Russia appears to have 'gone ballistic' in Syria - and it may be helping ISIS
- Natasha Bertrand - http://www.businessinsider.com/russia-syria-doubling-down-2015-12
Russia is showing no signs that it intends to forgive and forget Turkey's decision to down a Russian warplane two weeks ago.
Moscow has chosen to retaliate for the incident asymmetrically, hitting Turkish economic and military interests instead of engaging in a direct conflict with Ankara that might lead to a military confrontation with NATO.
But the Russians appear to have "gone ballistic" in their determination to wipe out Turkish influence in northern Syria and help regime forces reach Aleppo, a UN official told McClatchy on Monday.
A stepped-up Russian bombing campaign in the Bayirbucak region of northwest Syria, near the strategically important city of Azaz, has primarily targeted the Turkey-backed Turkmen rebels and civilians - and the Turkish aid convoys that supply them.
The strikes are in-line with an objective Russia has had since the beginning of its air campaign in Syria - namely, to undermine Turkey's Syria policy of bolstering rebels fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime and to prevent the Turks from establishing a "safe zone" for displaced Syrians that might hinder the regime's efforts to take Aleppo.
That city is the second-largest in Syria and divided between government and rebel forces. The Assad regime launched a large-scale offensive to retake the city in mid-October with help from Russia and Iran.
"There has been an uptick in bombing in northern Syria as part of the reaction to the downing of the Su-24," Boris Zilberman, a Russia expert with the Washington, DC-based think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told Business Insider in an email.
He continued: "Providing an opening for Assad to advance to Aleppo or any other advances is consistent with Russia's strategy all along. The situation with Turkey is an excuse to double down."
Indeed, the increased airstrikes on Turkish interests and allies in northern Syria is as much about hastening a vital win for the Russia-backed Syrian regime as it is about getting back at Ankara.
"If there is going to be a partition in Syria, and Assad is going to build his own state in Latakia, Bayirbucak is a strategic point and the Turkmen will have to be driven out," Abdurrahman Mustafa, president of the Syrian Turkmen Assembly, told the Independent last week.
Russia, for its part, insists that its planes have only ever targeted "terrorists." But Turkey had complained previously about Russia bombing villages in northwestern Syria that are predominantly inhabited by civilians and Turkmen rebel brigades battling Assad - not members of al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra or ISIS.
"Putin's larger immediate goal is to shut down Turkey's link to Aleppo, thereby preparing the way for Assad (perhaps even in coordination with the PKK-affiliated Kurds) to besiege and eventually recapture the city," Middle East expert Tony Badran, a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, wrote last week in Tablet.
Metin Gurcan, a Turkish military expert, expressed a similar sentiment in Al-Monitor late last month. He noted that the Russian operation near the border helps Russian and Syrian troops clear northern Latakia of opposition fighters - a necessary prerequisite to "further Syrian regime and Russian moves toward Idlib and Aleppo."
Additionally, Gurcan wrote, the bombing campaign helps the Assad regime "secure more defensible, expanded territory before an eventual cease-fire, as recommended in the Vienna meetings, goes into effect."
There is little Turkey can do about Russia's bombing campaign near its border without provoking a situation in which NATO would be forced to come to its defense.
In moves evidently meant as a message to deter Turkish jets from shooting down Russian planes in the future, Russia reportedly equipped its jets flying in Syria with air-to-air missiles for self-defense. It also sent a state-of-the-art S-400 missile system to the Russian Hemeimeem air base near Latakia - about 30 miles south of the Turkish border.
The US-led anti-ISIS coalition - of which Turkey is a part - may intervene, however, if it sees that the Russian airstrikes have created an opening for ISIS to make significant gains near Azaz and advance toward Aleppo.
"Everyone knows that any wrong move creates a vacuum, and the Islamic State will capitalize on it," the UN official told McClatchy. "In fact IS has taken quite a bit of ground" near Azaz.
In Tablet, Badran argued that this consequence was deliberate on Russia's part.
"By creating an opening for ISIS to make a push toward Azaz, Putin will leverage the US and Europe to pressure Turkey to shut down this section of its border. If ISIS actually makes it to Azaz, Russia can then invite the US and the Europeans to join it in strikes against ISIS, and in support of the Kurds," he wrote.
Zilberman said it would be in the anti-ISIS coalition's interest to shut down this vulnerable section of Turkey's border anyway.
"The United States should be pushing the Turks to close the border and stem the flow of fighters and terror financing crossing the border," Zilberman told Business Insider in an email. "That is in the interest of US and EU national security."
Russians Are Joining ISIS in Droves - Kate Brannen -
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/12/07/russians-are-joining-isis-in-droves.html
Jihadists from Russia and Central Asia are pouring into the caliphate, four times more than a year ago.
Across the globe, the number of foreign fighters traveling to Iraq and Syria continues to climb, but Russia and Central Asia have experienced the most dramatic change over the past year, with some estimates suggesting a 300 percent increase.
Russia, with an estimated 2,400 fighters, is now believed to be the third biggest supplier of foreign fighters to radical Islamist groups fighting in Iraq and Syria, according to new analysis from the Soufan Group, a security consulting firm based in New York.
In June 2014, it was estimated that Russia had around 800 foreign fighters in Iraq and Syria.
"Comparatively speaking, this increase is far more substantial proportionately than that seen in Western Europe over the same time span," the Soufan Group says in a report it plans to release tomorrow. The Daily Beast obtained an early copy.
The only two countries who currently supply more fighters are Tunisia, with an estimated 6,000, and Saudi Arabia, with 2,500. Jordan also continues to rank among the top nationalities fighting with the so-called Islamic State or Jabhat al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda franchise, with somewhere between 2,000 and 2,500 Jordanians leaving home to fight in Iraq or Syria.
The majority of Russia's foreign fighters is coming from the North Caucasus-Chechnya and Dagestan, areas with long histories of Islamic extremism.
"Local grievances have long been drivers of radicalization in the Caucasus, and as the strong centralized security apparatus of the Russian government limits the scope for operations at home, the Islamic State has offered an attractive alternative," the Soufan Group report says.
But news investigations have also revealed that Russian authorities have encouraged local jihadists to travel to Syria. The logic being: better terrorists fight abroad than make trouble in Russia. According to a report in Novaya Gazeta, Russia's domestic intelligence agency-the Federal Security Service or FSB-facilitated the travel of Russian fighters headed to Syria.
With the terrorist attacks in Paris carried out by French and Belgians who'd traveled to Syria to fight, and with the Islamic State claiming responsibility for the bombing of a Russian airliner in Egypt in October, Russia may be rethinking its strategy to export local fighters. Rather than guaranteeing more safety at home, Russia could be sending men and women off to collect valuable combat skills on the battlefield that can be brought back home to carry out attacks.
Addressing the threat in October, Russian President Vladimir Putin said a task force would be established to strengthen the borders of former Soviet republic states, who have also seen its foreign fighter numbers quickly climb over the last year. The Soufan Group has identified credible reports of foreign fighters in Syria from 12 of the 15 former Soviet states.
Approximately 2,000 militant fighters hail from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, according to the report.
Putin said between 5,000 to 7,000 people from Russia and the former Soviet states had joined the Islamic State. The Soufan Group report says that number is likely closer to 4,700. Either way, an alarming number of people are leaving the region to join the Islamic State, and did so before Russia began its bombing campaign in September against groups that oppose Syrian President Bashar Assad.
It is too soon to tell what effect Russia's more aggressive approach in Syria could have on its own population. Over the past 18 months, recruits from North America have not escalated dramatically, despite the anti-ISIS bombing campaign led by the United States.
"This suggests that the motivation for people to join violent extremist groups in Syria and Iraq remains more personal than political," the Soufan Group report says. "A search for belonging, purpose, adventure, and friendship, appear to remain the main reasons for people to join the Islamic State, just as they remain the least addressed issues in the international fight against terrorism."
Just 18 months ago, the number of foreign fighters in Syria was believed to be somewhere between 12,000 and 15,000. Now, that number appears to have doubled.
Through its own investigation, the Soufan Group found that in total between 27,000 and 31,000 people have traveled to Syria and Iraq to join the Islamic State and other violent extremist groups from at least 86 countries.
This is line with a recent U.S. intelligence assessment that estimates nearly 30,000 foreign fighters have traveled to Iraq and Syria from more than 100 countries since 2011.
Western European countries have seen its foreign fighter numbers double over the last year, jumping from 2,500 in June 2014 to roughly 5,000 today. France, the United Kingdom, Germany and Belgium contribute the biggest numbers to this tally, making up almost 3,700 of the total.
As for fighters traveling from the United States, FBI Director James Comey has said that approximately 250 Americans have traveled or attempted to travel to Syria. In 2014, that number was closer to 70.
"There are no significant patterns of locally based recruitment in the Americas-nor recruitment hot spots-as seen in Europe and the former Soviet republics," the Soufan Group report says.
Russia brings over heavy T-90 tanks to boost three Syrian warfronts - http://www.debka.com/article/25065/Russia-brings-over-heavy-T-90-tanks-to-boost-three-Syrian-warfronts
On Wednesday, Dec. 2, Russia started transferring dozens of advanced T-90 tanks to Syria, debkafile's military and intelligence sources report. They were moved immediately to two Syrian army fronts fighting rebel forces at the two most important cities, Aleppo and Damascus, and are expected to be sent to beef up the combined Syria, Iranian, Hezbollah army poised to recover Palmyra from the Islamic State.
The shipment to the capital was delivered into the hands of the 4th armored division, Syria's republican guard commanded by Gen. Ali Maher Assad, the younger brother of President Bashar Assad.
The attack on Palmyra in country infested by ISIS forces was scheduled to have begun two weeks ago but was delayed for the arrival of the heavy Russian tanks, among other reasons.
The T-90 weighs 46.5 tons and has a range of 375 kilometers, with an average speed of 45 km per hour under battle conditions or 65 km per hour on roads. It has three layers of defensive systems: composite armor plates on the turret; Kontact-5 third-generation explosive reactive armor on its front, sides, and turret that reduces penetration by kinetic energy bombs; and the "Shtora," or curtain, an electro-optical active protection system that enables the tank to jam the systems of antitank missiles.
The T-90 also has 12 smoke mortars, a 125 mm cannon and AT-11 Sniper guided antitank missiles. The tank has proven itself in battle in recent years in Russia's wars in Georgia and Chechnya against forces not unlike the Syrian rebels.
Until last week, Russia kept only a few T-90 tanks in Syria, mainly to protect its military bases around Latakia.
The new shipment, say Western military sources which are monitoring Russian movements, will eventually replace a large part of the Syrian army's fleet of around 500 operational tanks, mostly T-72s - at least half of which are positioned to defend the capital.
But the pace of delivery will be dictated above all by the time needed for Russian instructors to retrain Syrian tank crews from scratch in the use of T-90s in battle conditions.
It should be noted meanwhile that, while the Syrian rebels have antitank missiles able to take out the T-72, they do not have advanced missiles capable of stopping the much heavier, reactively armed T-90. But the Islamic State does, having captured US-made antitank missiles from the Iraqi armored divisions put to flight in June 2014. Some of those advanced missiles may be presumed to have been passed to ISIS forces in Syria.
For now, the Russian general staff shows no sign of preparing for a wide-scale operation against ISIS in Syria, so the newly-delivered T-90s are not immediately threatened from that quarter.
As far as Israel is concerned, the main worry is that Russian instructors will also be assigned to train Iranian and Hezbollah tank crews in the use of the advanced T-90. Once they get hold of these tanks, they will be able to attain their objective of beefing up the Iranian-Hezbollah front against Israeli defenses from southern Syria and the Syrian Golan.
Israeli finds cause for concern in the constant expansion of the Russian military presence and involvement in Syria. Preparations for a very long stay are signified by new developments every few days. A permanent Russian military presence in Syria would give Iran and Hezbollah cover for a standing military buildup in Syria. This would confront Israel's vital strategic interests with a major challenge.
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