The Secret Trump-Putin Deal Suits Both Their Goals in Syria……
19 October 2019
19 October 2019
Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin were hand in glove in the secret deal playing out this week in Syria.
It worked because both sides got exactly what they wanted.
Far from Washington, where he is weighed down by Democratic impeachment moves over alleged abuse of power with Ukraine and whistleblowers, Trump undertook an audacious gamble in a global trouble spot.
The deal he set up with the Russian leader was designed, in a nutshell, to convey responsibility for north-eastern Kurdish provinces and most of the east, from the US-backed and trained Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) to the Russian military command in Syria and government forces, complete with American equipment.
This trade of proxies between two big powers is unprecedented. It happened because the two presidents’ overriding goals for Syria intersected:
Trump was resolved to pull US forces out, a goal that interlocked with Putin determination to recover Syrian sovereignty on every inch of land - and stay there.
The two goals fused in the Turkish operation against the Kurds of north-eastern Syria.
By Thursday, October 17, 10 US bases in northern Syria were in the hands of Syrian government forces under a Russian shield.
Another brace of whistleblowers may raise Cain when the deal comes to light, especially in the Washington circles still preoccupied with Russia’s intervention in the 2016 election.
The two presidents started the ball rolling by allowing Turkey to stage a limited incursion into north-eastern Syria on October 9, knowing that President Recep Erdogan would not resist the temptation to exceed those limits and go for the Kurds.
This was to set the scene for the Russian intervention and takeover.
For now, this radical realignment of power stakes in Syria has attracted little attention.
By Tuesday, when the US Treasury clamped punitive sanctions on Ankara officials, hostilities on the ground were already slowing down, according to plan.
The Turks paused when they saw Syrian forces jumping into the bubbling pot to take over the Kurdish towns in their sights and under their artillery.
This brought the Russians into dangerous proximity of the fighting. Turkish forces halted their advance for their bosses in Ankara to decide what next.
Reliable sources reveal that on October 6, when Trump offered to remove 50 American troops from the Syrian border in a phone conversation with Erdogan - against his commitment to keep Turkish forces within in a security zone 200km long and 30km deep - he was in fact setting him a trap.
Turkey was to be cornered into a confrontation with Russia and Syria - and forced to give ground - after US troops were whisked off the scene.
Trump had no intention of letting a US force engage in battle with a fellow NATO member, even for the sake of defending America’s Kurdish ally.
And Erdogan did walk into the trap.
Someone in the White House with a hand in the scheme - Secretary of State Mike Pompeo certainly played a key role - must have realised that Trump would pay dearly in political coin for his apparent betrayal of the Kurds, who fought with US forces for the ISIS defeat.
But the president was intent on carrying on regardless, determined to go down in history as the US president who brought American troops home from the hopeless entanglements of the Middle East.
He had no qualms about dumping the region’s inherent feuds and fights in Russian laps – even to boosting their clout.
This venture is rolling forward, although its outcome is yet unknown.
When Turkish troops stepped across the border into northern Syria last Wednesday, October 9, Trump and Putin counted on them and their allied Syrian-Turkmen militia allies, who had been preparing for this day for more than ten years, going beyond the agreed security zone limits and hitting Kurdish towns.
Neither were the Kurdish leaders under any illusions about what lay ahead. They were not surprised by their first collision which claimed around 100 dead on both sides in the first five days of the Turkish operation.
By then, however, the secret interchanges between Syrian President Bashar Assad and Kurdish commanders, launched around two weeks earlier, had been revved up.
They were presided over by the Russian President’s Special Envoy to Syria, Alexander Lavrentiev, who has long experience in weaving deals and understandings between the presidential palace in Damascus and the Kurdish autonomous ruling institutions known as “Rojava.”
Some of the texts were ready for signing, having been worked and reworked during the years of those secret contacts.
When the US president authorised the Pentagon to pull some 1,000 American troops back from the embattled region, Kurdish pens were hurriedly pulled out of pockets and put to paper.
Both the Russians and Assad took advantage of the Kurds’ contretemps from the loss of their American umbrella to squeeze them into relinquishing their demands for full independence.
The paper signed by the parties at the Russian Khmeimim Air Base on Sunday, October 10, was far short of the semi-autonomous status granted Iraqi Kurdistan.
Syria’s Kurds had to be satisfied with local, self-ruling institutions subject to the authority of the central government in Damascus.
They were also stripped of their main military organ.
Reliable sources report that the SDF/YPG militia was forced to give up its separate status and be integrated in the Syria army’s 5th Corps, which is the main joint Russia-Syria fighting unit in Syria.
The transfer of American troops out of the Kurdish regions on the Turkish border was the first move in President Trump’s overall plan to withdraw the US army from Syria at large and allow the Russians to move into US-held sectors.
The next day, a directive went out to pull US troops out of the eastern sectors as well, excepting only the US garrison at Al Tanf, which straddles the border intersection between Syria, Iraq and Jordan.
This base protects the big US Ain Al Asad air base in western Iraq from the west. The eastern Syrian oil fields are still up in the air.
What does this mean for Putin? See the next article.
JUST IN; Deadly Turkish air-strikes Friday shattered an hours-old US-brokered deal to stop Ankara’s military offensive against Kurdish forces in north-eastern Syria.
The ceasefire announced late Thursday was meant to provide a pause for the evacuation of Kurdish fighters from the battleground border town of Ras al-Ain and other areas Turkey wants to control along its border with Syria.
The five-day suspension looked designed to help Turkey achieve its main territorial goals without fighting but its Syrian proxies continued to clash with Kurdish fighters Friday and an airstrike killed five civilians.
Putin Brings Ten US Bases under Syrian Government Control…..
19 October 2019
19 October 2019
Moscow sent out almost daily, increasingly harsh, warnings to Turkey to cease the operation its army launched against the Kurds of north-east Syria on October 9.
The first signs of a Turkish forces’ pause in their advance came about on Tuesday, October 15 and was still more or less in force on Thursday.
On Sunday night, October 13, President Vladimir Putin first cracked the whip: “All the forces deployed illegitimately inside any sovereign state, in this case Syria, must leave. Syria’s territorial integrity must be completely restored,”
The next day, the Kremlin said it did not want to “entertain the possibility of a clash in Syria between Russian and Turkish forces and Moscow was in regular contact with Ankara”.
Asked if Moscow was worried that Russia could get sucked into a clash in Syria with Turkish forces, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Petrov said that was the last thing it wanted, “We wouldn’t even like to think about that scenario.”
He added that Moscow had warned all sides in the Syrian conflict to avoid any action that could “escalate tension in the area or damage the fragile political process.”
This was diplomatic-speak for a warning to Ankara to halt its advance into Syria or risk being forced to retreat by Russia’s armed strength.
A more explicit warning went out on Tuesday.
The Kremlin’s envoy for Syria Alexander Lavrentiev [pictured above] called Turkey’s military offensive in north-east Syria “unacceptable” and denied Ankara’s operation had been cleared by Moscow in advance as President Recep Erdogan had claimed on Monday.
This was followed by a report of Russian military police being mobilised to separate Syrian and Turkish forces in northern Syria.
The Russian defence ministry said that Syrian government forces allied with Russia were in full control of the northern Syrian town of Manbij.
As to Kobani, which is important to the Americans, reliable sources report that, while boasting publicly that he would never back down, Erdogan agreed in a conversation with President Trump on Tuesday, October 15, to refrain from attacking that key SDF town.
The Turkish leader also talked by phone with Putin and they arranged to meet in Moscow next Tuesday, October 22.
Before then, on Thursday, October 17, Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo were due in Ankara to press the US demand for a truce and for Turkey’s pull-back from Syria on pain of economic sanctions.
Putin is less susceptible to domestic political fallout than Trump, who is fighting for re-election in 2020 and beset with a bid for his impeachment.
Neither does the Russian leader care much about international opprobrium. While not keen on a military clash with Turkey, he would not hold back if he deemed this necessary.
But then, he would go all the way and chase Turkish troops across the border out of Syria.
Erdogan understands this.
He knows the Russian president has never budged from his insistence that the recovery of Syria’s total territorial sovereignty was the purpose of his 2015 military intervention in the civil war at Bashar Assad’s request, rejecting all the partition proposals put forward for ending that conflict.
Putin made this clear to President Barack Obama in mid-2015 during the six- power nuclear negotiations with Iran.
The two presidents agreed secretly to split their spheres of influence in Syria, with the Americans responsible for the area east of the River Euphrates and the Russians holding sway in the west.
Putin gave way provisionally on this point to procure the Obama administration’s acceptance of his military intervention in Syria that year.
Four years hence, Putin’s patience has paid off.
He has achieved 90% of his goals in Syria, capped this week by the withdrawal of US troops from 10 bases in Syria, excepting only the large Al Tanf garrison, which commands the Syria-Iraq-Jordan border junction and is the key to defending US bases in Iraq.
Abandoning Al Tanf would render the US Ain Al Assad air base in western Iraq indefensible to attack from the west.
The Russian leader can live with that last US foothold in Syria. The eastern Syrian oil fields are still in discussion.
Therefore, many analysts reckon that the Russian leader will not immediately lean hard on Erdogan to remove his troops from Syria. He will give him some leeway to manoeuvre, but not very long.
When they meet in Moscow, next week, Putin will try and obtain the Turkish leader’s consent to voluntarily pull his troops out of Syria, against Moscow’s assurance that the Kurds will not be allowed to rebuild their armed forces.
Putin will let him claim the credit at home for snatching the Kurds’ dream of independence, or even full autonomy, and boast that he extracted guarantees from Russia and Damascus to prevent the Kurdish “terrorists” from ever attacking Turkey from their territory.
But if Erdogan refuses to comply, Putin will have no compunction about setting his air force loose, without prior notice, to halt the Turkish advance in Syria, possibly even camouflaged as Syrian warplanes.
This ruse may be borrowed from the 70's and 80's when Soviet pilots flew aircraft painted with Syrian and Egyptian insignia against Israeli warplanes.
Putin can claim kudos as being the first leader since the Cold War years to achieve a partial US pull-back from the Middle East.
This goal eluded Saddam Hussein in 1990 and 2003 and is still is out of reach of Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei despite his tireless efforts.
Just 24 hours after the Syrian deal was in the bag, a glowing Putin landed in Riyadh on Monday, October 14, three days after President Trump had announced the deployment of thousands of additional US troops to the Kingdom “to enhance the defence of Saudi Arabia.”
The monarch and the president agreed that Russia’s importance for the security of Saudi national interests and oil exports was no less than that of America.
US shortcomings in protecting Gulf oil shipping and an Iranian assault on Saudi oil facilities had opened the way for Russia to pitch sales of its advanced air and missile defence weapons to Riyadh and otherwise step into America’s shoes.
No such empire as the United States of America seems to be spoken of in Bible prophecy which depicts utter carnage in the Middle East during the latter days?
Are we seeing a withdrawal of what was once the world's most powerful military from the region just as Russia and Turkey rush in to fill the vacuum?
Iran’s Guards, Hizballah Move into Baghdad’s Green Zone While Attention Fixed on Syria.........
19 October 2019
19 October 2019
With the spotlight trained on the Turkish-Kurdish collision in north-east Syria, Iran was able to press ahead with its takeover of Baghdad and its Green Zone almost unnoticed.
Last month, the long arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) kept popular demonstrations against government corruption and poor services on the boil, using the unrest as the vehicle for entrenching subservient local Shiite militias at the centres of government in the Shiite cities of southern Iraq.
The outbreaks subsided when large pro-Iranian militia contingents moved in and established fortified quarters in Nasiriyah, Amara, Diwaniya and Hilla, on the format of the Hizballah stronghold in the Dahya district of Beirut.
In the guise of “protective backup” for the endangered Iraqi government, thousands of IRGC and Lebanese Hizballah combatants have swarmed in the past ten days into the Green Zone, the seat of government and foreign missions in Baghdad, the capital.
Earlier, 7,000 Guardsmen were sent to Shiite towns on the pretext of laying on security for Iranians arriving for the Imam Hossein pilgrimage in the shrine city of Karbala.
The IRGC had set up a situation room in Baghdad’s Green Zone to run Iran’s expanding Iranian military operations in Iraq.
To account for this foreign incursion, Iranian officials claim that the Hizballah-affiliated contingents entering Iraq through Syria are coming to help defend the Baghdad government against the protesters.
And indeed, reliable sources report that some 10,000 IRGC and Hizballah fighters have been placed under the orders of Abou Jihad al-Hashemi, director of the Iraqi prime minister’s office, for action in case of a deterioration in security.
Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi who, for a while, looked like preserving a measure of independence against Iranian domination, appears now to be playing ball with Tehran, accepting the claim that, like Syria’s Bashar Assad in 2013, his regime is being rescued from being ousted by Iranian intervention.
Iran has an interest in keeping Abdul-Mahdi in power although he tends to vacillate between Washington and Tehran.
Substantial Iranian strength is on hand in Baghdad to make sure he stays on the right side of the blanket.
Iranian strategists are fixated on making Baghdad a formidable arena for Iran’s contest with the US and using it as a reservoir for Shiite fighters consigned to boost its foothold in Syria.
US President Donald Trump’s decision to draw US forces back from northern and most of eastern Syria, in the major shift set off by the Turkish operations against the Kurds, has played neatly into Iranian hands.
These moves would bring Iran and its Iraqi and Lebanese proxies that much closer to threatening US bases in Iraq.
Iran Turns the Nuclear Clock Back to Pre-JCPOA Accord…..
19 October 2019
19 October 2019
Step by step, Iran is making good on its threat to peel away its commitments under the 2015 nuclear accord known as the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action), in response to Europe’s failure to compensate the Islamic Republic for US sanctions on its oil exports.
This week, Ali Akbar Salehi, [pictured below] Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization Director, announced that a set of 30 advanced IR-6 centrifuges and a new part of the heavy water reactor at Arak would be put to work in the next two to three weeks.
Both these steps violate the JCPOA that Iran signed with six world powers in 2015 which the Trump administration quit in May last year.
Iran was bound not to employ more than 30 IR-6 centrifuges for speeding up uranium enrichment before 2023.
On Tuesday, Salehi announced in an interview to Iran’s state TV that Iran’s nuclear program had “returned to the pre-JCPOA situation” after increasing the production of low, 3.5% enriched uranium to 5-6 kilograms a day.
Iran has already exceeded the 3.67% enrichment grade and the 300kg stockpile of enriched uranium permitted under the nuclear deal. It has also started using faster centrifuges which enrich uranium to a higher level, closer to weapons grade.
The IAEA inspectors confirmed in September that “Iran has installed or is installing 22 IR-4, one IR-5 and 30 IR-6 centrifuges.”
Tehran is threatening to take the next step for stripping down its commitments to the nuclear deal by November 6.
Asked what this would consist of, Salehi told reporters in Tehran “It is too early to talk about this.”
He made it clear that the decision would come from over his head, adding “We are ready to implement any decision that may be taken in this regard.”
Don Stewart's BREAKING NEWS 18 October 2019
Israel Report
Editor; Mike Claydon
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