© ReutersA formation of Russian Mig 31s
Russian fighter pilots are expected to begin arriving in Syria in the coming days, and will fly their Russian air force fighter jets and attack helicopters against ISIS and rebel-aligned targets within the failing state.
According to Western diplomats, a Russian expeditionary force has already arrived in Syria and set up camp in an Assad-controlled airbase. The base is said to be in an area surrounding Damascus, and will serve, for all intents and purposes, as a Russian forward operating base.
In the coming weeks thousands of Russian military personnel are set to touch down in Syria, including advisors, instructors, logistics personnel, technical personnel, members of the aerial protection division, and the pilots who will operate the aircraft.
Past reports have stated that the Russians were in talks to sell the Syrians a package of MiG-29 fighter jets, and Yak-130 trainer jets (which can also serve as attack aircraft.) The current makeup of the expeditionary force is still unknown, but there is no doubt that Russian pilots flying combat missions in Syrian skies will definitely change the existing dynamics in the Middle East.
The Russians do not harbor offensive intentions towards Israel or other sovereign states in the area, and their main stated goal is battling ISIS and preserving Assad's rule. However, their presence will represent a challenge to the Israeli Air Force's freedom of operation in the skies above the Middle East.
Western diplomatic sources recently reported that a series of negotiations had been held between the Russians and the Iranians, mainly focusing on ISIS and the threat it poses to the Assad regime. The infamous Iranian Quds Force commander Major General Qasem Soleimani recently visited Moscow in the framework of these talks. As a result the Russians and the Iranians reached a strategic decision: Make any effort necessary to preserve Assad's seat of power, so that Syria may act as a barrier, and prevent the spread of ISIS and Islamist backed militias into the former Soviet Islamic republics.
The Russians are not the only ones coordinating their Middle East policy with the Iranians; The US has also jumped aboard that train. American government officials have been holding intensive consultations with representatives of the Iranian regime concerning a stronger joint effort against ISIS in Iraq. It seems that the US government currently views Iran as a central and necessary force in the campaign against ISIS within Iraq.
The Iranian-American cooperation is focused on two focal points: The first being Anbar province, where the Iraqis have thus far failed to expel ISIS; and the second Mosul, where the Iraqis have yet to come up with a feasible plan to recapture the city.
Western diplomatic sources have emphasized that the Obama administration is fully aware of the Russian intent to intervene directly in Syria, but has yet to issue any reaction. The absence of a vocal opposition from the Obama administration is compounded by its cessation of calls for the dissolution of Assad's murderous regime.
After a decades-long absence, Russia is finally strong enough again to begin clamping down on Middle East madness
Arab media outlets have recently published reports that Syria and Russia were looking for an additional port on the Syrian coast, which will serve the Russians in their mission to hasten the pace of the Syrian rearmament.
In the meantime, Assad's army is in full scale retreat in the strategic province of Idlib. Mere days ago, a force from the Jaesh Al Fatah (A coalition or rebel groups including Jabhat al-Nusra) advanced on the Abu Duhur military airfield in southwestern Syria's Iblib province, which borders on Latika. Alwaite and Christian residents of the area have fled to the last remaining Alawite Bantustans along the country's coastline.
Even Turkey, which has so far avoided any action which would strengthen Assad, has had to come to terms with the Russian-Iranian move and the resulting American silence, leading it to launch its own bombing campaign against ISIS in Syria.
During a recent trip to Qatar, Erdogan reached understandings with the Qataris and the Saudis regarding a program to arm Muslim Brotherhood backed rebels who are fighting against ISIS, de-facto fighting both Assad and ISIS.
Reader Comments
Looks like another American plan is about to go pear-shaped.
And the American's can't object to attacks on ISIS, without confirming what everybody already knows... That ISIS are an American owned and operated tool.
Oded Yinon in his essay wrote that the main problem of Israel are not Arabs and other Muslims but Russia.
"The Gorshkov doctrine calls for Soviet control of the oceans and mineral rich areas of the Third World.
That together with the present Soviet nuclear doctrine which holds that it is possible to manage, win and
survive a nuclear war, in the course of which the West's military might well be destroyed and its
inhabitants made slaves in the service of Marxism-Leninism, is the main danger to world peace and to
our own existence. Since 1967, the Soviets have transformed Clausewitz' dictum into "War is the
continuation of policy in nuclear means," and made it the motto which guides all their policies. Already
today they are busy carrying out their aims in our region and throughout the world, and the need to face
them becomes the major element in our country's security policy and of course that of the rest of the Free World. That is our major foreign challenge.
The Arab Moslem world, therefore, is not the major strategic problem which we shall face in the
Eighties, despite the fact that it carries the main threat against Israel, due to its growing military might.
This world, with its ethnic minorities, its factions and internal crises, which is astonishingly self-destructive, as we can see in Lebanon, in non-Arab Iran and now also in Syria, is unable to deal successfully with its fundamental problems and does not therefore constitute a real threat against the State of Israel in the long run, but only in the short run where its immediate military power has great import. In the long run, this world will be unable to exist within its present framework in the areas around us without having to go through genuine revolutionary changes. The Moslem Arab World is built like a temporary house of cards put together by foreigners (France and Britain in the Nineteen Twenties), without the wishes and desires of the inhabitants having been taken into account. It was arbitrarily divided into 19 states, all made of combinations of minorites and ethnic groups which are hostile to one another, so that every Arab Moslem state nowadays faces ethnic social destruction from within, and in some a civil war is already raging."
A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties
by Oded Yinon
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Indeed British actions in the middle east [Link] go back many generations but their most disruptive and illegal actions took place in Palestine and the repercussions make the middle east a tinder box today. Occupied Palestine has every right to be fearful and many in this world would rather the occupiers and their minions be removed from the middle east all together.
We've had enough of the US "fighting" ISIS, which mostly consists of "accidentally" dropping them weapons and other aid while "accidentally" killing some other people.
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