Did Kremlin let Russian mercenaries be wiped out ‘like pigs to the slaughter’?
IT WAS one of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant’s biggest cash cows, a strategic prize crucial to the Kremlin and Bashar al-assad’s plans to re-establish his rule over Syria.
But when the Conoco oilfield near Deir Ezzor came under assault earlier this month, the move ended in disaster. It sparked the first deadly combat between Americans and Russians since the Vietnam War and embarrassed Vladimir Putin.
It also cast an unwelcome light on one of the worst kept secrets of Russia’s war in Syria: its increasing reliance on illegal mercenaries.
“These were shock troops and they would take any position, fulfil any task,” said Alexander Averin, a veteran of the pro-russian militias in east Ukraine and friend of one of the Russians who was killed.
He said Kirill Ananyev, 33, was a fellow member of the radical “national Bolshevik” political party Other Russia and had also fought in east Ukraine.
He said that Ananyev, whom he had known since 2001, had been working for a private military company when he was killed. He would not name the company, but other casualties have been linked to the secretive Wagner group.
Some media reports have put the number of Russian casualties in the hundreds, and relatives want answers.
“I want everyone to know about my husband and about all the guys who died there so stupidly,” Yelena Matveyeva, whose husband Stanislav was killed, told a regional news site. “They sent them like pigs to the slaughter.”
The debacle unfolded on the evening of Feb 7, when hundreds of mysterious fighters began charging toward a Syrian Democratic Forces position near the oilfield under cover of artillery, tank and rocket fire.
In response, US special forces embedded with the mostly Kurdish SDF called in artillery fire and strikes from fighter jets and B-52 bombers that effectively destroyed the “battalion sized force” they were facing.
Mr Averin told The Daily Telegraph that 500 Russians were in Deir Ezzor at the time and that many were now dead and wounded. It is not entirely clear whether the Russian high command authorised the attack, and some believe that Wagner mercenaries were working for a local pro-assad businessman to take the lucrative site.
According to a Syrian government contract seen by AP and Fontanka, an independent news outlet, a Russian company linked to the Wagner group was to receive 25 per cent of profits from oil and gas fields its contractors captured.
Others have suggested the Kremlin allowed the preventable defeat, which also saw Syrian troops killed, as a warning to an increasingly independent Mr Assad, as well as Iran, his other major backer.
“You need to be in line with our policies in Syria or you’ll get bombed,” was Moscow’s message to them, said Yury Barmin, of the Russian International Affairs Council, a think tank close to the Kremlin.
Mr Putin’s bombing campaign in Syria was supposed to be a television war, providing footage of impressive Russian air strikes without any body bags to ruin the mood.
But Syrian forces reportedly proved ineffective even with the help of Russian advisers and special forces. Kremlin-linked contractors allowed Moscow to run a covert land operation while denying it had boots on the ground.
“The big battles, the intense battles with casualties, that’s all Russian mercenaries,” said Ruslan Leviev of the Conflict Intelligence Team, a research group that tracks Russian military activity abroad.
Some 3,000 Russians have fought for the Wagner group, the biggest of the private military companies, in Syria since 2015, according to Fontanka.
“The new phase in the Syrian conflict makes the anti-isil war look like a stroll in the park,” said Bilal Saab, an expert at the Washington-based Middle East Institute. “This has the potential to turn into a regional war.”