Vol. 79/No. 38 October 26, 2015
At the same time the Pentagon, which has led 7,300 airstrikes in Iraq and Syria over the past year, acknowledged that its attempts to train Syrian opposition forces to fight Islamic State but not the Assad government failed. These events have intensified the debate in Washington over how best to defend the U.S. rulers’ interests as the old imperialist order in the region unravels.
The toilers of Syria have been battered by four and a half years of civil war that has killed 250,000 and driven millions from their homes since the Assad government moved to crush growing popular protests for political rights in 2011. That defeat is the result of decades of betrayals of the fight for national liberation and the interests of working people by bourgeois nationalist, Stalinist and Islamist forces.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, who initially presented Moscow’s intervention in Syria as directed against the reactionary Islamic State, now openly acknowledges that the aim is to prop up Assad. Moscow’s task is to “stabilize the legitimate authorities,” he said on Russian television Oct. 11.
In addition to daily airstrikes and combat helicopters strafing villages, like areas around the city of Hama, Moscow fired 26 cruise missiles from its naval vessels in the Caspian Sea Oct. 7. Traveling 900 miles over Iran and Iraq, most of them reached Syrian soil.
Moscow is also sending ground forces. Russian “volunteers” on their way to Syria “cannot be stopped,” Adm. Vladimir Komoyedov, the government’s top military liaison to parliament, told the media Oct. 5, echoing claims used by Moscow to cover for its previous dispatch of soldiers to Ukraine. Tents for nearly 2,000 soldiers have been set up at Russia’s air base near Latakia in northwest Syria.
A prominent Iranian general, Hussein Hamedani of the elite Revolutionary Guard, was killed Oct. 8 near Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, highlighting Tehran’s stepped-up efforts to back Assad.
Taking advantage of Moscow’s attacks on opposition forces, Islamic State Oct. 9 advanced to the outskirts of Aleppo, seizing several villages and a former army base from opponents of Assad’s regime. Islamic State now controls territory a little more than a mile from a government-held industrial zone in the north of the city.
Debate in Washington
“Putin is playing a weak hand extraordinarily well because he knows exactly what he wants to do,” former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former Defense Secretary Robert Gates wrote in the Washington Post Oct. 8. “He is defending Russia’s interests … including securing the Russian military base at Tartus.”They proposed that Washington should create its own “facts on the ground” in Syria by creating “no-fly zones and safe harbors.” Many Republican politicians and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton also promote this idea, which Obama has rejected as “half-baked.”
The Obama administration Oct. 9 announced it was ending its program to vet and train opposition Syrian fighters in camps in Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia or the United Emirates. The results of this operation were disastrous for the Pentagon, with only a handful of “graduates” still stationed on the battlefield since it began earlier this year. Very few of those who wanted to get rid of Assad would agree that weapons provided would only be used against Islamic State.
Now, officials say the Pentagon will provide more light weapons, ammunition and communications gear to commanders of unnamed Syrian opposition groups approved by Washington, and train them to call in U.S. airstrikes.
Washington has been requesting discussions with Moscow on coordinating use of airspace over Syria as both countries conduct bombing operations there. Not wanting to inflame tensions with Moscow, U.S. warplanes have begun altering their flight paths to avoid proximity to Russian jetfighters.
Related articles:
Turkey: Bombing of rally met with protests, strikes
U.S.-allied gov’t keeps up assault on Kurds
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home