Power shift: Who gains in the battle for Syria’s northeast? – World

The decision of the president of the United States, Donald Trump, to withdraw from Syria radically realigns the balance of power in the northeast of the country and creates a vacuum that Russia, Turkey and Iran are struggling to fill.

With the Turkish forces pushing south from the border, the Kurds have invited government troops backed by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad from the south and west. Assad's forces are exploiting the withdrawal of the United States to recover the territory rich in resources they abandoned years ago.

The area includes most of the Syrian lands that formed the "caliphate" of the Islamic State group, whose combatants have gone underground but promised to return.

More than 10,000 prisoners of the Islamic State, including many hardened foreign fighters whose Western governments refuse to recover them, are in prisons there, and tens of thousands of their relatives are in camps.

Here is a summary of what the US withdrawal means. UU.

What is the objective of the Turkish offensive?

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan says he wants to settle up to two million Syrian refugees, many of them Sunni Arabs, in the target region of the operation, territory currently controlled by Kurdish-led forces.

Turkish troops and Syrian rebels backed by Ankara have focused on the first week of operations to expel Syrian Kurdish YPG fighters from two main border cities, Tel Abyad and Ras al Ain, some 120 km away.

Despite the chorus of global criticism, Erdogan has said that nothing will stop operations against YPG's Kurdish fighters, considered terrorists by Ankara due to its links with guerrillas who wage an insurgency in southeastern Turkey.

Erdogan has said that Turkey will take a border strip that extends hundreds of kilometers from Kobani in the west to Hasaka in the east and 30-35 km in the interior of Syria.

A Turkish official said Reuters the operation progressed "quite quickly and successfully." The first phase would be complete by November 13, when Erdogan will meet Trump during a visit to Washington, he said, without specifying how far Turkey would have come by then.

What are the objectives of Assad?

The total withdrawal of US forces and the deployment of the Syrian army is an important juncture in the Syrian conflict, restoring a foothold for the Assad government in the largest strip of the country that had been out of reach.

The area includes oil, farmland, water resources and the hydroelectric dam in Tabqa, vital assets that will better position the government to cope with the impact of Western sanctions.

Read: Kurds have been abandoned and abandoned to die

Syrian state media said troops arrived on the M4 motorway that runs east to west about 30 km south of the border with Turkey, on the edge of the planned "safe zone" of Ankara. On Tuesday, they entered Manbij, in an area that had been jointly patrolled by Turkey and the United States.

However, Assad's army has been weakened by the wear and tear of the protracted conflict, and now it depends heavily on Russia, Iran and Iran's allies, including the Hezbollah of Lebanon.

What does it mean for Kurdish autonomy?

Kurdish groups in Syria exploited the withdrawal of government forces from the Northeast at the beginning of the Syrian conflict to build autonomy institutions and teach Kurdish language in local schools.

Exposed to the Turkish attack on the withdrawal from the United States, they invited the Syrian army to return, a decision that highlighted their weakness and marked the end of many of their dreams.

They will hope to preserve as much of their autonomy as possible in political talks with the Syrian state, their stated objective for a long time. But they no longer have a powerful ally to support them.

Even so, Damascus and the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) share the objective of expelling Turkey from northern Syria, or at least halting its progress.

“Damascus needs the Kurds. The Kurds and Damascus have two things in common: enmity over Turkey and a desire not to see the Sunni rebel militias ruling northeastern Syria, "said Joshua Landis, head of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma.

"But they disagree on anything when it comes to governing northeastern Syria."

What will become of the Islamic State?

The Kurd-led SDF was the main force on the ground in the US-backed offensive that recovered the Syrian lands from the self-proclaimed & # 39; caliphate & # 39; of the Islamic State, including the de facto capital of the Raqqa group. Before his retirement, Washington had been preparing to train and equip an SDF force to stabilize the area, to prevent the return of the militants, who carried out large massacres of Kurds in the cities they had controlled.

The SDF says that the Turkish offensive has helped energize the sleeping cells of the Islamic State, just one year after the "caliphate" was effectively dismantled. The Islamic State has already claimed responsibility for the attacks, including a deadly car bomb attack in front of a restaurant in the largest Kurdish city of Qamishli, just one day after Turkey launched its raid.

Since the fighting began last week, the SDFs say there have also been riots in prisons where they are holding combatants and in camps where their wives and children are.

Related: an overview of the United States' participation in the civil war in Syria over the years

Potential Iranian War

Assad's ally, Iran, is also willing to win. Iran-backed Iraqi paramilitary groups on the Iraq-Syria border will likely help Assad secure control, strengthening their own supply lines along a corridor of territory from Tehran to Beirut.

What does Russia want?

Russia's indispensable role in Syria reflects a major change in the Middle East from Damascus to Riyadh, as demonstrated by President Vladimir Putin's tour of the Gulf this week, including his first visit to Saudi Arabia in more than a decade.

It was Russia's intervention with air power in 2015 that helped change the course of Syria's civil war in favor of Assad, and Trump's decision to withdraw from the northeast has cemented Moscow's central role in shaping the future. from the country.

"There are Turkish-Russian conversations […] set the pace for northern Syria, particularly east of the Euphrates, "said a pro-Damascus regional source." They are the ones who move all these plans. "

The Turkish official said Ankara is "working in very close cooperation with Russia," and Erdogan said on Monday the importance of Russia when he said President Vladimir Putin had shown a "positive approach" to the situation.

The two countries can reach an agreement that divides the northern border into new control zones and prevent their local allies, the Syrian government on the one hand and the anti-Assad insurgents on the other, from going to war.

“I think there will be real friction, but I think the Russians can handle it. An agreement must be reached, ”said Landis, an expert in Syria.