Putin trio of Syria winners seen accepting partition for now

Bloomberg

The triple alliance of Russia, Turkey and Iran, now the dominant actors in Syria’s war, is stepping up efforts to impose a peace. It may end up presiding over a partition.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is meeting his Turkish and Iranian counterparts in Ankara on Wednesday for their latest summit on Syria’s future. The three leaders have buried their sometimes competing interests to cooperate closely since last year. They’ve all scored military gains recently, and they all insist that Syria must emerge from more than seven years of civil war with its territorial integrity intact.
That’s not the reality now, and maybe not anytime soon. President Donald Trump is saying he’d like a pullout soon of the 2,000 US troops in Syria, where they’ve been fighting in the northeast against the now largely defeated IS. But policy makers in Moscow expect the American military presence to continue, prolonging a de facto carve-up of the country.
“If Moscow and Washington agree on how to keep Syria together, it will be a unified state,” said Elena Suponina, a Middle East expert at the Russian Institute for Strategic Affairs, which advises the Kremlin. “If not, the dividing lines will remain.”

TURKEY’S SPHERE
Intervention by Russia and Iran turned the tide of the long-running war in President Bashar al-Assad’s favour. The Syrian leader scored a significant coup this week when rebels began to leave their last bastion near the capital, Damascus, after a heavy bombardment that added to the war’s half-million death toll.
Even with the foreign support, Assad is running out of places he can comfortably recapture. Apart from the US-occupied northeast, the largest area to remain outside the control of Damascus is Idlib in the northwest — and that’s now in Turkey’s sphere of influence.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan doesn’t share the Russian and Iranian focus on keeping Assad in power. When Erdogan sent his army into that border region of Syria in January, his goal was to push out Kurdish fighters allied with insurgents in his own country. Erdogan rapidly achieved that goal, and he’s in no hurry to hand over the territory to Assad or anyone else.
The other significant opposition holdout is in the south towards Syria’s border with Israel. An Assad advance there could trigger intervention by the Jewish state, which says it won’t tolerate an Iranian presence nearby.
One thing that does bind together Russia, Iran and Turkey is their shared hostility towards the US deployment in Syria. American troops are protecting the same Kurdish militia that Erdogan is fighting further west, and the area they’re holding includes energy resources that Russia and Iran would like to see restored to Assad.
Sergei Rudskoi, deputy chief of Russia’s General Staff, railed against Washington on Wednesday for seeking to establish a “quasi-state” in Syria. “The United States has taken the path of dividing up Syria,” he said at a security conference in Moscow. It’s a high-risk standoff involving the world’s two biggest nuclear powers. In February, US forces killed more than 200 Russian mercenaries who attacked a base near an oil refinery in the American zone. The Kremlin denied any official involvement, and the US was quick to say it accepted that assurance. And late last month, a phone conversation between army chiefs on both sides was required to head off another potential clash, according to US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis. “Russian elements” got “too close” to the American-backed forces, and fell back only after the call, he told reporters March 27.
Mattis’s boss campaigned on a pledge to stop miring America in foreign wars. Twice in a week, Trump has said he’ll be pulling troops out of Syria soon. But the president has also promised to counter Iran’s regional ambitions — and two incoming members of his foreign-policy team, John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, are well-known hawks on that issue.
In the end, that’s likely to keep at least some American presence in Syria, said Cliff Kupchan, chairman of the Eurasia Group, a New York-based risk consultancy.