The Russian Air Campaign

Thursday, October 22nd, 2015

The Russian air campaign makes straightforward military sense, the War Nerd argues:

Russia is using its air force to try to blast out a viable territory for an Alawite/Shia state along the Syrian coastal hills. Assad’s people are longtime Russian clients and allies, and the Russian air force is helping them maintain their key turf against a much more numerous enemy. It may fail, but at least that’s a reasonable plan.

At the moment, Russia’s planes are focusing on a triangle of Sunni-held territory north of Homs, trying to blast a path for Assad’s weak infantry. If you look at these very good graphics put together (it pains me to admit) by the New York Times, you can see what a sensible, traditional military move that is. Scroll down to the two maps captioned “Many of the Initial Airstrikes Were Near the Boundaries Between Government and Rebel Zones” and go to the second map. You’ll see a T-shaped yellow zone marking Sunni-held territory due north of Homs, along the key road to Hama and Aleppo.

That’s where the Russian strikes have been hitting hardest lately, in Sunni-held crossroads towns like Ter Maela, right on the M5 highway that runs north to Hama and Aleppo, south to Damascus. That highway is the key to Syria, a kind of spinal cord like the big vein down a shrimp’s back. If the Russians can obliterate Ter Maela’s defenders thoroughly enough to let Assad’s weak infantry (or maybe his much better Hezbollah or Iranian ringers) take and hold these villages, then the Alawites have the makings of a viable state.

The US air campaign, on the other hand, does not make much sense:

If you were to sum it up, it’d go something like this: “Hit Sunni targets east of the coastal hills, but ignore everything to the west; help the Kurds in the north, but grudgingly, as little as possible, for fear you’ll offend Turkey; and while you’re attacking Assad’s enemies, keep reassuring the Israelis that you’re just as anti-Assad as you are anti-Islamic State.”

Sound stupid? It is. It’s a ridiculous compromise adopted to please the Israelis and Saudis, based on the dumb-ass notion that Sunni fighters in eastern Syria are evil sectarian bastards, but the Sunni fighters facing off against the SAA in the west are “moderates.”

It’s true that Islamic State is uncommonly vile, but let’s not lie; the only faction in Syria that even tries to rise above sectarian hatred are the young Kurdish commies of YPG/J. Every other group is sectarian, and militias that start out sectarian only get meaner as they go, by the iron logic of primitive war, where massacre is the norm. And this sectarian taint isn’t new. Syria’s Sunni were chanting “Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the graveyard” long before the fighting started.

Air strikes look clean from air, messy from the ground:

As a rule, you can tell when the media approve of air strikes by the angle. If it’s all nice clean pilot’s-view of distant explosions, it’s a good strike. If they show you funerals, weeping relatives, blasted apartments, it’s a bad strike. So you can tell, just from the headline — “This Is What the Russian Air Strikes in Syria Look Like from the Ground” — that it’s a bad strike.

Comments

  1. Slovenian Guest says:

    To paraphrase J from the h2oreuse blog:

    Regarding Syria, Assad’s basic policy is to exile the Sunni population and transform the country into a Shi’a stronghold. Several million Sunnis have already left the country, Assad is destroying Sunni monuments and mosques. The Alawi sect has thrown away its semi-Sunni camouflage and is openly, militantly Shi’a. Aggressive efforts to convert Sunnis into Shiites are underway as well. The ethnic cleansing that Assad and his Shiite allies are performing is also a “religious” cleansing, aimed at permanently changing the nature of the country and consolidating the “Shiite crescent”. Palestinian refugees that left Syria are not allowed to return.

    Bashar coming out on top of it all, what a twist!

  2. Ben K. Itman says:

    This is more or less what I wrote a few weeks before “the War Nerd”.

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