Opinion | The re-escalation of the Syrian Civil War

By Tom Fowdy

Beginning at the weekend, the Syrian Rebel Forces, pinned in a distant northwest corner of the country, suddenly launched an offensive against the territory of the Bashar Al-Assad government. Disorganized and ill-prepared, the rebels almost immediately recaptured the city of Aleppo, which had been reclaimed in a hugely destructive and deadly battle back in 2016. Mainstream liberals began cheering on social media again for the prospective fall of the Assad regime, although that seems premature.

Likewise, the US-backed "Syrian Democratic Forces" (SDF) also affiliated with the Kurdish regions of the country which they currently occupy, are also under attack by the FSA rebels, who are Turkey-backed (and therefore Anti-Kurd), but it is naïve to think they will ally with Assad. The Syrian civil war was essentially a conflict that was frozen for years, but now, it has suddenly heated up again. Despite their long having wanted to topple Assad, the implications for the West in the revival of this bloody conflict could be huge.

How did this happen? The re-escalation of the Syrian conflict is a result of changes in the balance of power which has given certain actors a window of opportunity to launch a successful attack. First of all, owing to the conflicts in Gaza and Lebanon, Israel has severely weakened Hezbollah (a key ally of Assad) and decapitated its leadership, as well as Iran's militias. Second, Russia, which is the largest military guarantor of Assad's Syria, is militarily occupied through its commitment to Ukraine. While Russia still has a military presence in the country and is still in fact bombing the rebels following the start of their offensive, to what extent can Moscow commit to supporting Assad?

It is believed that the primary instigator and backer of the rebels, as this offensive shows, is in fact Turkey. However, the United States has no huge strategic problem with it as they would be happy for Assad to go and Russia's military presence ejected from the country. Under Erdogan, Turkey is a geopolitically unreliable state that aggressively plays all sides for its own gain and acts in a highly untrustworthy, if not erratic manner. At the heart of his foreign policy lies a revisionist concept known as "Neo-Ottomanism" that seeks to aggressively expand Turkey's sphere of influence aiming to emulate its historical power under the Ottoman Empire.

To do this, one of Turkey's longest strategic goals has first been to assert its hand over Syria, which is seen as a security threat due to being a source of Kurdish separatism and radicalism, Ankara has long attacked Kurdish militias outside of its own borders, including those in Iraq. To do this, it has utilized the Islamist Syrian rebels as its primary proxy, and seeks to undermine both the Assad regime and the US-backed (Kurdish) SDF concurrently. While it seems unlikely that Turkey would go all the way to try and terminate Assad (as Erdogan is not willing to completely destroy ties with Moscow), building a "buffer zone" in the north of Syria is its most immediate goal and it thus sees now as a window of opportunity to do so, as it likewise did in escalating the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict.

Again, the United States does not see Turkey's escalation of conflicts as contrary to its interests, namely because it is hurting Russian interests and undermining their ties with the regimes they back, such as Armenia. Such conflicts exploit Russian weakness and therefore create geopolitical space for states to repivot or switch sides, and the West has sought to use the conflict in Ukraine to do so as much as possible. While they have succeeded in Moldova, they are also attempting to do so in Georgia. Thus, while the US will not shed tears over Assad, they also possibly see a window of opportunity to bring him out of the Russian and Iranian sphere of influence.

However, in terms of practical results, an escalation of the Syrian civil conflict is very bad news for the West because the sporadic violence it creates leads to large-scale refugee flows, which in turn generates political instability and right-wing populism. I still argue that the crisis of 2016, triggered by the battle for Aleppo, was a key factor in the political backlash that led to the British public voting for Brexit in that year, while the surge in terrorism and the ISIS conflict existing as a tangent was also influential in the election of Donald Trump (His Muslim ban suggestion being when the polls surged). So it should be stated quite clearly that an escalation of the Syrian civil war is bad news for everyone involved. Syria is a state that is fragmented on deep ethnic and sectarian lines and does not have the institutional framework or legitimacy to reconcile them, creating a hotbed of serious instability that metes out to the rest of the world. For Turkey to reignite this conflict now is a sign of the world we live in, as I have long pointed out, that one major conflict has geopolitical ripple effects which subsequently causes others in its wake.

The author is a well-seasoned writer and analyst with a large portfolio related to China topics, especially in the field of politics, international relations and more. He graduated with an Msc. in Chinese Studies from Oxford University in 2018.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.

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