The reality is that, like it or not, the West, including Europe, are on the losing side of the conflict in Syria and this automatically limits leverage
During the 11
th
EU–Russia Expert Network on Foreign Policy (EUREN)
meeting
, Andrea Dessì,
Senior Fellow within IAI's Mediterranean and Middle ... ... Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was killed during a U.S. raid. What do you make of his death and what consequences could that have for ISIS and international terrorism as a whole?
Andrey Kortunov, Michel Duclos:
Helping Iran to Make the Right Choice
The killing ...
... began to lose support rapidly. Saudi Arabia, which originally saw it as an obstacle to Iranian success lost faith. It became detrimental to early supporters because it led to an increase in foreign boots on the ground: the 2015 JCPOA agreement allowed Russia to increase presence in Syria and send forces to Khmeimim, and Western presence increased in the campaign to terminate ISIS.
How to prevent the next phase
Today, ISIS is gone. They have lost all of their territorial strongholds, and the ability to call themselves an “Islamic State.” According to Dr. Kepel, this is the end of Phase Three, the “aufhebung” phase....
... centralized state.
To maintain its current position of a critical power broker in Syria as well as in a broader Middle East context, the Kremlin has to figure out how to cope with three recent developments that call for significant adjustments in the Russian strategy.
First, the defeat of ISIS, which is definitely a positive development for everybody engaged in Syria and in neighboring countries, has an important downside. Old regional rivalries, animosities, fears and conflicts that were put aside in order to fight the common enemy, are back to stage. It might become increasingly difficult for Russia to forge ...
... expert, and Vasily Kuznetsov, Director of the Center for Arab and Islamic Studies at the RAS Institute of Oriental Studies, RIAC expert, represented Russia at the meeting. Iranian side was represented by the following speakers: Mahmud Shuri, Fellow for Russian Studies, IRAS, and Hassan Ahmadian, Research Fellow, IRAS.
Experts name the Syrian crisis and its resolution among the key factors for the future setting of the entire Middle East. The parties noted that the existence of ISIS had been uniting players with very different interests for the sake of one goal.
The victory over ISIS deprived ...
One of the main events of 2017 has been the victory won by the Russian armed forces and the Assad government in Syria. When Russian President Vladimir Putin decisively intervened in Syria’s bloody civil war in September 2015, many were taken completely by surprise. Western commentators and politicians ― including none other than then-U.S. President Barack Obama ...
... Trump during the campaign as an “unwitting agent of the Russian Federation” and “a threat to our national security.” Russian analysts, as noted by the journal Sputnik, had by this time observed a “catfight” in Washington between the CIA, the Pentagon, and the State Department over policies towards Syria. While the Pentagon was interested in fighting ISIS, the State Department, together with the CIA, placed the major emphasis on deposing Assad. The reason Putin knew this may ...
... both waging war on the people of Syria, nothing will stop the flow of refugees that risk destabilizing Syria’s neighbors that include multiple major U.S. allies—a flow that has helped spur an explosion of right-wing insanity in both Europe (where Russia is “weaponizing” the refugee crisis to damage the EU) and America, a right wing insanity that feeds the rise of radical Islamic extremism even as the war in Syria does the same—unless the war stops and/or safe zones are established, as nothing will convince the more than five million Syrians who have fled Syria (and that number only counts those registered by the UN: Jordan alone is estimated to have around ...
... and did nothing to prevent the onset of the greatest global financial and economic crisis since the Great Depression (barely managing to address it in time to prevent a... ... Since then, it has failed to effectively deal with conflict in Libya, Ukraine, and Syria, all within or near its periphery. The situation in Syria has led to refugee and... ... regional refugee and economic policies. In France, a rising far-right party funded by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government may possibly come to control France...
... can to expel Russian influence and a Russian presence, more dead Russian military personnel through incidents like the one yesterday, and more dead Russian civilians from terrorist attacks in a war that will not end anytime soon and keeps empowering ISIS, in part thanks to Russia’s actions in Syria.
The choice is clear for Mr. Putin: stop the charade and begin real cooperation with the NATO and other powers against ISIS, or go down a much more difficult path of pain, confrontation, and isolation. Russia could have taken former approach some ...
... how to react to this horrific terrorist attack—one following on the verily likely terrorist downing of a Russian airliner in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula—it is important to take a breath. This could very well lead to massive escalation in Syria by France (and maybe Russia, in relation to the airliner attack) and maybe even by others if it turns out ISIS had something to do with it; Yemen could be a focus if the attack involves the al-Qaeda affiliate operating there. Whatever moves are made, it is important to keep a clear head and ask what the likely results are to be of any such escalation, whether ...
