My experience as a talking head on the Syrian crisis for WION, India’s premier global broadcaster

My preference is to ‘stick with my knitting’ and limit my participation in on air news programs to what I know best, which is Russia.  However, since Russia has long been a major player in the Middle East thanks to its close ties with Syria, Iraq and, more recently, with Iran, it is difficult to decline insistent invitations to comment on the Syrian crisis from broadcasters in need of talking heads to make sense of breaking news.

The news coming out of Syria suggests that the regime of Bashar al-Assad is in retreat and may lose the match. Today’s Daily Telegraph in the U.K. informs us that he has evacuated his family to Moscow. The BBC insists that the country’s third largest city, Homs, will be the next major city to fall to the rebels following closely on the loss of Aleppo and Hama. Now Damascus itself appears to be their next prey.

There are also reports that the Russians have moved their naval ships out to sea from their base in the port of Tartus. Sergei Lavrov was asked about this today by journalists who were following him during his  visit to Qatar, and he confirmed the ships’ departure but said it was for participation in military exercises in the Mediterranean. That answer does not raise confidence that the Russians will try hard this time to prevail in Syria.

In the interview with WION, the toughest question was what exactly the Turks stand to gain from toppling the Assad regime and watching a radical Sunni regime take control of the country. The price Erdogan is paying for the satisfaction of seeing off the Assads, with whom he has sparred for decades is complete loss of trust by the Russians and Iranians. The gains he will make in stronger relations with Israel and the United States are unlikely to provide sufficient compensation.

Transcription submitted by a reader

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxWYM8hhGUI
WION: 0:00
All right, so let’s start with the big story that we are tracking on WION at this hour. In a big blow to the Bashar al-Assad government, a war monitor has claimed that rebels have started to surround the government-held capital city of Damascus. The Syrian Defense Ministry has, of course, rubbished these reports of the army fleeing from its positions near the capital city. The Syrian government has lost control of the city of Daraa after the rebels wrested other key cities from its grip. Hezbollah claims they’ve sent about 2,000 of its fighters to Syria to defend its positions there, and the group has added that it has not participated in any of the battles with the Syrian rebels so far.

0:39
While Aleppo and Hama fell to the Islamist-led rebel alliance, Daraa reportedly has fallen to a local armed group, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Earlier this week, a rebellion group called Hayat Tahrir al-Sham was confined to northwest Idlib region, but it made a surprise and lightning attack backed by the Turks taking over Aleppo in the north and also Hama in central Syria to reach closer to Damascus. The rebel fighters and residents were seen celebrating in the streets of Hama after the forces took control of the city. A video published by a group affiliated with the Syrian rebels on Thursday is said to show detainees pulling out of the Hama prison after the rebels freed them. The Russian and the Syrian strikes have killed at least about 20 civilians in near Homs.

1:48
[Russian and Syrian strikes killed] about 20 civilians in and near Homs. Syria’s Defence Ministry has said that it is conducting attacks in the northern part of the city with cover from the joint Syrian and the Russian air force. Fearing rebels’ advance, tens of thousands of members of Assad’s Alawite minority are now fleeing from the city of Homs in central Syria. So as the rebel forces continue to gain more ground, the United Nations has said that at least about 370,000 Syrians have had to flee from their homes since the fighting began on the 27th of November. This includes 100,000 Syrians who have had to flee their home more than once. Meanwhile, Iran and Iraq have issued a joint statement with Syria warning that the sweeping rebel gains at the expense of the government forces poses a danger to the whole region.

2:40
During a visit to Baghdad, Iran’s top diplomat Abbas Araghkchi said that if Syria becomes a safe place for terrorists, then they should expect the return of the Islamic State group and other terrorist outfits. Meanwhile, what is interesting is that the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had said that he hopes that the Syrian rebels will continue in their advance against President Bashar al-Assad’s forces. But he has also voiced concerns about what he said were terrorist networks in their midst. Erdogan’s comments have outlined the complex structure of the rebel forces who are fighting against Assad.

3:15
To help make sense of what is happening at this moment in this very complex war theatre in Syria, we are joined in this broadcast by Dr. Gilbert Doctorow, who is an international affairs analyst and author and also a historian. Dr. Doctorow, you know, let me in fact start off by asking you this. Now looking at these spectacular gains that have been made by the rebels, are you surprised that the fact that Bashar al-Assad who is backed by Russia and also Iran has not been able to blunt the advances being made by the rebels?

Doctorow: 3:49
I think the problem is on the side of the government, Damascus, and I think the Russians were deeply disappointed by the lack of foresight in Bashar al-Assad’s entourage, that they did not prepare themselves for a resurgence such as we have just seen.

At the same time, I emphasize that we are all, all of us, reporting on this or trying to make sense of it, are acting in the midst of a fog of war. We have the Western media, mainstream media, in the first place. That is the BBC and the British media, in print as well, like The Telegraph, they are cheerleaders for the rebels. And they’re cheerleaders for good reason. It is clear that the British government and its intelligence agents are heavily involved in this operation.

4:46
They’re not the driving force, they’re not the originators of it, but they are contributors to it. And the reporting that we’re all seeing on the BBC reflects that fact. And if anyone who has a doubt about it will note that BBC’s latest reports have been quoting the so-called “White Helmets” to describe the civilian casualties that are alleged to take place in Syria due to bombing by the Syrian air force and the Russian airplanes that are based in Syria, in Latakia province. So the Brits are in this up to their necks. The Turks are in this, as you have just indicated.

5:26
That is to say, there are foreign elements, foreign forces that are driving this, although the group that is doing the liberation, as you say, of Aleppo and of Hama, they are based in Idlib under the terms of the end of the civil war, what we thought was the end of the civil war, negotiated in the Astana process.

WION:
Right. Now, it is true, you know, there is a fog of war, and the reports that are now emerging, both in the Western media and media from other parts of the world, need to be taken with a pinch of salt. But the Syrians themselves have admitted that they have lost Aleppo, they have also lost Hama, and that the rebels are moving closer to the central strategic city of Homs. Now the Western media is alleging that a lot of the Syrian army is of course abandoning its positions. This has been denied by the Syrians. All of that is fine.

6:29
But the fact [is] that this kind of an offensive cannot happen in a vacuum, it cannot suddenly start out. Where do you think things actually went wrong? Was this a failure of intelligence on the part of the Syrians and also their backers, that is Russia and Iran? That this kind of a force and this kind of an offensive was made possible by Hayat Tehrir al-Sham, a group that is backed by the Turks. And the Americans and the Brits, as you say, also have a very major role to play in this.

Doctorow: 6:57
Well, we have to single out the Turks, and they have created very bad feeling with the Russians and with the Iranians because of their obvious support and involvement in the training of these rebels. With Turkish assistance, the Ukrainian forces have entered this game and are, were active in training the HTS people in what they know best, perhaps better than many military experts around the world, and that is drone warfare.

7:36
This is apparently being used in the current offensive, and the skills which the Ukrainians certainly have developed in their war with Russia have been put into play. All of this thanks to the logistical support and surely financial support that they are receiving from Turkey and additionally from the British and the Americans. The Israeli involvement is hard to pin down, though the single biggest beneficiaries of all this chaos tht we are now witnessing is, in fact, Israel, because that was their long-term objective: to disrupt logistics across Syria, insofar as Syrian territory was being used as a conduit for arms from Iran to Hezbollah.

WION: 8:27
Right, it’s interesting that you say that one of the biggest nations which of course gains is the state of Israel because it cuts off the conduit of weapons and other materials that was being supplied. But what does Turkiye gain out of all of this? Because it is Turkiye which seems to be driving this operation.

Doctorow: 8:44
Yes, The involvement of Turkey is complex, that’s to be sure. They have been the sponsors of the groups that we now recognize as HTS in Idlib province. That was the consequence of the resettlement of various Islamic extremists that were operating across Syria and which were pinned down, isolated, and threatened with destruction by the Russian and Iranian forces in this period of 2015 to 2017.

9:23
So the end result was that they, with their families, I stress, this was a notable aspect of the end of the civil war, we thought it was the end, in 2017 up to 2020, was the resettlement of various groups of Islamic terrorists from across Syria into Idlib. And there they had the support– this is bordering with Turkey, and they had Turkish support. The Turks’ involvement there is to find supporters in their attempt to contain the Kurdish population that is east of Idlib and borders also with Turkey.

WION:
Interesting. Thank you very much indeed, Dr. Doctorow, for joining us and giving us that perspective there.

Doctorow: 10:09
Thanks for the invitation.

Post Script, 8 December: As we now know, the rebels have taken control of Damascus, Assad has fled the country and a new, unpredictable future has begun in Syria.