"Putin's gambit"
I came across this fascinating article (translated from very dense French) that I find fascinating but hard to understand.
I am left none the wiser about what “Putin’s gambit” was.
I recall that in the days leading up to the fall of the Assad regime Assad had talks with Putin. I cannot find anything on the search engines on this - everything points to the latest headlines, nothing before that. In any case, we have no idea of what was discussed.
What I do get from this article is that the US was dangling a carrot in front of Assad offering normalisation in return for dropping Iran and Russia. Somehow, word got back to Erdogan who launched his jihadists’ attack on Aleppo.
No one expected that the Syrian army would fade away and just let the Jihadists advance, all the way to Damascus.
Was this “Putin’ s gmbit”
According to this version:
The attack by pro-Turkish jihadists on the Syrian Assadists was intended by Washington and Tel-Aviv to reignite the bloody Syrian civil war, exhausting all sides, including the Russians and Iranians, in protracted fighting and providing a pretext for continued Israeli campaigns against the Palestinians and Lebanese.
The article seems to be suggesting that is why Russian forces in Latakia are still in place and the Iranian embassy has been restored. It would also explain what would appear to be a panicked reaction by the Israelis.
Have I got it right?
Abdulreza Faraji-Rad, a former elite Iranian diplomat, detailed how Putin cunningly used Erdogan to foil Washington and Tel-Aviv's secret joint plans to drag Russia into a protracted and exhausting war in Syria.
The Syrian gambit Putin's recent subtle December Syrian gambit, in which he launched Syrian jihadists directly against Israel and the US by "quickly withdrawing Assad" to Moscow, as analyzed yesterday by prominent Iranian diplomat Abdolrez Faraji-Rad, a well-known advocate of a strong Iranian presence in Syria, did not fall out of the blue, but was the perfect Russian response to Washington and Tel-Aviv's secret raids around Syria this year.
Israel and the U.S., through the Emirates, began secret negotiations with Assad, and his Syrian backers, this year, promising to "ease Western sanctions against Syria" in exchange for "significant Syrian disengagement" from Iran and Russia. The wily Assadites promised a solution to Syria's deep economic crisis, which was crushingly undermining their regime, from the talks. But the talks did not escape attention, and someone arranged for information about them to reach Turkey's Erdogan.
A negotiated reconciliation of the Assads with the Israelis and the Americans, at the expense of the Iranians and Russians, would mark the final line over Turkish ambitions in Syria. So, as expected, Erdogan quickly mobilized his few pro-Turkish Syrian jihadists, and they went on the offensive in late November in what even Israeli intelligence at its outset considered a pure suicide. The attack by pro-Turkish jihadists on the Syrian Assadists was intended by Washington and Tel-Aviv to reignite the bloody Syrian civil war, exhausting all sides, including the Russians and Iranians, in protracted fighting and providing a pretext for continued Israeli campaigns against the Palestinians and Lebanese.
However, despite the expectations of the CIA and Mossad, the attack by Erdogan's jihadists was quickly successful, as the "Syrian army" surprisingly offered no resistance, and the Iranian guardsmen in Syria resisted mainly by sight, as Tehran sent them no backup.
The result of Putin's gambit is already shocking. The jihadists are not attacking Russians or Iranians in Syria. But by their rapid advance, a terrified Israel has already begun bombing Syria like mad yesterday, violating a UN resolution and invading treaty-demilitarized Syrian territory, and the Pentagon even sent a few B-52s against the jihadists this afternoon, destroying them with drones and making dramatic power talk. Yet not long ago, Israel was secretly treating jihadists wounded in the fight against the Assads, Russians and Iranians on its territory at the request of the US.
I managed to track this down from the Tehran Times
It noted that Bashar al-Assad’s government had been negotiating with the UAE to realign Syria with the Arab world and distance itself from Iran and Russia. The UAE mediated talks between Assad, the U.S., and Israel, with the U.S. offering to lift sanctions if Syria complied. Assad reportedly took initial steps, especially regarding Iran, but these efforts clashed with Turkey’s regional ambitions. In response, Turkey mobilized the militants, coordinated with the U.S. and Israel, and committed to dismantling Syria’s Resistance movement, a strategy preferred by Washington. The editorial concluded that these developments have significantly enhanced Turkey’s geopolitical influence. The paper warned that Turkey’s revived focus on Zangezur and potential Azerbaijani aggression against Syunik could reshape the regional balance further.
https://www.tehrantimes.com/news/507254/Arman-e-Emrooz-Shifting-alliances-in-Syria
From Michael Snyder
Israel Just Sank The Entire Syrian Navy And Has Crippled The Syrian Air Force
DEC 11
While radical Sunni militants were conquering Damascus, Israel was conducting an absolutely massive bombing campaign inside Syria that is unlike anything we have seen before. The IDF is telling us that more than 350 targets were hit. Basically the goal was to destroy as much military hardware as possible so that it would not fall into the hands of the militants. The Israelis were concerned that the militants might use the military hardware that they inherited against them, and so they took pre-emptive action. Unfortunately, the militants are now steaming mad, and some of them are already publicly threatening Israel.
Syria never had a large navy to begin with, but now it has been completely neutralized.
According to the BBC, Israeli naval forces “struck the ports at Al-Bayda and Latakia on Monday night”…
Israel has confirmed it carried out attacks on Syria’s naval fleet, as part of its efforts to neutralise military assets in the country after the fall of the Assad regime.
In a statement, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said its ships struck the ports at Al-Bayda and Latakia on Monday night, where 15 vessels were docked.
The BBC has verified videos showing blasts at the port of Latakia, with footage appearing to show extensive damage to ships and parts of the port.
The goal of the operation was to destroy the entire Syrian Navy, and we are being told that the operation was successful…
Israeli missile ships destroyed the Syrian military fleetin an operation on Monday night as part of a broad campaign to eliminate strategic threats, Defence Minister Israel Katz said on Tuesday in Haifa.
It is also being reported that Israel conducted extensive strikes on the largest airbases in Syria.
According to one report, “dozens of helicopters and fighter jets have been destroyed”…
Israel has hit Syria’s largest airbases, the Al Arabiya television channel said, citing two sources in Syria’s defense sector.
“Israel has delivered strikes on the largest airbases in Syria,” the sources said, adding that airfield “infrastructure and dozens of helicopters and fighter jets have been destroyed.”
The Syrian Air Force has been crippled for the foreseeable future, and this will be a major advantage for the IDF if a full-blown conflict with the new regime suddenly erupts.
The IDF also targeted sites where it was suspected that chemical weapons and ballistic missiles were being developed.
Essentially, the Israelis wanted to wipe the slate clean as much as possible. So just about every site that had strategic importance got hit.
In addition, the IDF has created a “buffer zone” in southern Syria in order to keep the rebels from storming the Israeli border. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says that this “buffer zone” is just a “temporary defensive position”…
The IDF seizure of Syrian positions in the buffer zone was a “temporary defensive position until a suitable arrangement is found”, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday.
“If we can establish neighbourly relations and peaceful relations with the new forces emerging in Syria, that’s our desire. But if we do not, we will do whatever it takes to defend the State of Israel and the border of Israel,” he said on Monday.
Of course others see this move by Israel very differently.
According to the Times of Israel, a news outlet that is aligned with Hezbollah is alleging that Israeli forces have moved well beyond the reported “buffer zone”…
The Hezbollah-affiliated Al-Mayadeen news outlet reports that Israeli tanks have advanced beyond the boundaries of the Golan Heights buffer zone in Syria that it moved troops into earlier this week.
According to the unverified report from the Lebanese outlet, the tanks progressed past the abandoned buffer zone town of Qunaitra before stopping near Qatana, a southern Syria city just over 21 kilometers away from the capital city of Damascus.
The report further that Israeli troops also entered several villages on the outskirts of Damascus.
The Israeli government is strongly denying that Israeli forces have approached Damascus.
Hopefully the IDF and the militants will keep their distance from one another, because a full-blown conflict could erupt so easily right now.
Meanwhile, the Iranians are trying to figure out what to do next as they process the most “devastating defeat” in modern Iranian history…
The swift collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime represents a devastating defeat for Iran, the latest in a string of setbacks that have punctured long held assumptions in the West about Tehran’s military prowess.
In recent months, Iran has proved unable to thwart Israeli covert operations from targeting key figures in the regime, defend itself from damaging Israeli airstrikes, or protect an ally next door that was a linchpin in its regional proxy network, dubbed the “axis of resistance.”
The Iranians understand that the same forces that engineered regime change in Syria are coming for them next.
The Iranians feel cornered, and a cornered predator is extremely dangerous.
There is one more thing that I wanted to mention before I end this article. On the other side of the globe, the Chinese are once again becoming extremely aggressive with Taiwan…
Taiwan’s Defense Ministry on Tuesday said that China had deployed its largest navy fleet in regional waters in nearly three decades.
The deployment is bigger than the military drills of 2022, when former US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited the island.
The Defense Ministry said that 47 aircraft and 12 warships had been detected in the previous 24 hours. It added that this was the largest number of aircraft spotted near the island in a single day in the last two months, which saw an escalation in Chinese war games along the island.
The Chinese were obviously not pleased with how the regime in Syria was toppled.
Could this be their response?
Are they trying to send us some sort of a message?
2025 could potentially be a year when we see war in Asia, war in Europe and war in the Middle East all at the same time. I have been warning about these wars for ages, and now we are right at the door.
Sadly, most of the population of the western world does not seem too alarmed by anything that is happening.
Most of us just continue to go on with our lives as if the party will never end, but meanwhile our leaders continue to drag us closer and closer to the unthinkable.