’s northwest could be out of Assad’s reach for the foreseeable future.”

“It wouldn’t be a clean end to the war, but does Moscow really need that?” Lund adds. “From Moldova to South Ossetia and eastern Ukraine, the Kremlin has a habit of letting messy situations linger to its advantage. As seen in Cyprus, Turkey is also no stranger to the concept of endless interim solutions.” The future of Syria, as the war winds down, could be a series of more localized, semi-frozen conflicts—a Turkish dependency in the northwest, and a Kurdish proto-republic in the northeast, tepidly backed by the United States.

All this geopolitical wrangling, and how it may or may not be resolved, pushes other questions out of the picture, as the regime’s sudden release of death notifications makes clear. Four years ago, before Russia’s military intervention all but saved Assad, and at a time when a regime defector was sharing thousands of images in Washington of torture in Assad’s prisons, the question of accountability and justice—of a Syria without Assad—was at least open to debate. “If Assad stays in power, I don’t see a possibility for transitional justice,” Mohammad Al Abdallah, the executive director of the Syria Justice and Accountability Center in Washington, told me in 2014. David Tolbert, the president of the International Center for Transitional Justice, added: “For Syrian society itself, there must be a reckoning with these abuses if there is to be any prospect of a stable future.”   

What does the future of the Islamic State look like in the wake of its battlefield setbacks in Iraq and Syria, from the fall of Mosul last summer to Raqqa last month? Will it revert to a low-level insurgency, or lash out with the kinds of terrorist attacks more associated with its predecessors, like al-Qaida? Can it sustain itself as a movement drawing in sympathizers and recruits from around the world? A member of the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces walks inside a prison built by Islamic State fighters, Raqqa,  argued that the Islamic State’s “enormous losses … will cripple the effectiveness of its previous approach to recruitment” since “it has lost far more than territory. It has lost the living, beating heart of its appeal.” They highlighted a fundamental factor behind the Islamic State’s success: its ties to a broader social movement of jihadi extremism. As they pointed out, a shared sense of identity among its adherents manifested itself in the concept of “entitativity,” or groupness, that is essential for mobilization. The crumbling caliphate and the resulting demise of the Islamic State’s propaganda output will certainly make it a less attractive outfit to join for sympathizers to its cause. Although the Islamic State will strive to mitigate these negative effects by emphasizing a new “post-caliphate” narrative to draw in supporters, the setbacks will be evident. But they will be setbacks for the Islamic State itself, the specific organization, and not necessarily for the broader jihadi movement that fed it. In the study of social movements, scholars have introduced an important distinction between social movement “organizations” and social movement “families.”  The social movement family is “a set of coexisting movements, which,regardless of their specific goals, have similar basic values and organizational overlaps, and sometimes may even join for common campaigns.” The Islamic State is thus just one movement within a broader jihadi family, albeit the most prominent one over the past three years.

This jihadi family, often wrongly referred to as the jihadi-Salafi movement or ideology, has managed to attract sympathizers for more than three decades. That jihadi-Salafi label is misplaced since far from all jihadis are in fact Salafis—ultraconservative Sunni Muslims who adhere to a strict, puritanical form of Islam—so the notion overestimates the Salafi influence on the jihadi movement. The movement’s success in mobilization reached new heights after the eruption of the Syrian civil war. But even as the role of jihadis may dwindle in Syria and Iraq as the Islamic State’s caliphate falls, the diverse but related ideologies of jihadi groups will continue to attract followers, for three main reasons.

First, since Syria’s civil war broke out, the vast number of people either actively fighting for the jihadi cause on the battlefield or following and promoting it behind their computer and smart-phone screens implies that a generation has become embedded in jihadi ideology and accustomed to the normality of violence as a legitimate method of political expression. A major but often overlooked challenge here is the high number of children of foreign fighters who have grown up under the Islamic State. According to new figures from the French Ministry of Interior, for example, as many as 500 French children under the age of 12 are currently residing in the Islamic State’s remaining  territory in Syria or Iraq with their jihadi father or mother. What happens if or when such indoctrinated youth return to their home countries in Europe?

There is little to suggest that the fragmentation of the Islamic State will cause jihadism to lose its position as the most attractive radical ideology on offer.

Second, the immense amount of jihadi material, including propaganda, that has been produced and disseminated in the past decade, but especially since the Islamic State declared its caliphate in 2014, is still widely available online. As evident in the popularity of the material of Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical Yemen-based cleric who was killed in a U.S. drone strike in 2011, this material will prove essential for jihadi sympathizers in years to come. Add to this the recent years of high-intensity jihadi activity that have entailed the indoctrination of young cadres of jihadi ideologues, disseminators and recruiters who will not necessarily put down their pen or leave the keyboard because of the organizational demise of the Islamic State.

Third, the underlying factors initially leading to the radicalization and popularity of jihadi groups are still prevalent. Sectarianism is only getting worse; many Middle Eastern states remain in the hands of autocratic regimes that leave little space for political opposition; and external actors, including Western states, continue to either uphold such regimes or in other ways interfere counterproductively, for example through drone strikes that inflame anti-American and anti-Western sentiment. On several occasions . These on-the ground accounts confirm what has been widely established in reporting and other studies on Yemen and Pakistan: that such assassination programs benefit jihadis more than they harm them, by stoking anti-Americanism. Nevertheless, as Berger and Amarasingam noted, the Islamic State was unique in several ways, including its declaration of a physical caliphate and emphasis on governance, not just terrorism, as appeals to its followers. This uniqueness will likely have the effect of pushing Islamic State adherents, especially youth, to search for another radical ideology to vent their frustrations, rather than shop around for a new jihadi outfit to join. However, there is little to suggest that the organizational fragmentation of the Islamic State will cause jihadism to lose its position as the most attractive radical ideology currently on offer.

In fact, the broader jihadi movement—in the form of country-specific and globally focused organizational expressions—stands ready to take over. For some jihadi  sympathizers, these known entities, such as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham—formerly the Nusra Front—or al-Qaida, will not be enough, and they will either establish new groups or operate outside any organizational framework. Others will favor the prospect of joining another well-established and less radical group with a similar level of entitativity or groupness.

In either case, the broader jihadi movement will learn from the experience of the Islamic State, both the positive and negative. The past four years leave other groups with a list of “do’s” and “don’ts” for the future. This especially concerns methods of mobilization, but also warnings about not engaging everyone else as the enemy.

In attempting to forecast what will follow the collapse of the caliphate, the focus should not be limited to the appeal of a specific group, but instead the appeal of the broader jihadi movement. After all, there is little indication that jihad as a method of political mobilization has lost support among those who are disaffected and radicalized.

The Islamic State’s fall will emphatically change global jihadism and its organizational and ideological expressions, but not necessarily its prospects for mobilization and success. There is still a long way to go to ensure that.

 American Syria Policy

America’s Syria Policy Is Incoherent, and There’s No Sign It Will Change  As the tragic civil war in Syria grinds through its eighth year, it is impossible to make sense of the Trump administration’s strategy as it moves in one direction and then shifts in another, again and again. American policy is utterly incoherent, and there is no sign that will change. 

President Donald Trump’s position on Syria, expressed more often in tweets than in formal policy statements, vacillated wildly even before he was elected president. In June 2013, for instance, he contended that the United States should “stay the hell out of Syria.” But two months later, after Syrian President Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons against his own people, Trump advocated for a U.S. military strike and vociferously criticized then-President Barack Obama for not ordering one. Once in the White House, Trump initially focused on defeating the Islamic State, which by that time controlled a miniature, self-proclaimed “caliphate” based in the northern Syrian city of Raqqa. He expanded support for local militias fighting the extremists and increased direct U.S. air and artillery strikes. But after Raqqa fell and the Islamic State dispersed, the Trump administration appeared to have no clear idea how to turn battlefield success into strategic victory. By March 2017, administration officials were saying that the U.S. would not be involved in determining Syria’s long-term future. But a month later, after another chemical attack by the Assad regime, Trump ordered a cruise missile strike on a Syrian airbase. “Steps are underway,” then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson even suggested, to create an international coalition to remove Assad. A bit later, Tillerson said the U.S. might broker a cease-fire that included Assad, while Nikki Haley, Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, and H.R. McMaster, Trump’s national security adviser at the time, both expressed skepticism about a political solution that left Assad in power.

In the late summer of 2018, the confusion escalated. The president indicated that the U.S. would not play a role in Syria’s reconstruction despite reports that U.S. military leaders felt that was necessary to prevent an Islamic State revival. While Trump had indicated that he wanted to “get out of” Syria, administration officials like James Jeffrey, a retired diplomat whom Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently named U.S. special representative for Syrian engagement, said earlier this month that American military forces would remain for some unspecified time. Then, this week, National Security Adviser John Bolton switched to a different objective, announcing that U.S. troops are not leaving Syria “as long as Iranian troops are outside Iranian borders.”

All of this is incoherence, not flexibility. In part, it reflects the broader incoherence of the Trump policy formulation process, where a presidential tweet or off-the-cuff remark can change everything. With no experience at foreign or national security policy, no overarching concept about the purpose of American power, and a personal style focused on disaggregated responses to immediate problems rather than a long-term approach to various challenges, Trump is the antithesis of a strategist. He operates without a discernible vision for the Middle East or American security writ large in the coming decades, or for how to balance security benefits against costs and risks.

Trump’s senior advisers do have more strategic mindsets but are sometimes themselves at odds and, after staking out a public position, often are contradicted or undercut by the president.  

In the absence of a clear objective in Syria, the best the U.S. can hope for is avoiding an outright fiasco. American policy in Syria is also incoherent because the U.S., out of all the nations and non state groups involved there, has the least clear sense of its strategic priorities. Assad, Turkey, Iran and Russia all know what they want and what price they are willing to pay to get it; America does not. For a while, the defeat of the Islamic State was paramount, although neither the Obama nor Trump administration fully explained why that was vital for U.S. national security. Then America’s objective was to deter chemical attacks, although it was never clear why those were unacceptable while conventional violence was acceptable. At other times, Washington seems concerned by the humanitarian disaster in Syria yet is unwilling to take in refugees. Sometimes the U.S. wants to limit Russian influence, but at other times it doesn’t seem to care. Most recently, Bolton linked the presence of American troops in Syria to containing Iran. But no one in the administration has explained how a small U.S. troop deployment will thwart broader Iranian aspirations or deter Tehran from supporting Assad, which it considers a vital national interest.

At this point, there is no indication that any of this will change and that a coherent Syria policy will emerge. Past American presidents who assumed office with limited national security expertise, like Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, eventually developed a feel for strategy. There is no sign that Trump will. Yet he is unwilling to delegate control of national security policy to one of his senior advisers, in essence making them “strategist in chief.”

With so little chance of the Trump administration setting clear priorities in Syria, questions abound. Is preventing the return of the Islamic State the most important U.S. objective in Syria? Or is it containing Iran? Perhaps preserving regional order? Or maybe maintaining limitations on what dictators can do to their own people? Is it sustaining a security relationship with Turkey, a NATO ally—or helping defend Israel?. But in the face of continuing policy incoherence, there is no guarantee of avoiding an outright fiasco 

Assessment of US policy under Trump:  Trump is not diminishing America's military footprint; if anything, he's expanding it. As evidence for their position, the president's boosters cite his pullouts from Afghanistan and Syria, as well as his willingness to meet with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un to negotiate his country's nuclear disarmament. But the latter diplomatic overture is shaping up to be a complete bust, and the former pullouts are just as partial as former President Obama's was from Iraq. Just as Obama ended up succumbing and leaving a rump American force in Iraq, Trump too, for all his tough talk, has flipped on his original promise to fully withdraw from Syria. He is saying now that he's 100 percent" on board with a residual troop presence. Likewise in Afghanistan, he's talking only about withdrawing half the American troops — not all.

Trump's supporters are also ecstatic that he is questioning the NATO alliance—except that he's not. All he wants is that NATO countries reimburse America for its costs, not take responsibility for their own defense. In fact, The New York Times' Ross Douthat believes that Trump wants these countries to bear their military burden so that America's resources are freed up to deal with China, a country that for some reason has always rubbed Trump the wrong way.

  Trump doesn't want to pull out even from disputes such as Saudi Arabia's offensive against Houthi insurgents in Yemen where there is widespread consensus that America has no business getting involved. The Senate even passed a resolution 54-47 last week demanding that Trump stop using American forces to assist Saudis with midair refueling and target assistance, especially since he has no Congressional authorization to do so. Trump's response? A pledge to veto the bill.

But why exactly is Trump so gung-ho about helping Saudi Arabia  Apparently because Houthis are Shia Muslims like most Iranians — and Trump's hawkish advisers are telling him that if the Houthis take over Yemen they would ally with Iran against Israel, America's ally. But these are exactly the kind of geo-political considerations that "America First" was supposed to reject.

At least in Saudi Arabia's case Trump is providing "only" indirect military assistance. Not so in Somalia. The administration has escalated America's three-decade long military campaign against al-Shabab, an inconsequential Somali terrorist group whose less than 500 hard-core members pose virtually no threat to America.

The saving grace, if there is one, is that the administration at least designated Somalia as an "active area of hostilities," which will force Pentagon to disclose how many casualties its drone attacks cause. However, CIA drones bomb countries covertly all over the world without such a designation. President Obama at the tail end of his presidency issued an executive order requiring the agency to report these strikes along with assessments of the combatants and non-combatants it killed. But Trump last week scrapped this requirement so that the CIA can once again kill with impunity without worrying about bad publicity.

One reason why the American empire is on an unbroken growth trajectory is that a giant behemoth like the Pentagon has to justify its existence by inventing or exaggerating threats. Only a president determined to starve the beast would ultimately be able to shrink America's military presence around the world. And during his campaign, Trump lamented that if America had spent $6 trillion at home instead of the Middle East, "we could have rebuilt our country twice." However, now that Trump is in office he is doing the opposite.

His most recent budget proposed to cut domestic spending by 5 percent and boost defense spending by the same amount, never mind that America already spends more than the next seven powers combined on defense. To add insult to injury, Trump is boosting America's defensive capabilities less and offensive ones more, given that his budget seeks to cut spending on defensive missile systems by $500 million while increasing it on offensive systems such as hypersonic weapons by $2.6 billion.

Worst of all, Trump doesn't just want to use the American military to accomplish his foreign policy objectives; he is also enlisting the American economy, wielding sanctions and tariffs like weapons.

He tore up Obama's nuclear deal with Iran, re-imposing sanctions on the country and anyone that does business with it. And it's not just Iran. In 2017, Trump imposed a record 944 sanctions on foreign entities and individuals. And then he topped his own record and imposed over 1,000 sanctions last year. The Guardian's Simon Tisdall notes that soon any country not under economic attack by Trump will be the exception rather than the rule.

Using America's economy as a handmaiden of its foreign policy was always a neoconservative goal. Back in the 1990s, neocons vehemently opposed permanently normalizing trade ties with China because they wanted to make access to America's markets subject to China doing their bidding.

Trump's "America First," thus, isn't so much a departure from neo-conservatism as a different—and worse—version of it. In its zeal to impose America's will on the rest of the world, it is just as meddlesome and aggressive—but with less consensus-building abroad and accountability at home. Expecting Trump to rollback the American empire is a fool's dream.

Golan Heights

Golan Heights : Mar.,: Mar,22,2019: After 52 years it is time for the United States to fully recognize Israel’s Sovereignty over the Golan Heights,” Trump said in a tweet. Trump called the territory “of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and Regional Stability!”This is the second recent diplomatic bombshell dropped by Washington, which is Israel’s main backer, in seeking to redraw the fraught Middle East map.In 2017, Trump went against decades of practice by recognizing the disputed city of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, rather than the previously accepted Tel Aviv. Trump will host Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House next Monday and Tuesday. The Israeli leader, who is running for reelection, will be in Washington for the annual conference of the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) pro-Israel lobbying group.

The Golan Heights move was hinted at a week ago when the State Department changed its usual description of the area as “occupied” to “Israeli-controlled.”The Trump State Department has also dropped previous definitions of the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip as being “occupied” by Israel. Israel occupied the Golan Heights, West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip in the 1967 Six-Day War. It later annexed the Golan Heights and East Jerusalem in moves never recognized by the international community. Trump’s latest shakeup comes ahead of the expected unveiling of a White House plan for Israeli-Palestinian peace. Palestinian leaders, who broke off contact with Washington after the recognition of Jerusalem by Trump, say they expect the plan to be blatantly biased in favor of Israel.

On Thursday, March 21, President Trump introduced yet another sea change to U.S. policy towards the Arab-Israeli conflict—this time by tweet. “After 52 years,” Trump wrote, “it is time for the United States to fully recognize Israel’s [s]overeignty over the Golan Heights.” Left unclear was whether the president was merely calling for U.S. recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights or actually implementing it. National security adviser John Bolton later tweeted out his agreement on top of the president’s statement a few hours later, but the government otherwise failed to provide further information: The State Department referred reporters’ questions to the White House, where officials declined to elaborate on what the president had tweeted. For most of the afternoon, the closest thing to an official statement came from the State Department’s Twitter account, which simply retweeted Bolton without further comment.

Instead, the first person to confirm the change in U.S. policy was none other than Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Speaking next to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo from the prime minister’s residence in Jerusalem, Netanyahu claimed to have discussed the decision with President Trump. Speaking in both English and Hebrew, he described the decision as a “miracle of Purim” and tied it to Israel’s ongoing conflict with Iran, stating:

President Trump made history. He recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, at a time when Iran is trying to use the Golan Heights as a platform for the destruction of Israel. We are commemorating the miracle of Purim, when, 2,500 years ago, the Jewish people triumphed over the other Persians who tried to exterminate it. They will fail today, as they failed then, amongst other things thanks to the immense support of the United States and a president that is the greatest friend Israel ever had in our entire history.

Only then did Netanyahu turn the stage over to Pompeo, who, in a rambling statement, seemed to confirm that the president’s tweet had not been merely hortatory: U.S. policy toward the Golan Heights had in fact changed. “President Trump made the decision to recognize that that hard-fought real estate, that important place,” he said, “is proper to be a sovereign part of the state of Israel.”

The apparently slapdash rollout of this decision is an uncomfortable fit with the complex and hotly contested political history of the Golan Heights. A strategically significant plateau along Israel’s northeast border with Syria, the Golan Heights provide a vantage point into neighboring parts of Israel, Lebanon, and Syria, and—in at least some formulations—border the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee. The status of the territory has been in dispute since the state of Israel was founded, as the 1949 armistice line that was ultimately reached between Israeli and Syrian forces did not align with the borders of the pre-1948 British mandates of Palestine and Syria, which Israel maintains should have been the starting point for the border between the two countries.

Regardless, Israel seized control of the entirety of the Golan Heights in the Six Day War of 1967. In response to that conflict, the U.N. Security Council unanimously adopted resolution 242, which (in its English version) called for the “[w]ithdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict” and “acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every state in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and  recognized boundaries.” Israel, however, retained control of the Golan Heights, an act it justified in part by pointing to linguistic ambiguities across the English and French versions of U.N. Security Council Resolution 242 and its endorsement of “secure ... boundaries.” After Syria tried unsuccessfully to reclaim the Golan Heights in the 1973 October War, the two parties agreed to a ceasefire line through U.N.-sponsored negotiations, which was secured by a demilitarized zone and a U.N. Disengagement Observer Force, both of which remain in place to this day. In effect, this left most of the Golan Heights under Israeli control. (Notably, Lebanon also claims ownership over the Shebaa farms area of the Golan Heights, which remains in Israeli control.)

Israeli settlement activity in the Golan Heights began in earnest in the 1970s and has continued since that time. In 1981, Israel’s Knesset adopted a law that sought to formally annex the Golan Heights and incorporate them into the Israeli state. Again acting unanimously, the U.N. Security Council adopted Resolution 497 declaring such action “null and void and without international legal effect,” on the grounds that the acquisition of territory by force is inadmissible under the U.N. Charter and that the Golan Heights remained subject to the international law governing military occupation, which prohibits such annexation. In spite of this opposition by the international community, the de facto incorporation of the Golan Heights into the state of Israel has largely continued unabated, to the point that the region has become a center for Israeli-oriented tourism, wine-making, and even skiing. And while the native Syrian Arab and Druze populations have mostly retained their Syrian identity, a growing minority of the latter have pursued Israeli nationality—despite concerns that legislation recently adopted by Israel’s Knesset will render them and other non-Jewish Israelis secondary to Israel’s Jewish citizens.

Until yesterday, the United States had maintained a consistent position on the Golan Heights across Democratic and Republican presidential administrations, declining to recognize any fixed borders absent negotiations between Israel and Syria while promising to give weight to Israeli territorial claims and demands for a secure border. Trump’s announcement not only disrupts this policy but arguably runs counter to the international law principle that informed U.N. Security Council Resolutions 242 and 497: Namely, the obligation to “refrain ... from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state” embedded in Article 2(4) of the U.N. Charter.

The Trump administration’s unorthodox roll-out suggests that the motivation for this decision was primarily political. Netanyahu, a fellow traveler with close ties to many of Trump’s own supporters, is facing indictment on an array of corruption-related criminal charges. This has severely weakened his standing headed into Israel’s upcoming April 9 parliamentary elections, which may deprive him of power if he loses—or allow him to weather the criminal charges against him if he wins. The fact that the president made his decision during Pompeo’s visit makes clear that Netanyahu has the support of the Trump administration, which is widely popular in Israel due to Trump’s 2017 recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. President Trump may also see some domestic political advantage in the move, as members of his Republican Party have increasingly used Israel-related statements and policies to drive a wedge between those Democrats who have traditionally been strong supporters of Israel and the increasing proportion that are openly critical of certainly Israeli policies, painting the latter--and in some cases the broader Democratic Party itself--as anti-Israel or even anti-semitic. President Trump has himself engaged in such rhetoric in recent weeks, and may well see his Golan Heights decision as rowing in the same direction as these efforts.

Whatever the international response, there is no doubt that Trump has the constitutional authority to make recognition decisions regarding a foreign state’s territorial boundaries as a matter of U.S. law. The Supreme Court affirmed as much in its 2015 decision in Zivotofsky v. Kerry, which upheld the Obama administration’s authority to disregard a statute that sought to compel U.S. recognition of Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem. Yet the fact that the president’s Golan Heights decision appears to be in such clear tension with the U.N. Charter does at least raise the question as to whether it is consistent with his constitutional duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed[,]” particularly as the Constitution expressly includes such treaties as part of the “Supreme Law of the Land.” Regardless, it’s highly unlikely that a U.S. court will ever take up this issue, leaving Trump’s new policy in place--at least until one of his successors changes it. Some members of Congress have indicated that they intend to introduce legislation that would hedge against this possibility, prevent future presidents from doing so, but this would almost certainly be unconstitutional under Zivotofsky. That said, alternate measures that rely on authorities that are more clearly within Congress’s constitutional control—including one proposal that would statutorily mandate that the Golan Heights be treated as part of Israel for purposes of foreign commerce—may be more legally defensible and thus harder for future presidents to reverse without congressional cooperation.

The international response to the president’s decision, meanwhile, has been almost overwhelmingly negative. The Arab League condemned the move as unlawful under international law, as did Turkey and Iran. The Assad regime in Syria went further, proclaiming its intent to recover the Golan Heights from Israel’s unlawful occupation “through all available means.” The European Union did not condemn the president’s decision but confirmed that its own longstanding policy—one that views the Golan Heights as occupied territories under international law—has not changed. Russia, meanwhile, noted that such an action would violate various U.N. Security Council decisions and could destabilize the region. “It is just a call for now,” a Russian spokesman said, raising doubts about whether the president’s statement truly reflected a change in U.S. policy. “Let’s hope it will remain a call.”

And the Russian spokesperson has a point: The exact contours of the Trump administration’s new policy remain unknown, and there is ample room for obfuscation. This was the tack that the Trump administration took with its Jerusalem decision, which recognized that city as Israel’s capital to much fanfare but ultimately declined to identify the “specific boundaries of Israeli sovereignty,” leaving them “subject to final status negotiations” with the Palestinians. Trump administration officials are reportedly working on a written statement to clarify the new U.S. policy towards the Golan Heights, which Trump will sign at a meeting with Netanyahu next week in Washington. No one should be surprised if that statement embraces similar ambiguity in an effort to salvage whatever is left of the policy equities that the prior longstanding U.S. policy had attempted to preserve. And there are at least three, all of which seem likely to be negatively affected by the Trump administration’s decision.

First and foremost is the U.S. commitment to the prohibition on the use of force embedded in the U.N. Charter, which—despite being stretched in sometimes uncomfortable ways—remains a keystone of the post-World War II international order. Banning territorial expansion by conquest was one of the signature purposes of the U.N. Charter, and endorsing the Israeli accession of “hard-fought real estate” in the Golan Heights, in Pompeo’s words, runs contrary to this purpose. No doubt the situation in the Golan is complicated, and there are arguments that U.S. and Israeli international lawyers will pursue in an effort to square this circle somehow. But the effect within the international community will almost certainly be a weakening of this principle, and the international order that is structured on it. Moreover, this principal has been the primary basis on which the United States has rallied international support against various questionable actions by other states, including the Russian annexation of Crimea and China’s claims in the South China Sea. After Trump’s recognition of Israel’s claim to the Golan Heights, these efforts may be seen as increasingly hypocritical and thus warranting less support.

Second is the effective detente that has existed between Israel and Syria over the Golan Heights since the 1970s. This has been to the substantial benefit of Israel, which has been able to exercise control over the Golan Heights in relative security and de facto incorporate the area into the Israeli economy, society and state apparatus. Trump’s announcement seems likely to reinvigorate this dispute, as the Assad regime’s strident response makes clear. Moreover, a confluence of factors make a Syrian response more likely: Assad is currently intent on recovering territorial control, concerned about possible secession by the U.S.-backed Kurds and already irked at Israeli strikes against Iran-affiliated targets in its territory. The latter is also the most likely area in which Israel will suffer repercussions, as its anti-Iran military campaign is reliant on the tacit cooperation of Assad’s Russian allies, who effectively control Syrian airspace and could restrict or oppose their operations in retaliation. Israeli relations with Lebanon—where Hezbollah, another Iranian ally, continues to exercise substantial influence—may also take a hit, as the president’s decision appears to affirm Israeli claims over the Shebaa farms region. All told, by aggravating these old conflicts and putting Israel’s current military operations at risk, it’s unclear whether the president’s decision will help or hurt Israel’s strategic position vis-a-vis Iran in the long run.

Finally, Trump’s decision is almost certain to seriously compromise hopes for a negotiated solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict, including his own supposedly forthcoming peace plan. For several decades, these negotiations have relied on Resolution 242 and its endorsement of the 1967 borders as a starting point for negotiations. Israel has repeatedly accepted this premise, including in its peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan as well as in the Oslo Accords it signed with the Palestinians—and has done so despite its de facto annexation of East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, which most of the international community continues to view as illegal. Public U.S. endorsements of these activities not only adds fuel to widespread Arab objections over the illegality of these actions but undermines any remaining U.S. ability to act as a credible mediator, though the Trump administration’s increasingly open hostility towards the Palestinian leadership may have already dealt the latter a fatal blow.

When Trump recognized Israel’s claims to Jerusalem as its capital, he described his action as “nothing more, or less, than a recognition of reality”—namely, the fact that Israeli ties to Jerusalem were real and unlikely to be unwound in any future scenario. The administration may well argue much the same in regard to the Golan Heights. And there is some truth to this claim, particularly given that Syria’s broader future remains very much in doubt. Whatever practical validity Israeli claims may have, however, they cannot be confirmed by fiat. To the contrary, such declarations, if anything, have a tendency to result in feelings of opposition and resentment—not to mention legal claims—that can come to threaten whatever status quo may emerge. The only sustainable resolution is negotiation towards some mutually agreeable outcome, one whose legitimacy both sides can accept in perpetuity.

This is the approach that has produced Israel’s current borders with Egypt and Jordan. And it was the same approach that the United States and the international community were attempting in regard to Israel’s border with Syria as well, however slowly. Trump’s decision to recognize Israeli claims in the Golan Heights promises to disrupt this process, perhaps fatally. The decision may be in the interest of the president and some of his political allies. But the same is not true of  Israelis and the many others whose lives and livelihoods ultimately depend on long-term peace and stability in the region.

                                                                                                               

Israel and Hezbollah, Lebanon

As Syria’s Civil War Winds Down, Israel, Iran and Hezbollah Pivot to Lebanon After seven years of civil war, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad looks set to emerge victorious thanks to the support he received from Russia, from his patrons in Iran and from Iran’s Lebanese ally Hezbollah. The war is not over, but the focus on what comes next is already underway, and one change is now plainly visible: Iran, Damascus and Hezbollah are pivoting their attention to Lebanon’s future—and so is Israel. Lebanese Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil leaves a stadium after a tour organized for diplomats and journalists, Beirut, Oct. 1, 2018  

In recent days, a flurry of military and political activity has shifted to Lebanon, confirming that the tiny country—which has for so long been caught in the vice of   regional tensions, often with disastrous consequences—is once again feeling the pressure. Lebanon has been listening to the threats and counter threats exchanged by Hezbollah and Israel, watching military activities along its borders, tracking mysterious flights by Iranian aircraft, and following a fraught political drama that shows no end in sight.

The latest chapter in Lebanon’s struggles is unfolding as the quest to form a new government in Beirut remains stalled more than six months after the latest elections. Lebanon remains vulnerable as ever, with President Michel Aoun warning that if an agreement on a new government is not reached soon, “the risks are greater than we can bear.” Lebanon’s dire economic problems are only one of the reasons why the country’s stability remains so fragile.

With Assad now reinvigorated by battlefield victories and his gradual emergence from the tent of ignominy back into the Arab fold, Damascus, in coordination with Iran, is again aiming to rebuild its dominance in Lebanon. Observers have noted that one of the reasons Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri’s efforts to form a new government have proven so daunting is Damascus’ involvement.

The Syrians, according to the scholar Joseph Bahout, have made it clear to Hariri that he will not be confirmed by parliament unless he commits to “reestablishing the ‘privileged relationship’” between the two countries. That relationship started to unravel in 2005, even before the Syrian war, after Rafik Hariri—Saad’s father, a former prime minister and a determined foe of Damascus—was assassinated, most likely by Hezbollah agents working on Syria’s orders.

While the younger Hariri wrestles with pressure to hand powerful ministries to Hezbollah loyalists, tensions are escalating along Lebanon’s southern border. Last week, Israel launched an operation to destroy tunnels it said Hezbollah had been building beneath the border and into Israeli territory, advising Lebanese residents in Arabic to temporarily leave their homes while the demolition unfolded, lest the collapse of the tunnels and the possible ammunition within them trigger uncontrolled explosions.

For years Israelis living near the border had complained that they were hearing ominous sounds of activity under their homes. Israeli authorities had downplayed the threat, concealing the fact that they knew of and were monitoring Hezbollah’s tunnel construction. But this time they made no effort to conceal the information, in an apparent push to deter more construction. They even released photographs and videos apparently showing Hezbollah operatives caught by surprise by the Israelis while working inside what the Israeli Defense Forces, or IDF, called “attack tunnels.”  

Neither Hezbollah nor Israel are particularly keen on going to war right now, but circumstances could easily escalate. Neither Hezbollah nor Israel are particularly keen on going to war right now, but circumstances could easily escalate. The demolitions, according to the Israeli Defense Forces, could take weeks, as the IDF reported finding tunnels going deep inside Israel. Israel protested what it described as a flagrant violation of the United Nations Security Council resolution that ended the most recent war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006. Some questioned the timing of the campaign, claiming Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched it in an effort to protect himself from his growing legal troubles. But the general consensus among security experts in Israel is that the Hezbollah threat is real and must be challenged. The IDF said the decision to destroy the tunnels was made now because the tunnel construction, which it had been monitoring for months, had crossed into Israeli territory but had not yet become fully functional.

Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah has threatened that the next war between the two bitter enemies will be fought in Israel, with the entirety of Israel’s territory within the reach of Hezbollah rockets and the “the boots of resistance fighters.” Israel takes the threat seriously and is trying to crush the underground paths so that there will be no Hezbollah boots on Israeli soil the next time the two sides go to war an eventuality that seems all but assured. The operation to destroy the tunnels continues, but the IDF says it intends to remain on the Israeli side of the border.

Neither Hezbollah nor Israel are particularly keen on going to war right now, but circumstances could easily escalate. After sending his Lebanese militia to fight and die to save the Syrian dictator, Nasrallah needs to maintain his credibility as the protector of Lebanon. And however embattled Netanyahu is, Israelis across the political spectrum agree with the country’s security red lines.

Israel articulated those red lines with respect to Syria, saying it would not allow Iran to establish a permanent base there, nor would it allow Tehran to significantly upgrade Hezbollah’s arsenal. The IDF acknowledged striking Iranian and Hezbollah targets in Syria when they crossed those lines. So far, Israel has not attacked Lebanon as part of that doctrine.

Iran’s pivot to Lebanon may include a potential escalation in its arming of Hezbollah, a shift that could also trigger fighting inside Lebanon. Media reports claim that an Iranian  plane with ties to the Revolutionary Guards recently landed at the Beirut airport, carrying advanced rockets destined for Hezbollah. Israel has longed worried about what it calls the “Precision Project,” Hezbollah and Iran’s efforts to upgrade Hezbollah’s vast rocket arsenal to include GPS-guided missiles, which would be much more accurate at striking civilian populations than Hezbollah’s current munitions.

Israel’s security Cabinet, the inner circle of ministers with decision-making ability on national security affairs, has reportedly designated the Precision Project as an indelible red line for Israel, one that would warrant military action. As Tehran, Damascus and their Hezbollah allies, now battle-hardened after years of fighting in Syria, start turning their attention to what happens in Lebanon after the . Syrian war is finally over, Israel is also focused on preventing the trio from building a more formidable threat—even if that means another war.

 Conclusions

Week by week, month by month, the horrific war in Syria grinds on, killing Syrian civil war combatants from many countries and, most tragic of all, Syrian civilians—the unintended or, in many cases, intended victims of the warring parties. It’s easy to look at the Syrian war as uniquely horrible, the catastrophic result of geography, Bashar al-Assad’s craven brutality, the spread of jihadism and its malignant ideology, and foreign intervention. But in reality, Syria represents a frightening window into the future of war. If, in fact, Syria is the model, future wars are likely to have several defining characteristic

The first and perhaps most defining characteristic of the Syrian war is its intricate and deadly complexity. Rather than two nations or alliances pitted against each other, multiple interconnected fight occupy the same space and time. Second, the Syrian war suggests that future conflicts will involve a situation-specific configuration of forces, rather than enduring alliances, as one insurgency blends into the next. Third, the conflict shows that despite the massive and well-publicized human costs of contemporary wars, the international community has lost its stomach for humanitarian intervention. Fourth, Syria demonstrates something that has been evident for decades: The United Nations is unsuited to play a major role in complex, modern wars, particularly when permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, each with a veto over its actions, are involved.

Wars resembling Syria’s civil war will share other attributes both on and off the battlefield, with profound and troubling implications for the United States. As is all too clear today, the World. is unequipped to fight or resolve insurgency-style conflicts. World may be unsurpassed at waging a traditional, unambiguous war where the antagonists and battlefield are clear. But it is a different story for operations that are not defined by the law of armed conflict, where battlefield victory not does equal strategic success, and when the conflict doesn’t last a relatively short time with a clear beginning and end: in other words, the war in Syria, and the future wars it signals. 

Warfare has always been both physical and psychological. In the modern era, militaries turned to communication technology and psychology to weaken the will of their adversaries and anyone who might support them. Soldiers were trained to craft and transmit messages and propaganda, while psychological operations became a particular military specialization but now, much has changed. Technology gives individuals the ability to share images of or information about a conflict with global audiences, potentially shaping perceptions more than any traditional psychological operations specialist ever could. Psychological warfare has become dispersed and democratized, and the target audience for psychological warfare has expanded globally. Social media is the linchpin of this seismic change in the character of conflict, and to remain effective in this new environment, the Armed Forces need a new capability to shape the narrative of conflict.

Update : 

Dawn. 28, 2019: Golan Heights: REACTING to Donald Trump’s recognition of the Golan Heights as Israel’s territory, the Zionist state’s overjoyed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that his country “never had a better friend”. There is good reason for the Israeli leader’s adulation for the man in the White House; while US administrations over the decades have always gone the extra mile to protect Israel — particularly its blatant human rights abuses and barbaric treatment of Palestinians — perhaps no other American president has been so unabashedly pro Tel Aviv. Whether it is the ‘recognition’ of the disputed holy city of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, granting carte blanche to illegal Jewish settlements on Palestinian land, or now recognising the unlawful Israeli occupation of Syrian land, Mr Trump has pulled out all the stops to accommodate Tel Aviv, particularly Mr Netanyahu. And these convenient facts certainly won’t hurt the incumbent Israeli leader, who will be fending off several challenges to himself in the general elections due early next month.

However, while Mr Trump’s actions may help Benjamin Netanyahu electorally and nudge up his own ratings with his evangelical supporters, the American leader is playing with fire by trying to redraw the map of the Middle East in an imperial fashion. The Golan was lost in the disastrous Arab-Israeli War of 1967, along with the Sinai Peninsula, Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. While Egypt eventually won back the Sinai after a peace treaty with Israel — denounced by the Arab world — the rest of the aforementioned Arab land remains under Tel Aviv’s control. Only Lebanon, through Hezbollah, has managed to liberate Arab land from Israel’s clutches. Donald Trump has rewarded Israel’s illegal occupation and encouraged its never-ending desire to devour Arab land. However, the meekness and acquiescence of the Arabs in front of both Israel and the US over these moves is depressing. Perhaps if major Arab powers — especially Egypt and Saudi Arabia — had sent clear signals that illegal occupation of Arab land was unacceptable, Washington would have thought twice about going ahead with this audacious move. The OIC has been similarly ineffectual in resisting the encroachment of Arab and Muslim land.

The US ‘recognition’ of Israeli control over the occupied Golan may be farcical — Mr Trump has in effect endorsed Israel’s occupation of land that belongs to neither of them. However, the move is bound to have far-reaching implications. Currently, the Middle East is in a state of flux with great uncertainty. If Israel — under American patronage — undertakes any further adventures in the region, the reaction may result in a wider conflict. For example, Jewish extremists have threatened to desecrate Al Aqsa; Israel continues to brutalise the Palestinians; and Tel Aviv has struck both Hezbollah and Iranian targets inside Syria. Should any of these parties choose to respond to Israeli provocations, a new conflagration is bound to erupt in the Middle East.

Trump and the Golan: what it could mean, from Crimea to Kashmir

Christian Science Monitor•March 30, 2019

When President Donald Trump reversed 50 years of U.S. policy Monday to proclaim U.S. recognition of Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights – strategic territory seized from Syria in the 1967 war and occupied by Israel ever since – the move was both hailed and condemned.

Some of Israel’s most ardent supporters cheered the move, citing Iran’s presence in Syria and the security risks that poses. But critics said it dimmed the prospects of getting Arabs on board the long-awaited Middle East peace plan Mr. Trump could unveil in the coming weeks.

Still others labeled it a purely political gesture with no international validity, designed to boost the fortunes of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who faces a tough election April 9.

But at a deeper level, the move shook U.S. allies, seasoned American diplomats, and experts in international relations who see in Mr. Trump’s action further erosion in the U.S.-led international order that has been at the foundation of postwar global stability.

“If the liberal hegemon says we’re no longer going to use our moral power to prevent some things from happening, and in fact we’re going to disregard the rule of law that we have led and protected since World War II, it sanctions others to do the same,” says Edward Goldberg, an assistant professor at New York University’s Center for Global Affairs.

“The Golan Heights may seem like a little thing,” he adds, “but we may look back on this as one of the historical straws that can break the camel’s back.”

QUESTION OF PRECEDENT

Indeed, what worries some most is the example the action sets.

Perhaps the biggest drawback to a decision with a number of downsides is the “question of precedent,” William Burns, a former deputy secretary of state, said this week. The former U.S. ambassador to Russia was speaking at a Washington event where he discussed his new diplomatic memoir, “The Back Channel.”

“International law gets pilloried sometimes … but an important principle is that territorial questions like this have to be solved peacefully through negotiations,” Ambassador Burns said. “This kind of decision is going to get used by the Vladimir Putins of the world to say ‘What’s wrong with the annexation of Crimea if the Israelis’ unilateral annexation of the Golan can be recognized?’”

If it’s OK for Israel to annex the Golan Heights, many experts say, what’s to stop China from one day seizing Taiwan, which it considers its territory, or Pakistan from seizing the disputed Kashmir region, which recently was the focus of renewed tensions between Pakistan and India?

Those examples are hypotheticals. But to get a good idea of just how starkly Mr. Trump’s Golan decision contrasts with traditional postwar American action, some say, it’s enough to look back to President George H.W. Bush’s decision to wage war to reverse Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s invasion and occupation of Kuwait in 1990.

The U.S.-led Gulf War had the legal backing of numerous United Nations resolutions and a coalition of more than 35 countries, all supporting the notion that the seizure of territory through conflict could not be allowed to stand. Otherwise, the kind of territorial occupations in both Europe and Asia that led to World War II could be unleashed. (Of particular concern to the U.S. was Mr. Hussein’s publicly stated intention to move on to invade Saudi Arabia as well.)

Mr. Burns, who was serving as a diplomat during the Gulf War, says the George H.W. Bush administration was keenly aware of the potential consequences of allowing Iraq’s annexation of Kuwait to stand – not least for Europe, where the Soviet Union had recently crumbled.

IN EUROPE, ALARM

Europeans, who know all too well the devastation that in past centuries has resulted from unilateral land grabs and border redrawing, were quick to declare Mr. Trump’s action unacceptable.

The French Foreign Ministry issued a statement after Mr. Trump’s announcement that “the recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan, occupied territory, would be contrary to international law, in particular the obligation for states not to recognize an illegal situation.”

The German government said in a statement that it “rejects unilateral steps,” adding that “If national borders should be changed it must be done through peaceful means between all those involved.”

Most alarming to European leaders was what Mr. Trump’s action suggests about U.S. global leadership, some experts say.

“For the Europeans, this is really about upholding international law, which they see as such an important pillar of the current international system and critical to discouraging future territorial wars,” says Andrea Kendall-Taylor, a former deputy national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia at the National Intelligence Council. “And now for the first time they see the United States, one of the key architects of this order, undermining its principles and one of the threats.”

Some supporters of Mr. Trump’s action say Israel’s case is different from the Gulf War or World War II examples because Israel did not invade the Golan to annex it, but captured the strategic plateau in a defensive war. Moreover, the Trump administration says the situation is different now because Iran, Israel’s sworn enemy, has a foothold in war-torn Syria.

But for much of the international community, such justifications merely put the U.S. on the wrong side of an international order that has underpinned rising global prosperity and discouraged conflicts for 70 years.

Indeed, Ms. Kendall-Taylor, a Russia expert now at Washington’s Center for a New American Security, says Moscow is using U.S. actions like the Golan Heights recognition to promote a picture of the U.S. as an agent of disorder.

“They’re using the announcement to feed the narrative that the U.S. is a unilateral actor – and one who’s actions are destabilizing the world order,” she says.

AT TIMES, GOLAN WAS IN PLAY

NYU’s Professor Goldberg recognizes that Israel has security concerns along its border with Syria, but he also notes that since Israel passed a law annexing the Golan in 1981, it had not made it a fixture of its security strategy.

“Don’t forget that it was not so much of a problem that it stopped Netanyahu from wanting to negotiate the Golan Heights” with Syria, he says.

As for Iran, Mr. Burns says he actually sees a Golan annexation and U.S. recognition of it as a “gift” to Iran, because the Iranians are “always looking for an excuse” to capitalize on Israel’s “occupation” of territory.

Of particular concern to Ms. Kendall-Taylor is how Russia, despite the glaring contradictions of its annexation of Crimea and actions in the Ukraine, seems to be successfully advancing the notion that it, and not the U.S., is the power the world can rely on.

“Putin is advancing this perspective that Russia is the responsible global actor that acts according to international law, and the U.S. is not,” she says. “And he is adding this [Golan] U.S. action to the growing list of areas of agreement for Russia and the Europeans and even China – a list that includes the JCPOA [Iran nuclear deal] and climate change, where the U.S. is standing alone on the other side.”

Iranian Proxies: Apr.,2,2109:  US imposes fresh Iran-related sanctions against Shia militias in Syria, airline companies The US Treasury Department has issued a new batch of sanctions against four entities that it says have ties to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, and airlines that are already on Washington’s black list. The new ‘Iran-related’ sanctions list published by the Treasury on Thursday contains only one Iranian entity – a cargo airline based in the southern town of Qeshm – Qeshm Fars Air. The company was subjected to US punitive measures over its ties to another Iranian airline, Mahan Air, which was already sanctioned by the US. Armenia-based Flight Travel LLC also landed on Washington’s list for the same reason. Two more entities added to the blacklist are both Shia militias, which are fighting in Syria on the government‘s side. Known as the Fatemiyoun Brigade and Zainebiyoun Brigade, the groups were formed by Afghan and Pakistani Shiites, and are trained and equipped by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps – a fact that landed them both on the sanctions list.     

Iranian imperialism: Apr., 2, 2109: Tens of thousands of Afghans recruited, paid and trained under the Fatemiyoun Liwa (Fatemiyoun Brigade) by Iran to fight in support of Tehran’s ally President Bashar Assad are returning to their homeland, as the 8-year war in Syria winds down. Afghan veterans returning from Syria are threatened from multiple sides. They face arrest by security agencies that view them as traitors. According to some statistics, Iran has sent over 50,000 Afghan fighters under the Fatemiyoun Brigade to fight in Syria.

Russia: Apr., 15, 2019: When the Syrian civil war began, Russia and the United States backed opposing sides.Moscow’s military effort—in conjunction with support from Iran and Hezbollah—was a great success. Assad now controls most of the country, and the United States, which even at its peak had a limited military presence in Syria, has announced a major drawdown of troops. On Dec. 19, 2018, President Trump tweeted, “We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there in the Trump presidency.” Russia’s President Vladimir Putin praised the announcement, saying, “[I]f the decision to withdraw was made, then it is the correct one.” At the very least, Trump’s decision has clear implications for Russia’s calculations. many observers argue that the U.S. drawdown in Syria is a major win for Moscow. Within hours of Trump’s announcement, Russian foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova suggested that the Syrian-Jordanian border “can now return to peaceful life, as did Aleppo. There was no such hope as long as American troops were there.” Zakharova argued that the U.S. presence was a major obstacle to a peaceful resolution of the long-fought Syrian civil war. Many Western analysts also argue that the U.S. withdrawal favors both Russia and Iran.  The Kremlin has long had trouble managing its erstwhile allies in Syria. Turkey and Russia have disagreed over the fate of Kurdish forces, and, in many respects, Iran and Russia have contained their differences in the name of the fight to protect Assad. As long as U.S. forces were involved, these differences were largely secondary. Now Russia is the sole global power still in the game, and it will have to confront several crucial issues: Who will control the territory scheduled to be vacated by the United States? Will Ankara invade? Will the Kurds accept Syrian government control over their autonomy? Can the Kremlin reconcile Tehran’s long-term presence in Syria with Israeli demands for a complete Iranian withdrawal? Despite being co-conveners of the Astana Process, Turkey and Russia disagree over the future of Idlib province and the fate of Kurdish forces along the border. At issue in Idlib, the last remaining rebel stronghold in Syria, is the presence of approximately 10,000 fighters from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, often seen as the Syrian offshoot of al-Qaeda. In September 2018, Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan approved a demilitarized zone, coupled with a Turkish promise to rid the region of jihadis. During the February 2019 Sochi meeting of the Astana trio, Erdogan took credit for “keep[ing] calamity from Idlib,” but the Russian president pushed back, saying that “we do [not] have to accept the presence of terrorist groups in Idlib.” The next month, Turkey initiated patrols of the cease-fire zone. The situation around Idlib remains unstable, which has raised the specter of an all-out assault by the Syrian government—presumably backed by Russian air cover. Erdogan and Putin also differ on the future of Kurdish forces operating further east, in the area to be vacated by U.S. troops. Ankara is pushing for a 20-mile-deep safe zone along the border, in which no Kurdish presence would be permitted. In contrast, not only has the Kremlin not offered support for a Turkish incursion to clear the area, but instead it recommended that the Syrian regime open diplomatic channels with the Kurds. Zakharova summed up the Russian perspective in December 2018: “[W]ho will inherit control of the territories vacated by the Americans?” she asked. “Obviously, that should be the Syrian government.” Putin’s chosen mechanism for resolving Ankara’s and Damascus’s separate visions for postwar Syria is the Adana accord. The agreement, which was signed by Syria and Turkey in 1998 but eventually disregarded, guaranteed security along the Turkish-Syrian border and, most importantly, declared the Kurdistan Workers’ Party a terrorist organization. Damascus has offered qualified agreement, but it is unlikely that Erdogan would agree. The Turkish president fears that even if the Kurdish Peoples’ Protection Group is incorporated into the Syrian army, it would remain semiautonomous. Additionally, this solution would require the restoration of communication between Erdogan and Assad. Despite some intelligence cooperation, Turkey remains—at least for now—committed to pushing Assad from power. In January, Turkish foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu stated that Moscow and Ankara continue to disagree over “whether President Bashar al Assad should stay in office.” And Moscow’s relations with the other Astana co-convener, Iran, are replete with suspicions. Initially, there seemed to be a division of labor between the two: Russia provided air support, while Iran and Hezbollah assisted Syrian government forces on the ground. Now, as the war seems to be winding down, Russia appears intent on facilitating a peace with buy-in from many stakeholders, while Iran is committed to solidifying its gains in Syria. It’s not clear how the other players, most notably Turkey and even the Syrian government, would react to the permanent Iranian presence Tehran would like to secure. Iran’s efforts to further entrench itself in Syria will be exceedingly difficult for Russia to handle. Over the years, Moscow has developed good relations with Tel Aviv, based in large measure on trade and the fact that more than 20 percent of the Israeli population is Russian speaking. During the Syrian civil war, Russia has for all practical purposes given Israel a green light to attack Iranian and Hezbollah targets in Syria and to prevent the transshipment of Iranian equipment and munitions to Hezbollah in Lebanon. Additionally, Russia negotiated to keep Iranian forces 85 kilometers away from the Israeli border. Yet, in September 2018, when Syrian forces accidentally shot down a Russian jet during an Israeli attack, Moscow blamed Israel for instigating the attack. Israel expressed regret for the accident—even though it was not directly responsible—but it took almost six months for relations to improve. Iran is also being proactive. Just days before Netanyahu traveled to Moscow, Syrian President Assad flew to Tehran, where he was warmly welcomed by Iranian leaders. Many analysts speculated that by courting Assad, Iran not only showed its displeasure with the Russian-Israeli relationship but also made clear that it intends to stay in Syria. Moscow’s conflicting interests in finding a resolution to the civil war that can satisfy both countries places it right in the center of the Israeli-Iranian rivalry. Can it offer security guarantees to Israel at the same time that it continues to cooperate with Iran? Moscow is equivocating. Russia has criticized Israeli attacks on targets in Syria; in January, Zakharova said that “[t]he practice of arbitrary strikes on the territory of a sovereign state … [that is, Syria] should be ruled out.” But Russia has also distanced itself from its Iranian partners. Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Rybov, in response to a question from CNN about whether Russia and Iran were allies, stated that he “wouldn’t use this type of word to describe where we are with Iran.”This balancing act can lead to miscommunication. Netanyahu told a weekly cabinet meeting on March 3 that he and Putin had agreed on “the withdrawal of foreign forces that arrived in Syria after the outbreak of the civil war.” Did Russia mean the United States? Did Israel mean Iran? Neither side offered a clarification.

Fresh killings: July, 29, 2019: At least 130 children were among the 544 people killed in a Russian-led assault on the last rebel-held area of northwestern Syria over the last two months, according to an independent monitoring group. Aided by Russian air power, the Syrian army launched an offensive on the rebel-held Idlib province and the nearby provinces on 26 April – and fighting has continued since then. The Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR), a London-based group with a number of monitors on the ground, said the area had been hit with cluster bombs and incendiary weapons. More than 2,000 people had been injured, the organisation that briefs United Nations (UN) agencies added. “The Russian military and its Syrian ally are deliberately targeting civilians with a record number of medical facilities bombed,”  

US Syria withdrawal: Oct., 17, 2019:

President Donald Trump has upended American policy in Syria, and possibly in the entire Middle East, in one stroke. His unilateral decision to withdraw American troops from the Kurdish region of northern Syria, and thus give a green light for the Turkish invasion of the Kurdish enclave, has put all American goals in Syria in grave jeopardy. These included protecting the autonomous Kurdish enclave as a quid pro quo for the Kurdish militia’s singular military contribution in liquidating Islamic State and capturing its capital Raqqa at the cost of thousands of lives. They also included preventing the regime of Bashar al-Assad from reasserting control in northern Syria (a very important US objective in Syria was to circumscribe Russia’s and Iran’s reach and influence in the country). Finally, one of the principal aims of American policy in both Syria and Iraq has been to prevent the resurgence of the IS. All of these objectives now lie in tatters.

The YPG, having been let down by the US, has in desperation entered into an alliance with the Assad regime to counter the Turkish invasion. Syrian government forces are reported to be rapidly moving into the Kurdish enclave and towards the Turkish border. The Kurds have justified their decision by declaring that it is the duty of the Syrian government to protect the territorial integrity of the state. This is a major reversal of the YPG’s earlier stance that was anchored in gaining autonomy from Damascus and, as a corollary, preventing the intrusion of regime troops into the Kurdish proto-state.

The YPG had bargained that an American military presence in the area would not only deter a Turkish attack but also discourage the Assad regime from sending its troops into Kurdish territory. The YPG and its political arm, the PYD, seem to have given up their goal of autonomy from Damascus in return for ensuring the survival of the Kurdish people in the face of the Turkish assault that they fear could take on genocidal proportions.

The YPG and the umbrella force that it led, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), were until recently perceived by decision-makers in Washington as a barrier to the intrusion of Russian and Iranian military and political influence in northern Syria. Now, with the YPG allied with the Assad regime, it’s only a matter of time before Russian military advisers and Iran-backed Shia militias start operating in the Kurdish enclave. Russia and Iran are the Assad regime’s principal supporters, and Damascus was able to turn the tide in the Syrian civil war largely due to the aid of Russian airpower and the military prowess of battle-hardened Hezbollah fighters supported by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its Quds Force.

Both Russia and Iran are interested in attaining footholds in northern Syria. Both would like to see the Assad regime consolidate its control in all of Syria. Russia is also interested in gaining access to territory close to the Turkish border in order to enhance its bargaining power with Ankara over the Idlib enclave in northwestern Syria. While the Idlib region is under the nominal protection of Turkey, several hardline Islamist factions that Turkey finds difficult to control infest it.

These Islamist groups are inveterate enemies of both the Assad regime and Russia. Moscow would like to either eliminate them completely or drive them out of Syrian territory. To that end, it has conducted several air attacks on the Idlib enclave in contravention of the Sochi agreement it signed with Turkey in September 2018. Russia has claimed, with a great deal of justification, that Ankara hasn’t been able to keep its part of the bargain by not disarming Islamist factions and being unable to impose order in Idlib. Russia’s strategic position vis-à-vis Idlib is likely to be buttressed once it gains access to the Kurdish region of northern Syria that borders Idlib.

Iran will also make major political gains through the reassertion of the Assad regime’s control of the Kurdish enclave. Iran itself is faced with its own problem of Kurdish secessionist aspirations: the Kurdish proto-state in Syria was a source of inspiration not only for the Kurds in southeastern Turkey, but also the Kurds in northwestern Iran who have been in a state of an on-again, off-again rebellion against Tehran. Eliminating Kurdish autonomy and bringing the Kurdish enclave under the control of Damascus therefore redounds to Iran’s benefit as well by eradicating this source of attraction for Iranian Kurds. The extension of the Assad regime’s control into the Kurdish areas would also mean the indirect spread of Iran’s influence and presence in a region of Syria, and that also bordering Turkey, from which Iran had been excluded. This would give Iran greater leverage within Syria as well as in relation to Turkey, with which its relations have been ambivalent.

Finally, the mayhem created by the Turkish invasion, combined with the withdrawal of the American military presence from northern Syria, will be a boon for Islamic State. IS not only has sleeper cells in the region, but also had thousands of fighters who were incarcerated in the Kurdish enclave and guarded by YPG/SDF forces. These forces are now required to fight the Turkish invasion and so are unable to guard IS fighters and their dependents, many of whom have already escaped from the compounds where they were housed. It’s almost certain that these fighters will regroup and could well form the kernel of a resurrected IS. Several terrorist attacks attributed to IS have already been reported from northern Syria, and instances of such attacks are likely to increase in the near future.

This could lead to a repetition of the situation in Iraq after the American invasion of 2003, which left large swathes of territory ungoverned and in chaos, allowing terrorist groups to mushroom. The Turkish invasion of the Kurdish enclave in northern Syria and the American complicity in this act could very well usher in a rerun of the Iraqi scenario that created al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia that eventually morphed into IS.

Even if a fraction of this scenario turns out to be true, it will mean further suffering and turmoil in a region that has already had more than its share of both. What’s absolutely clear is that the hasty decision to withdraw American troops from the Kurdish region of Syria, thus paving the way for the Turkish invasion, has not only left the Kurds with a tremendous sense of betrayal but also overturned most of the goals that Washington had set for itself in Syria and the rest of the Middle East.

The betrayal of the Syrian Kurds has sent a clear message to America’s allies in the region and beyond that they can no longer depend on Washington’s assurances regarding their security, and that they should search for other options to ensure their own safety.

https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/who-gains-from-trumps-sudden-syrian-withdrawal/