TBR NEWS October 2, 2015

Russia establishes seaborne lifeline for Syrian allies

September 29, 2015

by Maria Tsvetkova, Gleb Stolyarov and Jonathan Saul

Reuters

LONDON- The Alexandr Tkachenko, an ageing ferry with a canary-yellow hull, usually carries people across the Kerch Strait, a bustling sea route and the only connection between Russia and Crimea, the peninsula Moscow annexed from Ukraine last year.

But the crossings stopped abruptly in late August when the Russian government chartered the ship, according to an employee at the ferry company. It was destined for another mission of possibly greater strategic importance – expanding Russia’s supply line to areas held by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

On September 11 – as reports were emerging of increasing Russian military activity in Syria – the ferry docked at the port of Tartous, maritime data showed, an area still controlled by Assad and where Russia leases a naval base. On its way it had stopped off at the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossiisk, where it took on board white-painted trucks, a port source said.

The ship’s journey – pieced together using port arrivals data, Reuters data and information from a maritime intelligence source – is one part of a sharp increase in sea traffic between Russia and Syria, where Kremlin ally Assad has suffered sharp reversals in his fight to stay in power.

Reuters was not able to confirm what was in the trucks or whether they left the ship at Tartous.

The Russian defense ministry did not respond to written questions from Reuters about whether it had chartered the vessel. Russia’s ministry of emergencies, which oversees foreign and humanitarian aid, said it knew nothing of the shipment.

INCREASE IN TRAFFIC

U.S. officials and military and rebel sources inside Syria say the Russian military has been increasing its presence in Assad-controlled areas. Washington has suggested that Russia may be preparing an airfield near the port city of Latakia, a stronghold of Assad, just north of Tartous.

While the Kremlin has not acknowledged any military build-up, publicly-available ship tracking data show an increase in shipping traffic between the two countries, more voyages than can be explained by the usual pattern of trade.

Cargo traffic to Tartous from Novorossiisk had averaged about one vessel a month in the period from September 2014 to September 2015, for example. Prior to August, only one ship from Novorossiisk had called at Latakia, another Syrian port up the coast from Tartous, in 2014-2015.

But in the period from September 9 to September 24, at least six cargo vessels that set out from Novorossiisk called at either Tartous or Latakia, both of which are in Syrian government-controlled territory, the data showed.

GOVERNMENT CHARTER

The Aleksandr Tkachenko was one of those vessels.

Crimea-based logistics company, SMT-K, which had been using the ship as a ferry across the Kerch Strait since March said its crossings stopped at the end of August. An employee who answered the phone at the company’s office said the Russian government had chartered the ship. The employee declined to give his name.

The vessel was next spotted in Novorossiisk, a short distance away on the Black Sea. It docked there on September 1, according to tracking data. A Novorossiisk port employee said he was involved in loading the Alexander Tkachenko, and a second ship, with white trucks which were to be shipped to Syria.

Shipping databases list the registered owner of the Alexandr Tkachenko as Moscow-based firm Koksokhimtrans Ltd.

Calls to a number listed for Koksokhimtrans went through to a company called Sovfrakht-Sovmortrans. One person who answered the telephone said he did not know who owned the vessel. Koksokhimtrans was part of the Sovfrakht-Sovmortrans group, this person said. That account was disputed by the manager responsible for Sovfrakht-Sovmortrans’ vessels, Ivan Okorokov. He said Koksokhimtrans was not part of Sovfrakht-Sovmortrans.

(Additional reporting by Polina Devitt, Daria Korsunskaya; editing by Anna Willard and Janet McBride)

Russian Involvement and a Redirection of Policy on Syria

September 20, 2015

by Paul R. Pillar

The National Interest

The recently increased Russian involvement in Syria ought to be viewed as an opportunity, more so than as a threat or as something that needs to be countered. Although Moscow’s current involvement is only an extension of its longtime relationship with the Syrian regime, it represents just enough of a change to serve as the closest thing we are likely to have to a peg on which to hang some needed rethinking about the Syrian conflict. The need for such rethinking is reflected in the fact that everyone, including the Obama administration, seems to recognize that the current trajectory of this civil war is unpropitious, notwithstanding disagreements over what to do about the situation.

The most important principle in any revision of policy toward the war needs to be that the untoward effects of this war will be ameliorated only insofar as peace is established in Syria, or as close as Syrians and the international community can come to establishing something passing for peace. It is the continuation of the war, much more than any particular outcome of the war or any particular political configuration of Syria, that is the source of most of the trouble that is worth worrying about.

This is true of at least three major types of trouble. One is the possible spread, quite possibly inadvertent, of instability and combat beyond Syria’s borders. The war has, for example, increased the chance of a new war between Israel and Lebanese Hezbollah, given Hezbollah’s substantial involvement in the Syrian war and Israel’s reactions to Hezbollah activity in Syria.

A second problem is the increase in violent extremism, as represented chiefly but not entirely by the so-called Islamic State or ISIS. It was the outbreak of the Syria war that enabled ISIS to spread its activity, suddenly and significantly, beyond its birthplace in Iraq. This should not be surprising; physical chaos and power vacuums have long been favorable ground for terrorist and other extremist groups.

A third problem, which has become the chief crisis of the day for Europe as well as an issue for the United States, is the surge of migrants fleeing the war for the West.

The needed focus on tamping down the war, rather than trying to tilt the outcome of it at the risk of further escalation, requires getting away from at least three unhelpful patterns of thought that have prevailed in discussion and debate about Syria. One is the dictum that “Assad must go.” Note that the aforementioned varieties of trouble stem not from the mere existence of the Assad regime but instead from the war that emerged from confrontation between the regime and its opponents. That is true of any spillover of armed conflict across international borders. It is true also of the expansion of ISIS outside Iraq, which occurred only after the Syrian war got under way. And it certainly is true of the migration of refugees. However much the migrants coming from Syria may have disliked the regime, it was only the physical danger and disruption of war that motivated any significant numbers of them to undertake perilous journeys to Europe.

The Assad regime certainly has many undesirable and even despicable characteristics—but so do many other regimes elsewhere in the world, and despicability alone is not grounds for escalating an internal war to try to influence the result. We also should note that some of the most despicable things this regime has been doing are, again, part of the war itself and do not predate the war. Before the war began, the regime was not indiscriminately barrel-bombing civilian neighborhoods.

Those who are especially solicitous about Israel should also note that Israel had enjoyed decades of relative stability along the Golan front with the devil the Israelis know, the Assad regime. It is only with the war in Syria and the loss of regime control of parts of that front that significant and immediate security questions related to Syria have more recently arisen for Israel.

The perpetuation of the Assad-must-go mentality is rooted in notions, found most conspicuously in neoconservative and liberal interventionist thinking, about democratization and liberalization being one-way processes and likely to result from any stirring of a political pot. This thinking has come to be applied especially to the Middle East because of the vain hopes attached to the neocon project known as the Iraq War and because of more broadly held hopes of what would come from the Arab Spring. Another root, given the alliance between Damascus and Tehran, is the idea that anything associated with Iran must be bad. Neither of these roots provides a realistic basis for formulating policy toward the Syrian war.

The one respect in which one could plausibly argue that the very character of the Assad regime is a basis for instability and the border-crossing consequences that can result from it is that the sort of authoritarian rule the regime represents will never be the foundation for political consensus in the way that Western liberal democracies know it. But that is a long-term consideration. Right now there is a fire to be contained; discussion of what sort of political arrangements might be kindling for fires in the future is, for the time being, a digression.

Probably the one possible development that is most likely to make the chaotic Syrian situation even more chaotic, as some members of the U.S. Congress evidently have come to recognize, would be a collapse of the regime with an ensuing political and administrative vacuum. A similar recognition may underlie recent comments from the Obama administration suggesting that, although the administration cannot bring itself to abandon the Assad-must-go formulation, the timing of his departure is negotiable.

Another unhelpful pattern has been persistence of the unfounded faith in developing a “moderate” opposition with enough unity and armed clout to be the nucleus of a force that would defeat both the regime and ISIS. If earlier events had not been enough to do away with that faith, then surely it ought to be dispelled by the embarrassing acknowledgment the other day by the top U.S. military commander for the region that the number of fighters that the United States has been able to put into the fray for this purpose can be counted on the fingers of one hand. The reason for this result is not perverse foot-dragging by the administration. One reason for it is the unresolved tension between the objectives of fighting the regime and fighting ISIS. Another reason is the inherent difficulty of vetting “moderates” amid a civil war, the waging of which is an inherently immoderate act. (And if some fighter who had passed through a U.S.-supported vetting, training, and equipping program were later, say, to be involved in a terrorist attack against a U.S. target, some U.S. critics pushing now to expand such programs more rapidly would not hesitate to lambaste the administration for that terrorist result.) Assertions of a woulda coulda shoulda variety, as one finds in the incessant drum-beating about Syria by the Washington Post editorial page, that if only a program to develop a moderate force had been implemented earlier with more gusto the result today would be better, is cheap talk that is unsubstantiated either by the experience of either this civil war or other ones.

With the latest Russian moves another unhelpful thought pattern comes into play, which is the tendency to view any Russian activism or extension of influence abroad as undesirable and something to be countered. This tendency is firmly rooted in old Cold War habits and has infused much thinking about other matters involving Russia, including in Europe. A corrective to this tendency, as far as the Middle East is concerned, is to reflect on how vastly different the Cold War circumstances were from what prevails today. Beginning with the financing of the Aswan high dam in the 1950s, the USSR was making major inroads in the Middle East, not only in Syria but in Egypt, Iraq, Libya, South Yemen, and elsewhere. The Soviet activity had implications for strategic postures as well the global ideological competition. That activity was worth worrying about, and worth countering. But today Russia is not a superpower, there is not a global ideological competition with Moscow, and the Russian presence in Syria pales in comparison with the much broader U.S. posture, including military posture, in the Middle East.

There has been much speculation about Vladimir Putin’s motives underlying the latest Russian moves in Syria. Of course we should not necessarily take what his government says at face value, and of course not all of the Russian motives are congruent with U.S. interests. But the situation regarding Syria is not zero-sum, and the United States needs to be open to ways in which the Russian posture, even with underlying motives divergent from our own, may help to bring closer possibilities for ameliorating the Syrian mess.

One thing that enhanced Russian involvement in Syria means is that Russia will be absorbing more of costs, and more of the opprobrium associated with collateral damage, from efforts that involve at least in part the containment of ISIS. To the extent this shifts some of a burden from the United States, that is a good thing. Russian aims are surely not purely anti-ISIS aims, but Russia has at least as much reason to worry about the group as the United States does. The United States has no equivalent to the concentrated, predominantly Muslim populations of the North Caucasus.

Another thing the Russian involvement means is that Moscow, to limit the extent and duration of its own costs, has that much more of a stake in stabilizing Syria and in tamping down the conflict sooner rather than later. A further implication is that greater Russian support for the Assad regime may yield greater Russian leverage over that regime with regard to any moves toward peace.

An overall conclusion is that the Russian moves mark an appropriate occasion for U.S. policy toward Syria to pivot away from feckless attempts to engineer a particular military outcome on the ground and toward greater emphasis on multilateral diplomacy aimed at finding a political resolution of the conflict. Russia will necessarily be heavily involved in any such effort. Talks between U.S. and Russian defense ministers for purposes of military deconfliction on the ground are fine, but talks between the foreign ministers will be even more important. Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Iran also will necessarily be fully involved. None of this implies that the prospects for a political resolution of this war any time soon, even apart from the ISIS problem, are very bright; they aren’t. The apparent intractability of some of the positions taken by rebel groups, even as they accept in principle a political solution, are discouraging. But exploring every opportunity for diminishing the current fire in Syria is more likely to ameliorate the problems this conflict has caused than will adding more fuel to the fire.

Saudi royal calls for regime change in Riyadh

Plea by grandson of state’s founder comes as falling oil prices, war in Yemen and loss of faith in authority buffet leadership of King Salman

September 28, 2015

by Hugh Miles in Cairo

The Guardian

A senior Saudi prince has launched an unprecedented call for change in the country’s leadership, as it faces its biggest challenge in years in the form of war, plummeting oil prices and criticism of its management of Mecca, scene of last week’s hajj tragedy.

The prince, one of the grandsons of the state’s founder, Abdulaziz Ibn Saud, has told the Guardian that there is disquiet among the royal family – and among the wider public – at the leadership of King Salman, who acceded the throne in January.

The prince, who is not named for security reasons, wrote two letters earlier this month calling for the king to be removed.

“The king is not in a stable condition and in reality the son of the king [Mohammed bin Salman] is ruling the kingdom,” the prince said. “So four or possibly five of my uncles will meet soon to discuss the letters. They are making a plan with a lot of nephews and that will open the door. A lot of the second generation is very anxious.”

“The public are also pushing this very hard, all kinds of people, tribal leaders,” the prince added. “They say you have to do this or the country will go to disaster.”

A clutch of factors are buffeting King Salman, his crown prince, Mohammed bin Nayef, and the deputy crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman.

A double tragedy in Mecca – the collapse of a crane that killed more than 100, followed by a stampede last week that killed 700 – has raised questions not just about social issues, but also about royal stewardship of the holiest site in Islam.

As usual, the Saudi authorities have consistently shrugged off any suggestion that a senior member of the government may be responsible for anything that has gone wrong.

Local people, however, have made clear on social media and elsewhere that they no longer believe such claims.

“The people inside [the kingdom] know what’s going on but they can’t say. The problem is the corruption in using the resources of the country for building things in the right form,” said an activist who lives in Mecca but did not want to be named for fear of repercussions.

“Unfortunately the government points the finger against the lower levels, saying for example: ‘Where are the ambulances? Where are the healthcare workers?’ They try to escape the real reason of such disaster,” he added.

Saudi religious and political legitimacy is predicated on their claim that they manage the holy sites properly and make them safely accessible for all Muslims. Since there are no monarchies in Islam and Saudi Arabia itself is not mentioned in the Qur’an, legitimacy is a fundamental issue for the Saudis and the Hajj disasters have been extremely damaging.

But just as urgent is oil, the price of which has dropped more than 50% in the past year. On Monday, the Financial Times reported that Saudi Arabia has withdrawn as much as $70bn (£46bn) from overseas investment funds to shore up its fiscal position in the face of tumbling oil prices

According to Alastair Newton, director of Alavan Business Advisory, Saudi Arabia’s published budget this year was based on oil trading at about $90 a barrel. But because of costly ad hoc items such as royal largesse after King Salman’s succession, the war in Yemen, and domestic security against the Isis threat, the fiscal position is only in balance at about $110.

With oil now trading below $50, fiscal weakness is starting to tell. The Saudi benchmark Tadawul All Share index has fallen by more than 30% in the past 12 months.

“They have enough reserves to sustain this situation for at least one year although it is very costly for them,” said Khairallah Khairallah, a former managing editor of the Saudi-owned al-Hayat newspaper.

The International Monetary Fund is already predicting Saudi Arabia’s budget deficit to exceed $107bn this year. Yet the budget announced for next year has marginally increased.

“The king is in charge of oil policy in the kingdom together with his son Mohammed bin Salman. Mohammed bin Salman is also responsible for [state oil firm] Aramco. The crown prince [Mohammed bin Nayef] is mainly focused on security. These are the main players in Saudi Arabia. They divide the responsibility,” said Khairallah Khairallah.

Prince Mohammed bin Salman is a new arrival to the Saudi senior leadership team but has already become one of the most controversial.

Although still very young by Saudi standards – officially 35 but rumoured to be much younger – he holds a multitude of posts including minister of defence and chair of the Council for Economic and Development Affairs, which is the country’s main economic policymaking committee.

This makes him responsible for many of Saudi Arabia’s problems, above all the war in neighbouring Yemen, where rebel Houthis have come under attack from Saudi aircraft and ground forces.

Many Saudis are sickened by the sight of the Arab world’s richest country pummelling its poorest, and as the cost in lives and treasure grows, criticism is mounting that Prince Mohammed bin Salman– whose unofficial nickname is “Reckless” – rushed in without a proper military strategy or an exit plan.

“This is a war against the Yemeni nation and against Yemen becoming independent,” said Sgt Maj Dakheel bin Naser Al Qahtani, a former head of air force operations at King Abdulaziz airbase, Dhahran, who defected from the Saudi armed forces last year.

“It has no legitimate political foundation and it is not what the people want,” he said. “Ninety per cent of people in Saudi Arabia don’t want this to happen, exactly the opposite of what the media shows.

“It has come about due to the absence of a national citizens’ establishment in Saudi Arabia and because Al Saud have put their own interests ahead of the national interest.”

The letters in Arabic calling for the overthrow of the king have been read more than 2m times. The letters call on the 13 surviving sons of Ibn Saud – specifically the princes Talal, Turki and Ahmed bin Abdulaziz – to unite and remove the leadership in a palace coup, before choosing a new government from within the royal family.

“Allow the oldest and most capable to take over the affairs of the state, let the new king and crown prince take allegiance from all, and cancel the strange, new rank of second deputy premier,” states the first letter.

“We are calling for the sons of Ibn Saud from the oldest Bandar, to the youngest, Muqrin, to make an urgent meeting with the senior family members to investigate the situation and find out what can be done to save the country, to make changes in the important ranks, to bring in expertise from the ruling family whatever generation they are from.”

The letters are unlike anything that has happened since King Faisal deposed King Saud in a palace coup in 1964.

The prince behind the letters claims to have received widespread support from both within the royal family and society at large. But only one other senior royal has so far publicly endorsed the letter, which may be unsurprising given the Saudis’ brutal history of punishing political opponents.

Like many modern Arab countries Saudi Arabia is a 20th-century construction. Since 1932, when Saudi Arabia was founded, the royal family has kept the country together masterfully. But as the economic and political situation in and around Saudi Arabia deteriorates, and royal family infighting intensifies, the possibility of a profound change is growing more likely.

Assad allies, including Iranians, prepare ground attack in Syria: sources

October 1, 2015

by Laila Bassam

Reuters

BEIRUT Hundreds of Iranian troops have arrived in Syria in the last 10 days and will soon join government forces and their Lebanese Hezbollah allies in a major ground offensive backed by Russian air strikes, two Lebanese sources told Reuters.

“The (Russian) air strikes will in the near future be accompanied by ground advances by the Syrian army and its allies,” said one of the sources familiar with political and military developments in the conflict.”It is possible that the coming land operations will be focused in the Idlib and Hama countryside,” the source added.The two sources said the operation would be aimed at recapturing territory lost by President Bashar al-Assad’s government to rebels.

It points to an emerging military alliance between Russia and Assad’s other main allies – Iran and Hezbollah – focused on recapturing areas of northwestern Syria that were seized by insurgents in rapid advances earlier this year.

“The vanguard of Iranian ground forces began arriving in Syria: soldiers and officers specifically to participate in this battle. They are not advisors … we mean hundreds with equipment and weapons. They will be followed by more,” the second source said. Iraqis would also take part in the operation, the source said.

Thus far, direct Iranian military support for Assad has come mostly in the form of military advisors. Iran has also mobilized Shi’ite militia fighters, including Iraqis and some Afghans, to fight alongside Syrian government forces.Lebanon’s Hezbollah, which is backed by Iran, has been fighting alongside the Syrian army since early in the conflict.

The Russian air force began air strikes in Syria on Wednesday, targeting areas near the cities of Homs and Hama in the west of the country, where Assad’s forces are fighting an array of insurgent groups, though not Islamic State, which is based mostly in the north and east.

An alliance of insurgent groups including the al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front and powerful Ahrar al-Sham made rapid gains in Idlib province earlier this year, completely expelling the government from the area bordering Turkey.

(Reporting by Laila Bassam; Writing by Tom Perry; Editing by Samia Nakhoul and Peter Graff)