The so-called “Manbij Model” that the US and Turkey agreed to in jointly administering the strategic city following the YPG’s withdrawal is promising but nevertheless imperfect because it fails to address the Kurdish-led “deep state” that controls the SDF’s political and military activities in northeastern Syria. The US and Turkey finally reached a deal to…
In a recent article for Foreign Policy magazine, Jonathan Spyer, a research fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategic Studies, argued that Russian President Vladimir Putin was content with what Spyer perceives to be the current situation in Syria: A “frozen conflict” in which Putin is prepared to accept a continuous low level conflict and…
A military delegation of high-ranking officers from Saudi Arabia and the UAE recently visited a Kurdish SDF base in Aïn al-Arab (Kobani) on the Syrian border with Turkey. They discussed practical questions connected with replacing the US military presence there with troops from several Arab nations, who would represent the League of Arab States. There…
From “De-Ba’athification” in Iraq to “De-Shi’afication” in Syria Of the dozens if not scores of tactical, strategic and fundamental mistakes the US made in Iraq after illegally invading and occupying the country in 2003, was a strategy which sought to inflict a punitive socio-political and economic disenfranchisement of the Sunni Arab population of the Arab…
Syria recently announced that it has handed over to its Russian and Iranian Astana partners a list of experts to participate in the upcoming UN-supervised “constitutional commission”. This is an important milestone in the peace process because it proves that President Assad was sincere when he told his Russian counterpart in Sochi last month about…
The fact a couple Russian military advisors together with dozens of Syrian soldiers have recently perished in the Deir ez-Zor area indicates the United States together with its allies carries on with preparations to cast a decisive blow in southwest Syria, aimed at cutting off Iranian forces from their allies. Damascus has this far been…
