There is a Presidential election scheduled for May 26 in Syria. Bashar al-Assad is running for re-election. But the stability of his regime is still in question. He received 88.7% of the vote in 2014.
A free election with competing parties campaigning freely will definitley not be what takes place on election day. A further derioration of the situation in Syria will generate more misery for Syrians and more pressure for refugees to seek asylum in Turkey and EU countries. It's also would pull even more foreign actors into Syria's internal
... it is precisely the catastrophic situation that is contributing to the fact that there have recently been more regional political activities to get Syria out of the impasse. Even explicit opponents of Assad, who have supported former rebels, fear a state collapse and a power vacuum after Assad's overthrow. Russia is trying to get the Arabs to accept Assad as a transitional figure – and to get Syria, whose membership was suspended in 2011, back in the Arab League.
But Assad, for his part, would also have to take steps, especially through concessions in the UN-led Constitutional Committee that includes the opposition, which is expected to meet again after the end of Ramadan. This concerns the implementation of UN Resolution 2254 of 2015, which calls for a political solution in Syria. U.N. envoy Geir Pederson has unveiled a new five-point roadmap and hopes Russia will put pressure on Assad to join. [my emphasis, my translation from the German]
It has been one of my recurring themes here how the EU is sadly unprepared for a recurrence of the unusuallly large refugee influx of 2015-16, which had very much to do with conflict in Syria and the collapse of the government of Libya. And the EU is doing a bad job, in someways a shameful and criminal job, of handling refugee issues right now. Here's one pitiful example from Denmark, Danish plan to repatriate Syrian refugees sparks controversyAljazeera 04/12/2021.
This video from Aljazeera's "Start Here" series provides a summary of the last decades of conflict in Syria, Syria — is it a war without end? 03/14/2021:
One important factor here is that the conflict is currently taking place inside Syria. Turkey's involvement inside Syria was agreed with Russia at two separate meetings in the Russian city of Sochi.
Russia, the biggest outside backer of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in his fight against rebels, has been preparing for an offensive on the city of Idlib, which is controlled by rebels and now home to about 3 million people.
But after Putin’s talks with Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, who has opposed a military operation against the rebels in Idlib, Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu told reporters there would not now be an offensive.
The rebels to be targeted in that 2018 agreement were Sunni Islamist groups, which opposed the Alawite-dominated government of Syria. The Alawites are sometimes described as a variation of Shi'a Islam. In any case, the Shi'a government of Iran is supporting the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad. Sunnis are a majority in Syria.
The 2019 agreement also concluded in Sochi was one in which Vladimir Putin gave Erdoğan permission to attack the Kurdish areas controlled by the leftwing Kurdish YPG in the Rojava area of northwestern Turkey: Full text of Turkey, Russia agreement on northeast SyriaAljazeera 10/22/2019
In the case of the Turkish invasion of Syria last month, the motive is not a matter of speculation: William V Roebuck, a US diplomat stationed in northeast Syria at the time, wrote an internal memo about what he was seeing for the State Department. The memo later leaked. It is one of the best-informed analyses of what happened and is titled: “Present at the Catastrophe: Standing By as Turks Cleanse Kurds in Northern Syria and De-Stabilise our D-Isis [sic] Platform in the Northeast.”
Roebuck, with access to US intelligence about Turkish intentions, has no doubt that Ankara would like to expel the 1.8 million Kurds living in their semi-independent state of Rojava. He says: “Turkey’s military operation in northern Syria, spearheaded by armed Islamist groups on its payroll, represents an ... effort at ethnic cleansing, relying on widespread military conflict targeting part of the Kurdish heartland along the border and benefiting from several widely publicised, fear-inducing atrocities these forces committed.” [my emphasis]
We're currently seeing the serious failure of Erdoğan's foreign policy of the last few years. This report from the International Crisis Group by Nigar Göksel et al (Deadly Clashes in Syria’s Idlib Show Limits of Turkey’s Options 02/29/2020)looks at Turkey's current situation, including this on Turkey-Russia relations:
Turkey’s military options are limited by Russia’s current control over Syrian airspace. Nor does it have any reason to expect robust support from its traditional post-World War II allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), including the U.S., in the event of a confrontation with Russia in Syria. As for Moscow, it presumably has no interest in sabotaging its overall relations with Ankara, which, from the Kremlin’s viewpoint, have helped distance Turkey from the U.S. and NATO.
Still, tensions between the two seem bound to increase. In recent years, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s strategy has leaned toward “Eurasianists” in Turkey who strongly favour close ties with Moscow. The death toll of the 27 February airstrike was shockingly high for Turkey, however, and Turkish media played up reports (denied by Moscow) that Russia did not even allow Turkish helicopters into Idlib’s airspace to evacuate the dead and wounded. All this will strengthen the hand of those who seek a rebalancing of Ankara’s strategic orientation toward Turkey’s NATO allies.
And, of course, the war is still creating large numbers of refugees. "One million people have been displaced in Syria's Idlib region since December near Turkey's southern border, causing what the United Nations says may be the worst humanitarian crisis in nine years of war." (Erdogan says he hopes for Idlib ceasefire deal in Putin talksAljazeera 03/02/2020)
