Putin accelerating battle for victory in Syria
Trump’s vow to focus on Islamic state boosts efforts
MOSCOW — Vladimir Putin is seizing on President-elect Donald Trump’s pledge to reverse U.S. policy on Syria to press for a military victory that could mark Russia’s return as a great-power rival in the wider Middle East.
With Trump vowing to focus on defeating Islamic State rather than on arming militias fighting Syrian leader Bashar Assad’s forces, Putin is moving decisively to oust rebels from Aleppo, their last major stronghold. Just days after Trump’s election last month, Putin and Assad resumed their aerial assault on the erstwhile Syrian commercial capital, turning a potential stalemate into what may become the Kremlin’s biggest success in the region in decades.
Putin’s advance, backed by Iran, is already paying diplomatic dividends. NATO-member Turkey is helping Russia bypass the U.S. by negotiating a cease-fire directly with insurgents. And last month, Egypt, the biggest recipient of American military aid after Israel, declared its support for Syria’s army. Russia is also preparing to forge a postwar transition that will keep Assad in power, contradicting the cornerstone of current White House policy.
“Trump’s election opens a new page that can put an end to this bloody war,” Randa Kassis, a Syrian political opposition leader who is poised for a role in a potential power-sharing deal brokered by Putin, said by phone from London.
Kassis, who has been ignored by the Obama administration because of her close ties to the Kremlin, met with Donald Trump Jr. in Paris in October before flying to Moscow for talks with Putin’s Mideast envoy. Trump’s transition team didn’t respond to emailed requests for comment, but confirmed the meeting with Kassis in the French capital to The Wall Street Journal.
Trump said during the campaign that the U.S. has “bigger problems than Assad” and that as president he’d “bomb the hell” out of Islamic State.
He said he’d coordinate the effort with Putin, something the Obama administration has so far refused to do.
Leonid Reshetnikov, a retired Foreign Intelligence Service general who now heads a Kremlin advisory group, said officials in Moscow expect the U.S. and Russia will work together to “wipe out terrorists” in Syria and Iraq.