U.S. warplanes banned from much of Syria
Aircraft barred from flying over ‘de-escalation zones,’ Russian diplomat says
BEIRUT— United States and allied aircraft will be banned from flying over much of Syria in a deal between Iran, Russia and Turkey, a senior Russian diplomat said on Friday.
The diplomat, Aleksandr Lavrentiev, also suggested that Russian and Turkish warplanes would be prohibited from flying in four designated “de-escalation zones,” where Syrian government and rebel forces are supposed to stop fighting each other.
But Lavrentiev seemed to sketch out a broader geographical no-fly zone for U.S. and coalition military planes. He said they would be allowed to fly only in eastern Syria over Daesh-held areas, apparently excluding the entire western spine of the country. There was no immediate comment from the U.S. military or from the Trump administration. Nor was it clear whether Washington had agreed to the conditions that Lavrentiev described, or whether Russia would try to enforce them.
Significantly, the agreement to establish the de-escalation zones has not been accepted by all opposition groups, and it left loopholes for Syria to continue undiminished attacks on the rebels, factors that combined to torpedo the last attempt by Iran, Russia and Turkey to forge a ceasefire.
Nevertheless, one of the representatives of the Syrian opposition groups at the Astana, Kazakhstan, talks, Col. Ahmad Berri, sounded a strikingly optimistic note, saying he expected to see a full ceasefire in the designated zones once the plan takes effect Saturday.
“The Russians this time are more serious, we sensed it, more than last time,” he said in a telephone interview. “The regime will be committed to the deal because the Russians are the guarantor, so if the Russians said no bombing, the regime will stop.”
No-fly zones have been a contentious issue in the Syrian conflict, now in its seventh year; they have long been requested by rebel groups and rejected by the government. Disputes about who can fly planes and when — “subtle professional issues,” Russian President Vladimir Putin, called them recently — are likely to continue under the new deal.
Confusion about the details of agreements in the Syrian civil war is nothing new, as disputes about the most basic facts and definitions have always made negotiations extraordinarily thorny. The government of President Bashar Assad of Syria said in a statement late Wednesday night that it “supports” the initiative on de-escalation zones, “including not shelling those areas.”
But the statement also said the Syrian military would continue to fight banned terrorist groups such as Daesh, also known as ISIS or ISIL, A l Qaeda-linked militants, “and other affiliated terrorist organizations wherever they were all over the Syrian territories.” That language was in- terpreted by many government opponents as a signal that the Syrian military intended to keep bombing wherever it chose on the pretext of fighting terrorism.
“Aviation over these territories ceases,” Lavrentiev told reporters in Astana on Friday, where a memoran- dum laying out the plan for de-escalation zones was signed the day before between Iran and Russia, which back the Syrian government, and Turkey, which backs some rebel groups.
But in answer to a question about the U.S.-led coalition formed in 2014 to fight Daesh, Lavrentiev did not mince words.
“The work of aviation, especially the forces of the international coalition, is absolutely not envisaged. With notification or without notification, this issue is now closed.”
He added: “The only place where the international coalition’s aviation can work is on the objects of Daesh that are located in the Raqqa area, some populated areas in the area of the Euphrates, Deir el-Zour and further on the Iraqi territory.”
That suggests that the U.S. military would no longer be allowed to fly over several critical areas where it already conducts operations and that it would be barred from all of the most important areas contested by the government and rebels not affiliated with Daesh.
The excluded area encompasses Idlib province, where U.S. warplanes have been carrying out an intensifying series of airstrikes against what officials say are Al Qaeda operatives. It also includes some of the areas where Turkey, a NATO ally, has skirmished with Kurdish militias also backed, sometimes with airstrikes, by the United States.
And it includes most of the Syrian government’s military installations, such as the Shayrat airbase, which the United States struck with missiles in retaliation for chemical attacks that killed scores of people in the rebel-held town of Khan Sheikhoun in Idlib province last month.
The de-escalation zones are along Syria’s southern border with Jordan, in the eastern Damascus suburbs, in Idlib province, and in a pocket of the central province of Homs.