Now it’s the US vs Russia in Syria
The CIA’s supply of American-made anti-tank missiles to rebel groups fighting the forces of Bashar al-Assad may have drawn Moscow into the conflict and turned it into a ‘proxy war by happenstance’. LIZ SLY reports
American anti-tank missiles supplied to Syrian rebels are playing an unexpectedly prominent role in shaping the Syrian battlefield, giving the conflict the semblance of a proxy war between the US and Russia, despite President Barack Obama’s express desire to avoid one.
The US-made BGM-71 tube-launched, optically tracked, wire-guided (TOW) missiles were delivered under a two-year-old covert deal between the US and its allies to help vetted Free Syrian Army groups in their fight against President Bashar alAssad. Now that Russia has entered the war in support of Mr Assad, they are taking on a greater significance than was originally intended.
So successful have they been in driving rebel gains in north-western Syria that rebels call the missile the “Assad Tamer”, a play on the word Assad, which means lion. In recent days, they have been used with great success to slow the Russian-backed offensive aimed at recapturing ground from the rebels. Dozens of videos have been posted on YouTube showing rebels firing the missiles at Russian-made tanks and armoured vehicles belonging to the Syrian army.
“It was a tank massacre,” said Captain Mustafa Moarati, whose Tajamu al- Izza group claims to have destroyed seven tanks and armoured vehicles in one day last week. More missiles are on the way, he added. New supplies arrived after the Russian deployments began, and the rebels’ allies have promised further deliveries soon, bringing echoes of the role played by US-supplied Stinger anti-aircraft missiles in forcing the Soviet Union to withdraw from Afghanistan in the 1980s.
The hits also plunged Washington i nto what amounts to a proxy war with Moscow, despite Mr Obama’s insistence this month that “we
are not going to make Syria into a proxy war between the US and Russia”. Last night, America said its forces had made a number of airdrops from C17 cargo planes of “small arms ammunition” in northern Syria. “It’s a proxy war,” said Jeff White, of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, who counted at least 15 tanks and vehicles destroyed or disabled in one day. “The rebels happen to have a lot of TOWs in their inventory. The regime happened to attack them with Russian support. I don’t see it as a proxy war by decision.”
Whether it will become one is one of the key questions confronting the Obama administration in the wake of President Vladimir Putin’s decision to throw Russia’s support behind the Assad regime. The TOW missile programme, overseen by the CIA, is separate from a failed scheme run by the Pentagon that was intended to influence the outcome of the other war being waged in the north-east of Syria against Isis.
The CIA programme got underwaybefore the Pentagon one, in early2014,with the goal of propping up the flagging rebellion against Mr Assad’s rule by delivering training, small arms, ammunition and the anti-tank missiles, which have proved instrumental in eroding the government’s key advantage over the lightly armed rebel force.
It was no accident, say officials and military analysts, that the first targets of Russian air strikes in Syria were the locations where rebels armed with TOWmissiles have made the most substantial gains and where they most directly threaten MrAssad’s hold over his family’s heartland in the coastal province of Latakia.
In northern Syria, a Kurdish militia that joined forces with rebels yesterday has been promised fresh weapons supplies by the US for an assault on Isis forces in Raqqa. The alliance calling itself the Democratic Forces of Syria includes the Kurdish YPG militia and SyrianArab groups, some ofwhich fought alongside it in a campaign that drove Isis from wide areas of northern Syria earlier this year.
The Arab groups in the new alliance are operating under the name “the Syrian Arab Coalition”. “We met the Americans and this has been approved and we have been told these new arms... are on their way,” said Abu Muazz, a spokesman for the Raqqa Revolutionaries Front, a grouping of mainlyArab tribal insurgents mostly drawn from the Raqqa area.
A US military official told Reuters that the Syrian Arab Coalition would push down towards Raqqa while staying east of the Euphrates river.
The new alliance includes the YPG, various Arab groups including Jaysh al-Thuwwar (Army of Rebels) and the Arab tribal Jaysh al-Sanadeed, and an Assyrian Christian group.
The Russian intervention, meanwhile, has continued to draw criticism around the world. Yesterday, it emerged that Moscow was warned by Saudi officials that air strikes would have “dangerous consequences”. The European Union accused Russia of putting peace efforts at risk in Syria, calling on Moscow to stop bombing Western- backed rebels. © Washington Post