Applebaum is a hawk on all things Russia. She has also been married for decades to Radosław Sikorski, the current Polish foreign minister. Zygar was the founder of the independent Russian news channel, Dozhd (TV Rain) and is a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council. He provides a lot of historical context:
During the Soviet years, the Middle East was always considered Moscow's zone of special interest. No other region received as much attention from Soviet central television's international correspondents. No foreign leader (outside the socialist bloc) visited the USSR as often as the head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Yasser Arafat. And no country (including the U.S.) was vilified by Soviet propaganda as fiercely as the "Israeli military machine."Zygar writes that “Syria truly became significant for Putin only after Russia annexed Crimea and began its military intervention in Donbas.” Putin was leery in the extreme of the various “color revolutions” in eastern Europe and of the similar phenomenon during the Arab Spring, which began in Tunesia in December 2010 with what was labeled the Jasmine Revolution there. Similar mass protests soon began in Egypt, Yemen, Libya, and Syria.
If the Middle East was the Soviet Union's "backyard," this approach was abandoned almost overnight with the USSR’s collapse. The new Russian state immediately established relations with Israel, which were eagerly developed thanks to the efforts of the emerging Jewish oligarchs.
Putin never took the Arab states seriously. He personally delved into some international affairs, but never the Arab world. In essence, the Arab East was left to adventurers. Shady deals were made there, having little to do with politics—after all, corruption in the Arab states was always at least as rampant as in Russia.
Everything changed with the Arab Spring. Vladimir Putin viewed the uprisings against Hosni Mubarak and Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 as if he had seen himself in them. What happened next with Bashar al-Assad struck an even deeper nerve. [my emphasis] (1)
The Libyan revolt resulted in the lynch-murder of former Libyan strongman Muammar al-Qaddafi. After he was sodomized with a bayonet. Qaddafi had given up his “weapons of mass destruction” programs. As had Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. As had Ukraine after the fall of the USSR. Subsequent events surely have not reassured so-called “rogue states” like Iran and North Korea that they can safely relinquish their “WMD” programs.
In a real sense, the current conflicts in the Middle East and nearby are a continuing process that began with the neoconservative crusade in Iraq.
Peter Van Buren recently described how much of the current war and chaos is part of a process that began then:
[M]uch of it had to do with the United States and its invasion of Iraq in 2003 — the destruction of a comparatively stable (but "evil"; they're all evil) regime that turned out to be the linchpin holding most of the whole Sykes-Picot world together.Israel is continuing that same kind of policy in Syria right now. Dror Ze’evi reviews some of the hopeful possibilities that the fall of the Assad regime presents:
That invasion began a process of inviting all comers to take hold of a piece of Iraq and see how far they might get with it. Many of the same ISIS and former al-Qaeda elements that now stand athwart Syria (and will no doubt soon be fighting each other for control there) almost grabbed the entire country of Iraq after the U.S.-trained and equipped post-Saddam Iraqi army ran from the field. The country was left for the Iranians to then take the reins, fashioning it into a client state after the U.S. cut its losses by cooperating with Iran to wipe out most of ISIS (which was created amid the remnants of Al Qaeda, destroyed by U.S.) in Iraq and abandoning the Kurds who had foolishly believed the U.S. owed them a nation-state after all this.
American hubris then led to the overthrow of Muammar Qaddafi in 2011. But the much ballyhooed NATO bombing and Western-backed revolt of sorts ended up doing little more than creating a failed state in the fragile region. Pundits saw it, as they will wrongly see the fall of Syria, as a blow to Russian ambitions in the region, not calculating the negative value of unleashing chaos in a region consumed by the Iranian-U.S./Israeli proxy war and middle power politics in the Horn of Africa. Russia, by the way, is still fussing around there, to the consternation of the West.
As a side note, watching Qaddafi being sodomized on TV after he gave up his nuclear weapons assured the world North Korea would never do the same. But that's another world away… [my emphasis] (2)
The rebels who took over Syria include Salafists, jihadists, moderates, supporters of Turkey, members of the Kurdish organizations, Druze and Sunni Muslims. But all of them have declared their loyalty to Syria in its current borders. Right now, they are trying to chart a future for the Syrian people without former dictator Bashar Assad and his collaborators. Everyone is talking about democracy, and even the radical organizations are showing openness. [my emphasis] (3)But instead of trying to facilitate the formation of a stable government with which it could cooperate, Netanyahu’s government is basically waging war on Syria directly and actually trying to repeat the create-a-failed-state approach that Van Buren describes in previous Western adventures in Iraq and Libya which it continued in Syria and now Israel is pursuing even further. With full support from the Biden Administration, of course.
Ze’evi continues by noting favorable opportunities that Israel could be pursuing that could make its military and political situation more secure. Obviously, the current Israeli consensus is behind continued ethnic cleansing and genocide against the Palestinians. For Netanyahu’sd government, making Israel’s position more secured means seizing the occupied territories and maintaining permanent apartheid for the Palestinians under Israel’s control.
But, as he describes, Israel is on the warpath in Syria:
Yet despite all this, Israel is behaving brutally and shortsightedly. It has occupied territory in Syria and has positioned itself from the start as hostile to Syria. Instead, immediately after the regime fell, the country's leaders should have wished Syrians success in replacing Assad's evil regime and said they would be happy to have peaceful, brotherly relations with Syria.But the current Israeli government does not want good relations with a new Syrian government. They just want to cripple the country. And take some of its territory.
Intelligent strategic thinking would embrace the new Syria and invite it to join the moderate bloc. This approach could also help in consolidating the Abraham Accords, getting closer to normalization with Saudi Arabia and maybe even moderating the world's anger at Israel.
But in a shortsighted government, policy will be set by the defense establishment. Consequently, senior defense officials must deviate from their practice of seeing every new development through their gunsights and instead start thinking strategically. [my emphasis]
Zvi Bar’el points to another complication, which is that Türkiye has its own ideas about how Syria should be run (Haaretz has not yet adopted the convention of using “Türkiye” as the English spelling):
Turkey, wielding the most significant leverage [on momentarily dominant HTS faction in Syria], is positioning itself to lead efforts to normalize the new Syrian regime's international relations. This stems from multiple factors: Turkey's long-standing support for militias within Ha'yat Tahrir al-Sham, its control over the Syrian National Army (formerly the Free Syrian Army), and its command of crucial border crossings that serve as Syria's economic lifeline.Türkiye, of course, is a NATO member.
Turkey now aims to fill the role previously held by Iran and Russia as Syria's primary patron. This goes beyond mere "good neighborly" relations between border-sharing nations. Turkey has a paramount strategic interest: transforming Syria into a bulwark against Kurdish forces, which Turkey has fought for decades. While Turkey condemned Israel's incursion into Syrian territory, it has itself occupied parts of northwest Syria by force. Last week, its allied militias captured the city of Manbij west of the Euphrates, a Kurdish stronghold, and Turkey makes no secret of its plans to expand operations east of the Euphrates.
The Kurdish question is expected to dominate upcoming Turkish-Syrian discussions, as its resolution is crucial for Al-Golani's ability to establish a unified state. A successful agreement would help prevent internal conflicts from escalating into armed clashes between the regime and the Kurdish minority, facilitate the withdrawal of Turkish forces from Syria, and ease tensions among the country's other religious and ethnic minorities. …
With Syrian and Russian air forces absent, Turkey may become the de facto controller of Syrian airspace and, in partnership with the Syrian government, could end Israel's operational freedom. [my emphasis] (4)
Nima Alkorshid is a Brazilian podcaster who strikes a rather somber pose in his video interviews. He recently talked to former US security officials, Larry Wilkerson and Larry Johnson addressing the current situation is the Middle East. (4) They both take a pretty jaded tone. They are worth listening to on this particular set of issues. But the need to be listened to critically. Johnson, for instance, states here that the jihadist al-Nusra Front staged chemical attacks in Syria in 2013 and 2017, a highly dubious claim, at best. (See below.) (5)
About those chemical weapons attacks in Syria
There doesn’t seem to have been any final, definitive determination about exactly who staged those chemical weapons attacks. But the most likely culprit in most of them was the Assad regime. Maybe more specifics will come out of the current situation if it doesn’t descend into a new complete mess. A 2023 UN report explained the findings of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW):
Fernando Arias, Director-General of the OPCW, then reported that, based on the analysis conducted by the OPCW investigation and identification team and presented in that report, “there are reasonable grounds to believe” that, on 7 April 2018, between 19:10 and 19:40 local time, at least one Syrian air force helicopter departed from Dumayr air base. Operating under the control of the Government’s “Tiger Forces”, it dropped two yellow cylinders, which hit two residential buildings in a civilian-populated area in Douma, located on the outskirts of the Syrian capital, Damascus, releasing highly concentrated chlorine gas that killed 43 named individuals and affected dozens more. …A new report partially based on current interviews with Syrian residents in one of the areas where chemical weapons were used:
Echoing much of the OPCW Director-General’s briefing was Santiago Oñate-Laborde, Coordinator of the OPCW Investigation and Identification Team, who added that the Team engaged in several good-faith efforts to allow Syria to discharge its obligations under the Convention and Council resolution 2118 (2013). Pointing out that the country decided not to reply to such requests, he added that the team took note of the positions expressed by Syria and the Russian Federation regarding the Douma incident, including their view that the incident was staged by terrorists with the support of Western States. He then provided a detailed description of the investigation and affirmed that, based on the chemical and analytical data, it is possible to rule out the hypothesis that the incident was staged. (6) [my emphasis]
The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), a global watchdog, said in a report last year that it believed a Syrian air force helicopter departed from the nearby Dumayr air base shortly after 19:00 [April 7, 2018] that day and dropped two yellow cylinders which hit two apartment buildings, releasing highly concentrated chlorine gas. …In a September 2015 attack, the OPCW did identify Daesh/ISIS [ISIL] as the likely perpetrator of that particular attack:
On more than one occasion in Eastern Ghouta, chemical weapons - banned by the Geneva protocol and the Chemical Weapons Convention - were used to attack Douma.
Bashar al-Assad's forces captured Douma shortly after the chlorine attack, and the stories of the victims were never fully heard. …
In 2013, rockets containing the nerve agent sarin were fired at several rebel-held suburbs in Eastern and Western Ghouta, killing hundreds of people. UN experts confirmed the use of sarin but they were not asked to ascribe any blame.
Assad denied his forces fired the rockets, but he did agree to sign the Chemical Weapons Convention and destroy Syria's declared chemical arsenal.
Between 2013 to 2018, Human Rights Watch documented at least 85 chemical weapons attacks in Syria, accusing the Syrian government of being responsible for a majority of them.
In addition to Douma in 2018, the OPCW's Investigation and Identification Team has identified the Syrian military as the perpetrator of four other cases of chemical weapons use in 2017 and 2018. An earlier fact-finding mission, which was not mandated to identify perpetrators, found chemical weapons were used in 20 instances. [my emphasis] (7)
The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) Investigation and Identification Team (IIT)’s fourth report concludes that there are reasonable grounds to believe that units of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) were the perpetrators of the chemical weapons attack on 1 September 2015 in Marea, Syria. The IIT’s comprehensive investigation was conducted from January 2023 to February 2024. [my emphasis] (8)
Notes:
(1) Zygar, Mikhail (2024): Putin's Son of a Bitch. The Last Pioneer 12/11/2024. <https://zygaro.substack.com/p/putins-son-of-a-bitch> (Accessed: 2024-12-12).
(2) Van Buren, Peter (2024): Set it off: How US invasion of Iraq led to chaos in Syria today. Responsible Statecraft 12/12/2024.
(3) Ze’evi, Dror (2024): Israel's Security-led Strategy Is Missing an Opportunity in Syria. Haaretz 12/12/2024.
(4) Bar’el, Zvi (2024): Syria Could Become a Turkish Protectorate, Limiting Israel's Freedom of Action Haaretz 12/15/2024. <https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/syria/2024-12-15/ty-article/.premium/syria-could-become-a-turkish-protectorate-limiting-israels-freedom-of-action/00000193-c934-d967-a5df-fbfee53f0000?gift=78d23024e11748849c2fc87499b8d4f7> (Accessed: 2024-15-12).
(5) The Chaos in Syria: How It Will Backfire on Its Creators! Dialogue Works YouTube channel 12/14/2024. <https://youtu.be/zEs_xMsCU9o?si=koU0AyTGcgMO-0sY> (Accessed: 2024-15-12).
(6) ‘Reasonable Grounds to Believe’ Syrian Government Used Chlorine Gas on Douma Residents in 2018 … Meetings Coverage-UN Security Council 02/07/2023. <https://press.un.org/en/2023/sc15194.doc.htm> (Accessed: 2024-12-12).
(7) Limaye, Yogita (2024): 'I want justice': Victims of Syria chemical attacks speak freely for first time, BBC News 12/11/2024. <https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn4xyd1yx0go> (Accessed: 2024-12-12).
(8) OPCW identifies ISIL as perpetrators of 2015 chemical attack in Marea, Syria. OPCW 02/22/2024. <https://www.opcw.org/media-centre/news/2024/02/opcw-identifies-isil-perpetrators-2015-chemical-attack-marea-syria> (Accessed: 2024-15-12).
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