Syria’s slide into chaos is the embodiment of a region in deep trouble

Only a week ago, Israel seemed headed for an all-out battle with Iran. No, excuses, buffers or proxies, like the enfeebled Assad Syrian forces or Hezbollah militias, stood in between. Over the weekend, the Israeli air force hit 18 targets in Gaza following an explosive device injuring four Israeli soldiers by the border fence last week. At the Munich security conference, Israel’s prime minister Netanyahu warned about the aggressive intent of Iran, and gave notice to the world that war was on the way.

The latest face-off with Tehran began with the downing of an Iranian drone, a carbon copy of one of the most sophisticated US spy UAVs, as it nosed over the border into northern Israel. It didn’t get very far before the Shahed 141 was hit by an Israeli helicopter gunship. It remains a mystery, by the way, why the Iranians risked such a prized piece of kit as the Shahed 141 on such a speculative venture.

Next, the Israeli air force launched an air raid on the control centre at Tiyas, where the Iranian flight controllers had launched their drone.

On the return flight, two Israeli F-16s were hit by a barrage of air defence missiles, causing one to crash. Both members of the crew were picked up, albeit one severely injured. This brought yet further response, in which Israel claimed to have taken out “a large part” of Syria’s air defence batteries. The defence minister Avigdor Lieberman threatened that there would be more to come.

At this point, according to leaks from Israeli intelligence Mossad, President Vladimir Putin placed a sharp phone call to Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister. In it, he warned that any continuation of the action would risk a severe response from Russian forces. Apparently Russian forces had been in and around Tiyas air base when it was hit.

The drone and F–16 incident are but two glaring illustrations of the chaos ensuing in Syria – the setting of a continuing conflict in which nobody seems to be in charge of the script.

In the past fortnight, an Iranian drone, Israeli fighter-bomber, a Turkish military helicopter and a Russian ground attack fighter have been downed in circumstances and scenarios of varying degrees of military unlikelihood.

A glance at the live map of the war in Syria this week shows at least nine major centres of fighting, to say nothing of the unregistered skirmishes between gangs, sects and different ethnic groups on almost every border. The war in Syria is showing no sign of ending – on the ground it looks very much as if it is fragmenting into different conflicts, often with a distinct cause and identity.

None of the main powers now seems to have a coherent and achievable strategy, including Russia, America, Turkey, the Assad regime and even Israel, perhaps. Both the Assad military regime and Israel could say that national survival is a strategy, but that is more an aspiration, and for both, a viable scheme of manoeuvre and concept of operations are elusive.

The decline of strategy and the rise of the fragmentary wars are signs of the times. Not that you would get many military academies and strategic advisers to acknowledge this. The only power with a coherent global strategy that it shows every intention of delivering is China.

Putin’s drive to make Russia count internationally again, to win influence and secure borders from the Mediterranean to the Baltic and east across Asia to China superficially might appear strategic. But look closely, and the holes begin to appear. In Ukraine and the Donbas, as in Syria, Putin’s forces are stuck in the relentless churn of fragmentary war, and there is no obvious exit strategy. It is reliably reported that more than 200 Russian advisers ‘volunteers’ and ‘auxiliaries’ have been killed in Syria. Recently death notices have been appearing in Russian media mourning the deaths of heroes of organisations like the Cossack Defenders of Orthodoxy.

Just this week, the UN’s special emissary on Syria, Staffan De Mistura, said that more than 1,000 civilians have been killed there over the past four weeks, which have seen worse violence that any time in his four-year tenure in office. More than 300,000 refugees have been forced to flee since Christmas.

The enclave held by Sunni insurgents round Idlib now is the crammed refuge of two million fugitives.

The first UN supply convoy in nearly three months has been allowed into the besieged enclave of Ghouta, west of Damascus. It has supplies for 7,000 – but there are estimated to be about 400,000 trapped in the enclaves round the Syrian capital, Ghouta to the west and Douma to the east.

Elsewhere former friends and international allies are facing off in fragmentary mini wars. The Turks have invaded round Afrin to defeat the Kurdish YPG – and if they advance to Manbij, the Kurdish centre to the east, they will run up against the main headquarters of US special forces and advisers, who see the YPG as their most effective local allies, and not foes.

The picture round Deir Ezzor on Syria’s south-east borders with Iraq and Jordan presents an even crazier mosaic of competing allies and foes – the changing balance of ‘frenemies’ in new military jargon. Here again the US advisers, trainers and SF, are leading the YPG in the fight against ISIS, who are still as active here as they are round Hama in north west Syria. They are opposed by Russian and Iranian backed Syrian government forces, intent on staking their claim to the upper Euphrates oilfields. Last week, this led to a clash in which at least 100 Syrian government soldiers were killed, probably many more, and according to some reports Iranian and Russian fighters with them.

ISIS is still the cause against which the Americans say they are keeping boots on the ground in Syria and Iraq, though there are only around 2,000 US military in Syria and around 5,500 in Iraq. ISIS remains a lively irritant, but all sense of unified command has been lost. There is little chance that we will see a return of the state, the Caliphate, declared by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in Mosul in 2014. Al-Baghdadi himself, badly injured by a drone strike last year, is believed to be hiding in Syria’s Euphrates border lands, in charge of little but himself and his immediate entourage.

Once again there have been reports that the Assad regime has resorted to chemical weapons – at Saraqeb in Idlib province, and round Damascus. This has led the French president Emmanuel Macron to threaten the use of force once it is proven that the ‘red line’ of the use of chemical weaponry. There is less to this than meets the ear, more a gesture of strategic grandstanding than the exercise of strategic analysis and policy. M. Macron failed to suggest how the French forces would implement his threat. Would they go it alone, and would they require a UN mandate?

The president has merely added, by way of clarification, that he would act only if there is proof of the use of chlorine or sarin. So far nothing has been registered by the OPCW, the Office for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons, who say they have observers on the ground. Incidentally, the Pentagon’s Chemical Biological and Nuclear weapons analysts have reported to defence secretary James Mattis that they cannot conclude beyond doubt that Sarin was used in shelling of Ghouta in 2013 nor an attack on Khan Sheikhoun in April 2017, as the ‘white helmet’ observers stated from Syria at the time. President Obama was only dissuaded from retaliating in 2013 because the British parliament voted against action. In April 2017 President Trump ordered a Tomahawk missile strike on Syria’s Sharyat air base.

If the Syrian regime is still using chemical ordnance, it is a sign of desperation – and that Assad’s military junta are failing to bring the war to an end, as he promised with the fall of Aleppo at the end of last year. Idlib and the north west, up to the Hatay border, is proving a huge IED, or improvised explosive device, for the Assad military dictatorship and its allies, Iranians, Hezbollah, Russian aircrew and mercenaries alike.

None of the main players can be happy with their present policies and postures in Syria and the Middle East. America has effectively withdrawn strategically. Trump promised to come up with his big strategy for Syria and Iraq within 60 days of taking office. We are still waiting. We are told that America intends to keep its present force posture in Syria and Iraq for about 18 months, to close off the fight against ISIS. ISIS still can cause trouble in Syria and Iraq, but it is of a lower order than the other threats in the fragmentary warfare across the region. ISIS is now focusing on prosecuting its cause through cyber space via the Cloud and the Dark Net. On the ground it has switched to prosecuting vicious fragmentary warfare in the cocktail of tribal, communal and criminal fights in Sinai, Libya and outliers in the Pacific such as the Philippines and Malaysia.

Putin’s Russia has appeared a strategic winner since its increased military support of Damascus since 2015. Assad’s fortunes have been turned around, and Russia has established bases on the Mediterranean at Latakia and Tartus. However, the commitment to Assad is now coming at increasing cost, and loss of Russian lives. With it all comes high risk – especially from ‘frenemies’ like Iran and Turkey. Turkey has brought unnecessary, and most likely inconclusive, fragmentary warfare to its borderland with Syria. Iran is demanding an escalating price for putting in its own Al Quds force command and deploying its client Iraqi Shia militias and Lebanon’s Hezbollah forces to do much of the heavy fighting for the regime in Syria. As part payment, Iran is now demanding to share with Russia the Mediterranean naval base at Tartus.

The latest turn of events has brought about a parlous state of affairs for the two most powerful regional powers in Syria’s fragmented conflicts, Turkey and Israel. Turkey has intervened against the YPG militias – an extension of its 30-year war against Kurdish militancy, as they see it – and got stuck. The YPG are fighting back, with Iran now threatening to support them, and confrontation with the US military mission in Manbij is always a risk.

For Israel the strategic prospect has received a sudden jolt following the exchanges over the Iranian drone and the downing of the IDAF F-16. The upshot, by the IDF’s own admission, is that Israel’s air force can no longer operate in Syrian skies with impunity and without redress. In the last few years Israel has carried out some 100 air attacks in Syria, almost without any acknowledgement, let alone effective response. This has now been ended by Russia’s explicit warning about responding. Far worse, according to Israeli briefings, is the growing threat from the military presence of Iranian forces and the advances in missile technology and targeting by Iran’s principal regional ally, Lebanon’s Hezbollah forces. “What is most worrying is the advance in precision weapons, ground to air missiles now being supplied to Hezbollah,” the IDF spokesman Lt Col Jonathan Conricus told me in a telephone briefing this week. “Israel will act to stop Iran building and supplying bases in Syria, and supplying Hezbollah.”

The language is ominously like that used in 2006, when Israel and Hezbollah sleepwalked into a war, which both soon found to be at the wrong time, in the wrong place and in the wrong fashion.

This time the predicament is more complex for Israel. As it talks up confrontation with Hezbollah and Iran, it is facing another potential conflict, of a very different kind, and on another front – in and around Gaza. This could be a fragmentary conflict with more than regional strategic consequence.

Over the weekend we have had the exchange of fire in which the Palestinians claim that two 17-year olds from Gaza were shot dead at the border as they tried to breech the security fence. The roadside bomb last week injured four Israeli soldiers, two severely. Israel’s defence minister Avigdor Lieberman has said that 18 Hamas ‘military targets’ have been hit by the Israeli air force, because Hamas is responsible for everything emanating from Gaza.

This has tended to distract attention from an extraordinary, and potentially highly significant, disagreement between the said hard-line defence minister Avigdor Lieberman and the chief of staff, or head of Israel’s armed forces, Lt General Gadi Eizenkot. The general has warned the cabinet that Gaza, the crowded home of two million Palestinians, is on the point of collapse, and ‘there is a real threat of another uprising.’ Mr Lieberman said he didn’t see any crisis in Gaza. “Not a crisis” replied the daily Haaretz, “but a disaster worsening by the day.”

After three conflicts in a decade and blockade by Israel and Egypt, the plight of Gazans, as the New York Times has been highlighting in articles and editorials this week, is worsening by the day. Electricity is on for only a few hours, the sewage system has broken, with effluent now flowing in the streets, and most of the water is undrinkable. More than 1.2 million Gazans depend directly on UN aid.

The crisis is compounded by the standoff between the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority on the West Bank and the Hamas government in Gaza. The Authority is refusing to pass on money for public salaries in Gaza – so 40,000 employees, including police, haven’t been paid for months. Cleaners are on strike, and most hospital facilities are at a standstill. At the main hospital, 115 children are in need of paediatric care, according to reports this week, and over 700 need immediate kidney treatment.

Just under four years ago the UN reported that Gaza was heading towards a terminal crisis – a process of ‘de-development’ one observer called it. The community, was in urgent need of basic facilities, for nutrition, medical care, housing, schools and employment. It projected that the whole place would run out of water in 2020, because 95% of the aquifers from which most domestic water was derived had been destroyed by the Israelis and Egyptians.

The UN reissued the report last year, and clearly warned that if nothing was done, the Gaza community would not be able to sustain itself at all in 2020 – there was real prospect of ‘more violent escalation’, under the circumstances something more than euphemism.

For Israel, the looming prospect of a two-front conflict is a symptom of strategic failure, perhaps one of the most significant in the growing complex of the region’s fragmentary wars.