As if the Middle East is not rent by enough warfare already – with Israel fighting Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis in South Yemen, all proxy fighters for Iran, which itself has attacked Israel twice with mass bombardment of missiles and been counter-bombed by Israel once, plus numerous smaller scraps between the proxies of Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and ongoing fights inside Iraq between other proxies – the 14-year old Syrian civil war has once again erupted after a long period of stagnation.

It may be the most insane conflict of all , judging from that terrific chart above, courtesy of Cdr Salamander, who does a quick, concise breakdown of what we see so far:

  • Some of the most useful reporting is from Al Jezeera.
  • The Al-Qaeda-adjacent Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) kicked this off in late November and have advanced rapidly to take the key city of Aleppo.
  • Homs is next and if that goes Damascus and Assad would be in real trouble, cut off from their coastal areas controlled by the Alawite sect and a good chunk of Syria’s Christian minority.
  • The Iraqi military have pushed across the border into Syria, probably at the behest of Iran.
  • Russia and Iran cannot help Assad as they used to because they’ve both been weakened by conflicts of their own.
  • “Turkey is feeling Ottoman at the moment”
  • The Kurds and Yazidi have their axes to grind against both Syria and Turkey (and Iraq and Iran), and other groups so are pushing in from their areas in the north.

ISIS is at the centre only because every other group wants to kill what’s left of it, hence all the one-way arrows. Two-way arrows means “frenemies” who may help each other or not depending on the specific circumstances.

It’s not a conflict I pay much attention too, even though perhaps I should, though for once oil is not the issue. Assad is almost the last of the basically secular Arab dictators, and in his case the son of one who dominated the nation in the simpler years of the Cold War, when he was armed and backed by the USSR. Dad did the usual shitty things in his career that such people do, probably the worst being how he dealt with the city of Hama when its people (and some Syrian Army units) rose in rebellion against him in 1982; he simply surrounded it with artillery and shelled it into submission, killing 20,000 of his own people. It got little attention at the time because of the Israel-Lebanon war (this shit never ends).

As such, I cheered a few years ago when a wider revolt exploded across the nation against his son. With considerable help from Russia, Assad survived. The Free Syrian Army is the rump of that effort, although in hindsight I probably shouldn’t have cheered so lustily for his opponents, given the distinct possibility that, whatever they say, an Islamic Republic would be the result. It should be noted that the Alawite Shia sect to which Assad belongs has (usually) protected the Syrian Christian community.

There’s also this analysis from one Saul Sadaka, with this map to go with the chart above:

Sadaka’s brief take covers some different and interesting points:

  • “The best case for Assad is that his poorly paid troops can hold Homs, allowing him to keep a rump state (the blue circled area).“
  • That’s also the safest result for Israel, especially if the Kurds take over the Deir Az Zor area in the NE, which would cut Iran’s supply lines to Lebanon, and hence Hezbollah.
  • It’s the worst case for Iran across the board.

Unmentioned by these folk is the hit that Russia would take, both in the soft-power of prestige and in the hard power of likely losing their only Mediterranean naval base at Tartus, having already moved ships out:

Anderson then reported that satellite imagery from December 3 showed that Russia removed the three frigates, the submarine, and two unnamed auxiliary vessels (likely the Yelnya and Vyazma) from the base — amounting to all of the vessels that Russia had stationed at Tartus.

Plus this latest…

In all of this one of the strangest things I’ve never understood was the toxic hatred between two of the bigger players, Erdogan and Assad. As near as I can guess it’s less to do with them and more to do with a thousand years of history:

  • Turkey was the Ottoman Empire and Syria a sometimes not too compliant part of it. The frictions linger with long-standing border disputes and of course Erdogan has spent twenty years indulging in dreams of a restored Ottoman with modern Islamic shades – something Assad would have a gut reaction against.
  • The long-standing Syrian support for the PKK, the Kurdish Workers Party – basically a communist group, as the name implies – which Turkey has rightly regarded for years as a terrorist group since it conducted attacks inside Turkey going back to the 1960’s in a bid to establish a Kurdish nation carved out of Turkey (Kurds also live in Syria, Iraq and Iran, meaning further frenemy actions.

Against that, the fact that Syria and Turkey were on opposite sides of the Cold War may never have actually meant much ideologically and certainly doesn’t now, given Erdogan’s rants against the EU in particular and the West in general.

To paraphrase Kissinger’s famous line about the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980’s: it’s a shame they can’t all lose.