Syrian conflict enters dangerous turf as Russia hits anti-Assad troops

WASHINGTON — Russian military aircraft have bombed Syrian opposition fighters, including at least two groups aided by the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), eliciting angry protests from United States officials and plunging the complex sectarian war into dangerous new territory.

Russia’s entry into the Syrian conflict on Wednesday, foreshadowed by a rapid military buildup in the past three weeks at an airbase in Latakia, Syria, makes the possibility of a political settlement in Syria more difficult and creates a new risk of inadvertent incidents between American and Russian warplanes flying in the same area.

And it adds a powerful but unpredictable combatant to a civil war that has already resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths and a flood of refugees to Europe.

Russian President Vladimir Putin justified his country’s entry into the conflict by saying that Russia was acting “preventatively, to fight and destroy militants and terrorists on the territories that they already occupied, not wait for them to come to our house”.

But US officials said the attack was not directed at the Islamic State but at other opposition groups fighting against the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad, whom Mr Putin has vowed to support. US officials said Russian warplanes and helicopter gunships dropped bombs north of the central city of Homs as well as the coastal city of Idlib, where there are few, if any, militants of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL.

Among the areas hit by the Russians was the base of a group that had been supported and supplied by the US and its allies, said its leader, Jamil Saleh. He said the group’s base had been hit severely in Hama province, wounding eight of his men.

“We are on the front lines with Bashar al-Assad’s army,” said Mr Saleh, whose group has recently posted videos of its fighters using sophisticated US-made missiles to destroy government tanks. “We are moderate Syrian rebels and have no affiliation with ISIS. ISIS is at least 100km away from where we are.”

The group posted a video that it said showed the attack, first with two Russian fighter jets wheeling overhead, then with a blast so close and powerful that it knocked the camera to the ground.

“Russia is an accomplice in Assad’s crimes today, with approval from both the US and the international community to kill us,” said Mr Khoodair Khusheif, an activist in the Homs province in western Syria. “If these raids continue this way, Russia will kill a larger number of civilians than Bashar did in four years.”

Mr Putin is believed to harbour both international and domestic reasons for interfering in Syria. On the international front, he wants to restore Russian influence as a global power and try to force an end to the diplomatic and financial isolation the West imposed after Moscow seized Crimea and supported separatists in south-eastern Ukraine. He also wants to maintain control over Russia’s naval station at Tartus, in Syria, its only remaining overseas military base outside the former Soviet Union.

If Moscow had been determined to destabilise the situation in Syria, many of Mr Assad’s opponents say, it would have been hard-pressed to think of a more electrifying and polarising way.

“By supporting Assad and seemingly taking on everybody fighting Assad,” US Defence Secretary Ash Carter said Wednesday, “(Russia is) taking on the whole rest of the country that’s fighting Assad.”

Some of those groups, he added, are supported by the US and need to be part of a political resolution in Syria. “That’s why the Russian position is doomed to fail,” he added.

Both Mr Carter and Secretary of State John Kerry were critical of Russia for failing to fully inform US officials ahead of the time of their mission.

The notification consisted of contacting the US Embassy in Baghdad one hour before the strikes, with the warning that American planes should avoid Syrian airspace. No effort was made to coordinate the air strikes with US air operations in the region. Illustrating the widening complexity of the war, the US conducted its own air strikes in Syria on Wednesday, near Aleppo, without warning to the Russians.

Mr Kerry raised Russia’s air strike on Wednesday morning with Mr Sergey Lavrov, his Russian counterpart, and after a late-afternoon meeting at the United Nations, Mr Kerry told reporters that the two sides had agreed to begin talks on avoiding unintended confrontations in Syria and clarifying which targets the Russians are picking as soon as possible.

Though Russia and the US remain far apart on the critical question of whether Mr Assad should remain in power, Mr Kerry said the two sides had agreed to explore “options” to ease the conflict. “We think we have some very specific steps that may be able to help lead in the right direction,” said Mr Kerry, who did not provide any details. “That needs to be properly explored.”

While the US$500 million (S$714 million) Pentagon programme to train and equip Syrian fighters has largely failed — at one point this month only four or five US-trained combatants were in the fight in Syria — the CIA’s covert programme to train other fighters has weathered some setbacks to produce 3,000 to 5,000 fighters in the nearly two years it has been operating.

Mr Kerry, speaking to the UN Security Council, warned Russia not to carry out air strikes in areas of Syria in which the Islamic State is not believed to be operating. With his Russian counterpart in the chair, Mr Kerry said that Washington would welcome “any genuine effort” by Moscow to target the Islamic State and the Nusra Front, Al Qaeda’s branch in Syria.

But Mr Kerry made it clear that the US would have “grave concerns” if the Russians bombed other moderate rebel groups, and repeated the American position that Mr Assad would eventually need to leave power as part of a political transition that would be intended to bring peace to Syria.

He also said that the US-led coalition is poised “to dramatically accelerate” air strikes against Islamic State.

Western diplomats warned that Russia was sending a dangerous message if its attacks were aimed primarily against opponents of Mr Assad, rather than the Islamic State.

“We need the Russians to understand that in coming to the defence of the regime to attack ISIL, what they will do is forge a single united force under ISIL leadership against the regime,” said the British Foreign Secretary, Philip Hammond. “That’s the huge danger we face.”

A spokesman for the Russian Defence Ministry, Major-General Igor Konashenkov, said its pilots were engaged in precision strikes “against the military equipment, communication centres, transport vehicles, arms depots, ammunition and fuels and lubricant materials belonging to ISIS terrorists”. THE NEW YORK TIMES