Russia, U.S. and “Friends” get SNC slap in the face

The Syrian National Coalition, the country’s opposition umbrella group, has finally given Russia, the United States and the so-called “Friends of Syria” group a kick in the teeth.

The Syrian National Coalition of Revolutionary and Opposition Forces said it was turning down invitations to visit Moscow and Washington and suspending participation in the “Friends of Syria” conference due in Rome next month.

In a statement posted on its Facebook page late Friday night, the National Coalition described the deathlike “silence of the international community over daily crimes committed against our people” as “complicity in the slaughter of Syrians throughout the past two years.”

The statement said, “Hundreds of defenseless civilians are being killed by Scud missiles.

“Aleppo, the city of history and civilization, is being systematically destroyed.

“Add to this millions of refugees and displaced and hundreds of thousands of detainees, wounded and orphans.

"In protest against such shameless international stance, the coalition leadership decided to suspend its participation in the ‘Friends of Syria’ conference in Rome and to turn down invitations to visit Russia and the United States.

“We hold the Russian leadership ethically and politically responsible for the most part because they continue to back the (Damascus) regime with arms.

“We also urge people around the world to regard the week of March 15-22, which marks the Syrian revolution’s second anniversary, as a week of mourning and protest.”

Kuwait’s Muslim scholar Dr. Ghazi al-Tawbah, writing for Aljazeera.net last week, wondered if “Friends of Syria” conferences were not in reality meetings of “enemies.”

The Syrian opposition, he said, has been telling its “friends” for two years -- at successive meetings in Tunis, Istanbul, Paris and Marrakesh -- what it needs to protect the Syrian people.

All the Syrian opposition got in return was “hollow promises.”

Dr. Tawbah wrote, “Opposition leaders told their hosts opposition forces needed some qualitative weapons to face tanks and warplanes. They said setting up an interim government needed safe zones and a budget of $500 million to meet the Syrian people’s needs. They explained the Syrian people suffered 60,000 fatalities, 140,000 wounded, 60,000 disappeared, 140,000 detainees, 720,000 refugees, two million displaced and four million in need of humanitarian aid.”

The “friends” having offered zilch, “we are justified to ask: Were these ‘Friends of Syria’ conferences in the past two years meant to be meetings with the friends or enemies of Syria?”

Friends, Dr. Tawbah opined, “are supposed to answer their friends’ pleas. But why is that not so with Syria of all the Arab Spring countries?”

Jamal Khashoggi, Saudi Arabia’s analyst, author and kingpin of the impending Al Arab TV news channel writing today for pan-Arab al-Hayat, says, “Raising funds nowadays is tough, given the global economic slowdown.

“At the (January 30) Kuwait conference, the United Nations sought to raise $1,2 billion in humanitarian aid for Syrian refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs). Since then, it received not more than 20% of the pledges made.

“So who is going to come up with the billions needed to rebuild Syria?

“Even if Bashar (al-Assad) were to succeed in putting down his people’s revolution, the region’s states and leaders won’t rehabilitate him or return him to their fold. Nor will they bear the cost of seeing him survive without victory or defeat.

“Accordingly, it is time to focus on the benefits of seeing him out and the establishment of a friendly, democratic and popular regime. All regional countries will draw benefit from this happening, except Iran.

“If truth were told though, losing Syria is better for Iran long-term. Losing Syria would bring Iran down to reality instead of continuing to live its pipedream of reversing 1,400 years of history. Iran would revert to its regional size, concentrating on its people’s wellbeing.”

With Assad’s exit, Khashoggi continues, “Jordan would be relieved of its northern neighbor’s plots and resultant security and intelligence costs. It would have a neighborly country complementing its economy and agriculture. Jordan and the new Syria would connect with Lebanon in a Bilad al-Sham economic triumvirate without border or regime change.

“Saudi Arabia would also be relieved of security strains the Baathist regime posed on and off in Lebanon or in connivance with Iran – this, without Saudi Arabia being able to isolate, or dissociate from, Syria.

“After all, Syria represents Saudi Arabia’s strategic and economic expanse and its doorway to Turkey and Europe.

“A free, democratic Syria with a market economy would certainly be good news for Saudi Arabia.”

Khashoggi says if Turkey and the Arabs choose to boost their support of the Syrian people, they could induce U.S. President Barack Obama not to wait any longer and to put his weight behind the Syrian revolution independently of the UN Security Council.

“Precedents of ‘Special Operations’ behind the Security Council’s back are many,” Khashoggi remarks.

U.S., after Russia, is part of the problem in Syria

The Assads entertaining the Kerrys at dinner in a Damascus restaurant (File photo from syrianhistory.com)

Abdelwahhab Badrakhan, who holds a Master’s degree in Information Science from the Sorbonne, writes regularly for four regional newspapers and has a daily political analysis program on Radio Monte Carlo Doualiya (International). He wrote this think piece in Arabic for today’s al-Hayat

Russia’s position on Syria became hopeless months ago. Instead of evolving, its position became increasingly intransigent.

All the talk about Moscow being “unconcerned” about Bashar al-Assad’s fate was a smokescreen.

It was meant to conceal the reality that Moscow joins Iran in considering Assad a “red line.” Russia and Iran work hand in glove in arming the regime and mapping out its survival, pending a solution tailored to fit it.

To see the United States join the Russian-Iranian duet is no longer far-fetched.

Why? Because the Syria crisis now has a byname in Washington: “Jabhat al-Nusra” or the “War on Terror,” instead of “The people want an end to oppression and aspire to freedom.”

The massacre of hostages and hostage-takers in Algeria, the mixture of Afghanization and Somalization with a tint of al-Qaeda in northern Mali, and al-Qaeda’s role in the killing of the U.S. ambassador and two other American diplomats in Benghazi will certainly spur America’s belief that “better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.”

When John Kerry, the new U.S. secretary of state and old “friend” of the Syrian regime, meets his Russian opposite number Sergei Lavrov next month, the new Obama Administration’s foreign policy wouldn’t have jelled yet. But the new policy will be drawing nearer – not further from – Russia’s objectives. It will want to activate the Syria “understandings.”

You can forget Washington’s earlier blabber about “a transitional government with full powers” and the need for Assad to step down.

The two big powers will support whoever can stifle terror. They will stand shoulder to shoulder against any side impeding this priority.

Obviously, they will want to rely on the regime, which is far from being gullible. The regime will request U.S. guarantees for its survival.

The regime is aware, but has yet to acknowledge, that the Americans have already dried up the sources of financial and military assistance to the opposition, including the non-extremist side. But the regime would also request the resumption of ties with Washington and a visit by old friend “Kerry,” who would have by then forgotten his earlier counsel to Assad to step down.

Meantime, the regime is trying hard to prove its mettle by committing at least a daily massacre, and by targeting children, young men and a whole generation…

That’s what you call the “Game of Nations” and the amorality of power politics in its ugliest form.

Once American and Russian pragmatism converge and play ball with the brutal Assad regime, Syria can expect a muddier and more tempestuous chapter.

The “game of nations’ leaves no room for peoples’ rights and “aspirations.” The Palestinian people can attest to such historic injustice.

At best, the Syrian opposition will be cornered and told the balance of power leaves it no more than what the two great powers determined.

The Syrian people demanded the protection of civilians. They demanded a no-fly zone. They demanded qualitative weapons to redress the balance of forces. They demanded relief aid. They demanded that children not be left to die from cold or disease.

They got nothing from the international community. Whoever spoke of a “conspiracy” with the regime against the people was not far from the truth.

Of course, America’s turnaround was not, and will not, be by electric shock. Nor will it be an easy matter, free of hurdles.

Despite differences in their assessments, neither Washington nor Moscow are certain the regime can still be rehabilitated – albeit for the specific, camouflaged and seemingly-worthy task of “precluding the collapse of the state and the army.”

But the “game of nations” hardly ever yields peaceable balances…

As the Americans and Russians play up today the symptoms of Somalization in Syria, they are fully aware the regime created them.  In addition, Barack Obama’s “non-intervention doctrine” effectively produced the same fallouts in Syria as those of the “intervention doctrine” of George W. Bush in Iraq.

Russia, which justifies its intervention in Syria with a lesson in international law, gives a bad example of what the international community’s role should be. Indeed, the two powers would say anything to absolve them of any responsibility for creating the situation they now bemoan. They make it sound as though the Syrian people revolted, sacrificed and suffered simply to stack up al-Qaeda and other terrorists on their soil.

By encapsulating the crisis as a proliferation of extremism, and by mulling a plausible excuse for its about-face, the United States is prioritizing the side effects of the illness instead of treating its causes. It even seems prepared to overlook the violence, the bloodshed and the destruction meted out by the regime -- to the point of pondering reliance on the regime “to restore order.”

Why and how Washington’s U-turn?

The factors are threefold:

1. From the onset, Washington’s priority in addressing the Syria crisis was to protect Israel’s interests, which meant “reforming the regime” rather than “regime change.”

2. The obduracy of Russia, which exploited Syria’s plight to recover its “Great Power” status, thereby forcing the Obama administration to reluctantly choose between outright confrontation and a trade-off.

3. The Syrian opposition’s struggle to set up one or more viable alternatives to the regime, chiefly because of the [two Assads’] 42-year bulldozing of politics altogether…

The Americans have long been heard inviting the Russians to be part of the solution and not part of the problem. Here is America becoming part of the problem too.

Should the anticipated policy change come true, America, like Russia, would become responsible for the Syrians’ killing and the butchery of their revolution. 

Syrians pay tribute to killed Japanese journalist

Mika Yamamoto

Yamamoto's body in the field hospital as her colleague Sato (top right) tries to stroke her forehead (below)

FSA members (top) escorted Yamamoto's body to southern Turkey

“Condolences from all of us Syrian people to the family of Mika Yamamoto. She has shared our tragic annihilation at Assad’s hands. May she rest in peace.”

Rana Kabbani, the Syrian writer, broadcaster and daughter of former Syrian ambassador to the United Sates Sabah Kabbani, posted these words on her Twitter page this morning as a tribute to the Japanese woman journalist killed by Syrian forces in Aleppo yesterday.

Mika Yamamoto, a 45-year-old award-winning journalist working for Tokyo-based independent newswire Japan Press, was fatally wounded while travelling with the Free Syrian Army (FSA), Reuters quoted a Japanese foreign ministry official as saying.

In a telephone interview with a Japanese TV news program, fellow Japan Press reporter Kazutaka Sato, who was travelling with Yamamoto, said it appeared government forces shot her.

“We saw a group of people in camouflage fatigues coming toward us. They appeared to be government soldiers. They started random shooting. They were just 20, 30 meters away or even closer,” said Sato.

He also told Japanese broadcaster TBS that Yamamoto had been shot in the neck.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said she was shot in the Sulaimaniya district of Aleppo, the scene of heavy fighting between government and rebel forces.

The Syrian activist group also said Bashar Fahmi, a Palestinian reporter for the U.S. government-funded broadcaster Al-Hurra, his Turkish cameramen Cüneyt Ünal, and an unnamed Lebanese journalist had disappeared in Aleppo.

Japan Press said on its website Yamamoto reported from Afghanistan under the Taliban and covered the 2003 Iraq war from Baghdad.

Yamamoto’s Iraq reporting won a Vaughn-Ueda prize given by the Japanese Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association and modeled after the U.S. Pulitzers media awards.

In April 2003 she narrowly escaped a U.S. tank’s attack on the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad, Jiji news agency said, while news agency Kyodo described her as a “pioneer video journalist”.

Yamamoto, who was born in 1967 and joined Japan Press in 1995, is the first Japanese killed in the current armed conflict in Syria, the ministry official said.

A video posted on YouTube overnight showed Yamamoto’s badly injured body lying in a makeshift field hospital.

One clip shows Sato, her colleague, bending over her body as if to stroke her forehead.

In the YouTube video, a group of FSA fighters led by Capt. Ahmed Ghazali are shown escorting Yamamoto’s body to southern Turkey.

"We welcome any journalist who wants to enter Syria," Ghazali says. "We will secure their entry, but we are not responsible for the brutality of Assad's forces against the media."

“It is extremely regrettable that a Japanese reporter was gunned down and killed,” Chief Cabinet Secretary Osamu Fujimura said at a daily news briefing. “We reproach such an act and offer our heartfelt condolences to those left behind.”

The dead woman's father, retired journalist Koji Yamamoto, said reports of her death were "too much to bear."

"I can't believe it until I see her with my own eyes," the 77-year-old told Jiji Press by telephone.

"She was always talking about tragic people who were caught in conflicts, human lives and world peace. She was more than I was... she is a wonderful reporter and daughter," he said.

"We mourn the loss of our colleague Mika Yamamoto and send our deepest condolences to her family and friends," said CPJ (Committee to Protect Journalists) Executive Director Joel Simon. "Syria has become the most dangerous place in the world for both local and international journalists."

Yamamoto is the fourth foreign reporter to have died in the violence in Syria since March 2011.

French reporter Gilles Jacquier was killed on January 11 at central Syria's Homs, where American journalist Marie Colvin and French photographer Remi Ochlik died on February 22.

Maj. Gen. Jamil Hassan

On the day Yamamoto was killed, the Arabic language website of Russian broadcaster Russia Today quoted an unnamed Arab source as saying a high-ranking Syrian military official had died in a Russian hospital and a private jet had flown his body back from Moscow to Damascus.

Syrian activists and the FSA have since named the Syrian officer as Maj. Gen. Jamil Hassan, head of Air Force Intelligence.

Maj. Gen. Hassan presumably suffered serious injuries in the July 18 bomb blast that killed Assad’s brother-in-law and his defense minister and decapitated the Syrian security hierarchy.

In its profiles last month of President Bashar al-Assad’s inner circle members, the BBC recalled that Maj. Gen. Hassan replaced Abdulfattah Qudsiya as head of Air Force Intelligence in 2009.

Though smaller than Military Intelligence, AFI is seen by some as the elite agency of Syria's intelligence empire. The agency owes its power to Hafez al-Assad, who was air force chief before coming to power in a coup.

AFI was originally tasked with protection of the Air Force, including the president’s plane and the president himself during his trips abroad.

It now plays a leading role in operations against opposition groups, as well as covert actions abroad, and has a reputation for brutality.

Gen. Hassan, an Alawite, previously served as a security official in the eastern governorate of Deir Ezzor.

In late April 2011, personnel from Air Force Intelligence fired tear gas and live ammunition to disperse crowds of demonstrators who took to the streets in Damascus and other cities after noon prayers, killing at least 43 people, according to the US.

The next month, the EU said Gen Hassan was "involved in the repression against the civilian population" during the recent anti-government unrest, and imposed a travel ban on him and froze his assets.

Baghdad's Arab summit and Syria as playing field

“No one has the right to tell (Syrian President Bashar al-) Assad to stand aside or step down” at the Arab summit opening Thursday in Baghdad, Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zibari tells Iraq’s satellite TV Alsumaria in an interview airing tonight.

Lebanese political analyst Iyad Abu-Chacra, writing this morning for the leading Saudi daily Asharq Alawsat, lists these telling backgrounds for the impending summit:

1. Iraq, the host country is in a mess. Its prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, wants leaders of autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan to hand him over fugitive Vice-President Tareq al-Hashemi to face terrorism charges. This is when sectarianism and chaotic security have totally undermined the independence of Iraq’s judiciary.
2. State authority in Maliki’s Iraq today rests on a sectarian coalition founded and sponsored by Iran. Many people suspect some coalition members are accomplices in the Syrian regime’s bloody crackdown on the opposition.
3. Arab heads of state, or their representatives, will be heading to the summit in the shadow of “two Samson-like choices.” One was made by the Assad regime in Damascus, the other by the “new tsarist leadership in Moscow.” Assad is in no position to wash his hands of the blood of tens of thousands of Syrians. Nor are the Russians able to regain the trust of the Islamic world after counseling Assad to go for the “Chechnya option” in populated Syrian areas and avowed their determination to protect the Orient’s Christians from Muslim rule.
4. At the summit, the Arab League will flaunt its impotence after having been castrated already by the double veto of Russia and China at the UN Security Council and the equivocation of the Obama Administration in an election year.
5. Moscow has already poured cold water on Kofi Annan’s Syria mission by continuing to link the freedom of the Syrian people to guarantees for their oppressors and jailers and to equate between the victim and the killer.
6. The clock keeps ticking to the “Friends of the Syrian People” meeting in Turkey, where participants need to come clean on previous commitments to stifle Assad’s “scorched earth” policy.

In light of such summit landscape, can anyone still talk of Syria being a “regional player”? Is it not more accurate to speak of Syria being the “playing field”?

“Friends of Syria” versus “Friends of Assad”

Anti-Assad demo in the heart Damascus yesterday (Photos from Asharq Alawsat)

Organization of the inaugural meeting of the “Friends of Syria” coalition to explore ways to support the Syrian opposition and further isolate President Bashar al-Assad’s regime is in jeopardy.

Agreement on the conference’s membership, mandate, agenda, date and even the Tunis venue seems to have hit the bump in the road.

Tunisian Foreign Minister Rafik Abdessalam announced his country’s readiness to host the February 24 conference during last Sunday’s meeting in Cairo of the Arab League Council of Foreign Ministers.

My impression, after reading this morning’s leader in the Saudi daily Asharq Alawsat, is that Tunisia’s offer is up in the air.

Here is what Alawsat editor Tariq Alhomayed writes in the leader:

If the Tunisian foreign ministry says it won’t be inviting the Syrian National Council (SNC) to the upcoming “Friends of Syria” conference but would be inviting Russia and China, then the question is: What’s the benefit from this conference? Rather, why not call instead for a “Friends of Assad” meeting?

It’s puzzling to hear Tunisian Foreign Minister Rafik Abdessalam say, “For sure, the Syrian National Council won’t be officially represented” at the “Friends of Syria” conference, hoping instead for proper representation of the Syrian opposition.

To say the Syrian opposition is not unified – after emerging from the shadows of two Assad criminal dictatorships spanning 40 years -- is unrealistic.

For example, who unified the Iraqi opposition in London before Saddam Hussein’s downfall except (U.S. Ambassador to Iraq) Zalmai Khalil Zada? And who unified the Libyan opposition except the French and Qataris...?

The conference in Tunis was meant to shore up the Syrian revolution and to send a clear message to the Assad regime, not vice-versa. Inviting the Russians and Chinese would void the conference of purpose…

The conference to be held in Tunisia is not an addendum to the UN Security Council warranting Moscow and Beijing’s attendance. The conference is meant to take decisions that serve the interests of unarmed Syrian civilians. It is not only meant to stop the killings, but to also launch the transition process advocated by the Syrian revolution and endorsed by the Arab League.

So, better have a “Friends of Assad” conference with the participation of Moscow, Beijing, Beirut, some Arab League officials, if not Cairo as well. It could be held wherever they please. But the “Friends of the Syrian People” conference should invite -- and of course recognize -- the Syrian National Council, as well as the influential countries eager to end the Syrians’ suffering and Assad’s crimes, such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, the UAE, Jordan, the European countries led by France, Britain and Germany and obviously the United States.

Such a conference would be in a position to take effective decisions and actions palpable to the unarmed Syrian civilians, chiefly those under two weeks of devastating bombardment such as the residents of Homs, Deraa and Idlib.

The “Friends of the Syrian People” need to pass resolutions and take practical steps to support and arm the Syrian opposition, to set up secure humanitarian corridors, to lobby Security Council members for ending the Assad era and to prod the International Criminal Court to track down those guilty of crimes against humanity in Syria.

That is what the “Friends of the Syrian People” need to do. Any other forum that does otherwise should be called the “Friends of Assad” conference. 

All-Syria talks in Moscow could break UN impasse

Wahhab with Assad in Damascus yesterday (photo from www.champress.net)

A call for all-Syria talks in Moscow sounds like the panacea likely to break the impasse in ongoing UN talks on Syria.

Ms Raghida Dergham, pan-Arab daily al-Hayat’s senior diplomatic correspondent in Washington and New York, reports this morning:

“The focal point of negotiations with Russia is a tradeoff whereby Russia agrees to back the Arab initiative enshrined in the Security Council resolution and the opposition Syrian National Council accepts Russia’s invitation for talks with the regime in Moscow.”

She says SNC leader Burhan Ghalioun told her in an exclusive interview to be released tomorrow, Friday, “If Russia is prepared to let the Security Council resolution pass by withholding its veto, there could be some rounds of negotiations in Moscow on the transfer of power as specified in the Arab initiative… We have no problem with the venue” so long as it leads to the transfer of power.

Russia’s UN envoy to Vitaly Churkin Tuesday urged the parties to the Syrian conflict to start dialogue. He said his country invited “the Syrian authorities and all opposition groups [to send their representatives to Moscow within mutually acceptable time periods to hold informal contacts without preconditions.

“It is very important to start a dialogue now, during which the necessary agreements on the country’s political future will be specified.”

A day earlier, the Russian foreign ministry said, "Our offer has already received a positive response from the Syrian authorities."
 But Ghalioun rejected the offer, telling AFP President Bashar al-Assad’s “resignation is the condition for any negotiation on the transition to a democratic government in Syria."

The foreign ministry said talks in Moscow were "acutely necessary for the immediate cessation of all violence in Syria and preventing a bloody split in society."

They would also help ensure the "success for profound democratic changes in the country, in keeping with the aspirations of all Syrians."

Russia said its offer to host talks was aimed at ending the crisis "through a peaceful mechanism worked out by the Syrians themselves, without international interference."

In Beirut, Wiam Wahhab, Lebanon’s one-time cabinet minister who heads the Druze-dominated Arab Tawhid Party, says in the wake of his three-hour one-on-one meeting with Assad in Damascus on Wednesday: “I found him (Assad) reassured and unperturbed. He trusts Russia’s stand, saying Moscow’s tackling of the Syria File is not circumstantial or ephemeral as some people imagine.” Wahhab also quoted Assad as telling him: ”The decisive phase has begun, but that won’t hamper planned reform. At the end of the day, chaos is much more costly than decisiveness.”

The tug of war over the UN vote on Syria

From my press archives

As I went to bed last night, I thought the theme of my Tuesday post would have to be the diplomatic tug of war over the UNSC Syria resolution.

While keeping my 24-year-old dog walking routine at dawn this morning, I could not imagine Moscow vetoing a second resolution on Syria within 12 weeks.

The draft resolution in its current form endorses the Arab League’s Syria peace plan for President Bashar al-Assad transferring full powers to his second-in-command (see “Full text: The Arab League’s Syria resolution,” 23 January 2012).

I still think compromise language will be found to amend the draft and overcome Russian objections before the vote later this week.

The changes, I believe, will be sufficient to persuade Moscow to allow a watered down resolution to pass by a majority vote. It can do so by abstaining or voting for or against without using its veto.

However, a leading political analyst in today’s Arab press doesn’t share my view. He makes clear Russia will hold its ground because it is fighting a “self-preservation” battle it can’t afford to lose.

"To Moscow's mind," Lebanese commentator Amine Kammourieh explains, “the issue is not Syria. The issue is Russia per se and the Russian leadership’s fate and future.”

Shooting down my anticipation, Kammourieh writes:

Syria is not so much a theater where Russia is defending a regime. It is a theater where it is vigorously warding off a comprehensive attempt to contain it and curtail its influence.

Russia suspects the Moslem Brothers’ likely sway in post-Assad Syria would drive the Islamic tide to its shores in the Caucasus and Ural regions, if not to the heart of Moscow.

But fear of the Islamic genie knocking at the Kremlin’s door is not looming. Nor is it perturbing Russia’s decision-makers today.

Russia also does not wish to see its historic Turkish adversary gaining strength and expanding its sphere of influence southward and eastward. That would tempt Turkey to look northward, where Turkish ethnicity is deep-rooted in places like Dagestan, Chechnya, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.

Here again, it is not Turkey that is unnerving the Russian bear at the moment.

At stake is not a Russian naval base in the warm waters of Syria’s Tartus seaport either.

Only Russia proper can cause a tense Russian reflex. Only Russia’s higher national interests, which are above all else, can rouse the Russian leadership.

The Kremlin’s current stalwarts believe their fate and future are on the line because of ceaseless provocations by the West. So when their survival is at risk, they become mindful that neither material sweeteners nor paltry deals nor insignificant regional roles can foster or save them.

Washington blundered when it hastened to support the outcry against Vladimir Putin after the parliamentary elections in the hope that an early Russian Spring is in the offing. By so doing, Washington provoked the Kremlin into thinking the Russian regime was the West’s target after Syria’s – or maybe the third if Iran’s were the second.

It is not surprising then to see Russia produce a similar challenge. The Syrian theater being today the most volatile in the game of nations and roles, the faceoff becomes more telling.

Russia cannot afford to lose the Syria game, where it is “playing all or nothing.”

In Syria, Russia is fighting a self-preservation war exclusively led by the Putin-Medvedev-Lavrov triumvirate. The room for maneuver is hence skintight.