In case you were wondering how that grand alliance to destroy ISIS was shaping up, look no further than the Russian fighter jet that fell from the sky on Tuesday.
A Turkish Air Force pilot, flying an American-made F-16, shot down a Russian fighter jet, because, Turkey said, it had strayed from Syrian into Turkish airspace. One of the Russian pilots was shot dead as he drifted down under his parachute; the second pilot is believed to be inside Syria. Vladimir Putin denounced the shoot-down, and Turkey’s leaders asked for a meeting of their NATO allies, which include the United States.
Remember: all these countries—Russia, Turkey, the United States—are at least nominally supposed to be working together to destroy ISIS, the murderous group that has taken over a huge swathe of territory in Syria and Iraq. Their campaign took on greater urgency following the ISIS terrorist attacks in Paris earlier this month.
There’s a lot to untangle here. The Russian jet, a Su-24, was flying as part of the military intervention ordered by Putin in September to shore up the regime, led by Bashar al-Assad. Putin’s intervention has included thousands of bombing missions, cruise-missile strikes, and artillery bombardments against rebel forces.
In recent days, Assad’s forces—backed by forces from not just Russia but also from Iran and the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah—have begun an offensive against rebels in the region of Latakia. Not coincidentally, Latakia is a stronghold of the Alawites, the religious minority that makes up the backbone of Assad’s regime, and of the Russians themselves, who have naval bases there. Assad and Putin want the area to be clear of trouble. The rebel groups under attack are ethnic Turks who feel a deep affinity for the country to the north. In recent days, as the Syrian-Russian-Iranian offensive got under way, Turkey’s leaders declared that they would not stand by as their brethren in Syria died. Then came the shoot-down.
Russia, Turkey, and the United States might agree on the need to destroy ISIS, but they don’t agree on anything else. That’s why a Russian jet was shot down. It’s also why the Syrian war has gone as long as it has.
The right way to look at the Syrian civil war is not through the lens of ISIS, but through the lens of Assad. In nearly five years of war, the Assad regime has distinguished itself for its utter inhumanity. It’s a dictatorship dominated by a religious minority. To hold on to power, the regime has employed all manner of violence: barrels of flaming oil dropped on civilian areas, mass torture, poison gas. The opposition to Assad’s regime began peacefully, but, as the repression intensified, it rapidly morphed into a movement dominated by fanatics—the men who lead groups like ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra, the local Al Qaeda franchise. A fight to the death rarely draws moderates.
The Obama Administration has tried to stay out of the war, but it has provided some very limited (critics say half-hearted and ineffectual) help to Syrian groups that are opposed to both Assad and ISIS. To date, these groups have not been spectacularly successful, but they are holding significant chunks of territory in Syria’s west and northeast. The French and British governments have taken a similar approach.
As the U.S. and other Western countries have tried to steer a middle way through the chaos, countries in the region like Russia and Turkey have not. A group has gathered to prop up the murderous Assad: Iran, Russia, and Hezbollah, the last of which might be unable to survive without a friendly regime in Damascus. At crucial stages of the conflict, these outsiders have intervened on a massive scale to save Assad—Hezbollah and Iran in 2013, and Russia this fall.
While Putin might proclaim that he wants to destroy ISIS, it’s clear that his main goal is to save the regime in Damascus. Since intervening two months ago, the Russians have focussed their firepower not on ISIS but on the groups that pose the most immediate threats to the Assad—that is, the rebel groups supported by the United States. The Russians and the United States are not in direct conflict, but their proxies are. A Syrian-American leader of one of the moderate rebel groups told me on Tuesday that his group had shot down a Russian helicopter using an American-supplied missile. Think about that: the last time American-backed rebels shot down Russians in a helicopter was during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, in the nineteen-eighties. (In recent days, Russian forces have began to focus on ISIS targets, but it’s hard to say at this point how serious they are.)
That brings us to Turkey. An armed conflict between Turkey and Russia is highly dangerous, not just for the main parties but also for the West, because Turkey is a member of NATO. That means that any attack on Turkey is regarded as an attack on the United States and the rest of the alliance. Let’s hope cooler heads prevail.
There’s one last irony that should be mentioned with regard to Turkey. Turkey may be an American ally, but it has pursued a reckless policy in Syria. In their zeal to bring down Assad, Turkey’s leaders have for years allowed their country to be used as a transit point for foreign rebels wanting to fight in Syria. The foreigners fighting inside Syria are among the most fanatical in the country. It’s hard to imagine that ISIS would be as strong as it is today if Turkish officials had not turned a blind eye to what was happening on their border. Putin, ranting about his downed pilots, called the Turkish military “accomplices to terrorists.” That’s an exaggeration, but you get the point.
Where does all this lead? Nowhere good. As the downing of the Russian plane showed, the Syrian civil war has become an arena for the world’s powers to battle for supremacy: essentially a stalemate. Even if we are spared another confrontation, the war in Syria, ghastly as it is, is likely to go on for a long time to come.
