Moscow's Damascus road goes via
Grozny By Derek Henry Flood
Russian policy toward the Syria crisis may
be more about Grozny than Tartus. Much has been
made by critics and analysts in the West of
Russian obstruction in the United Nations Security
Council in light of Syria's dire humanitarian
crisis, for which there appears to be no light at
the end of the tunnel.
In the 20 months
since the start of the uprising-cum-armed conflict
in Syria, it has been speculated that Russia's
principal interests vis-a-vis protecting the
weakened regime of Bashar al-Assad lay in Moscow's
agreement for a naval-base at the warm-water port
of Tartus - Russia's only such facility outside
the former Soviet sphere - and Russia's role as
Syria's essential foreign
supplier of small arms,
artillery and military hardware. As Russia is well
aware, however, dictators gobbling up crates of
Kalashnikovs came and went throughout the history
of the late Cold War period. Post-Soviet basing
leases can be renegotiated at a later date with
successor regimes.
What is crucially at
stake for the Vladimir Putin government is its
cherished policy of a nation-state's "internal
affairs". Russia's present ruling elites, often
referred to as the siloviki, recall the
chaos of the 1990s and the brief, ego-bruising
loss to what briefly became a quasi-independent
Chechen state in the North Caucasus. An enfeebled
Boris Yeltsin negotiated from a position of
weakness in August 1996 with Chechen nationalist
leader Aslan Maskhadov to sign a peace agreement
in Khasavyurt, Dagestan.
Putin views the
signing of the Khasavyurt Accords as a dreadful
low point for Russia, one that he would remedy by
launching the second Russo-Chechen war in the fall
of 1999. Putin empowered himself though his
reinvasion of an already devastated Chechnya and
exploited the crisis of authority in the Russian
Federation to his immense advantage. He has been
continuously in power - as president or prime
minister - ever since.
An economically and
militarily renewed Russia under the rotating duo
of Putin and Dmitry Medvedev, strengthened by
copious energy sales to European Union states and
metals to China, still managed to "lose" Saddam
Hussein's Iraq and Muammar Gaddafi's Libya during
the Putin-Medvedev tenure. They have vowed that
Bashar al-Assad's Syria - a steadfast Russian
client dating from the Soviet era - will not be
yet another domino in odious Western-engineered,
regime-change schemes based upon the twin veneers
of humanitarian intervention and liberal
internationalism - concepts Russia's
siloviki are deeply skeptical about.
Despite the significant blowback of
retaliatory domestic Chechen terrorism reaching as
far north as Moscow, replete with intermittent
suicide bombings, the Kremlin succeeded in warding
of any form of externally imposed intervention in
Chechnya.
This hands-off approach by
Western powers ceded to Russian ground forces and
accompanying Chechen proxies a free hand to mount
a scorched-earth campaign that included
pulverizing the Chechen capital of Grozny - akin
to the collective punishment by the Assad regime
in restive parts of Homs, Aleppo, Idlib and Daraa.
Assad and his vindictive brother Maher
have unsurprisingly been using artillery of
similar or identical Russian provenance to that
used against the populace in Chechnya.
Under Putin, Russian and local authorities
mostly successfully suppressed press access to the
Chechen Republic, to the point where the Chechen
cause is largely forgotten in the West, relegated
to the chaos of the post-Soviet 1990s. During
Yeltsin's drunken oversight of the 1994-1996
conflict, Western journalists ran amok in
Chechnya, reporting the humanitarian catastrophe
mostly freely. When Putin struck back against the
rebels three years on, one of his key takeaways
from the mismanagement of the earlier war was to
control media access to the front at every level
possible.
Assad, feeling Western powers
were against him from the start, has given the
foreign press two options highly reminiscent of
the Putin playbook: sign up for the occasional
regime-orchestrated dog-and-pony show or risk
death by entering the territory illegally with
erratic bands of rebel fighters. Both Putin and
Assad's clumsy but brutal, un-evolved
counter-insurgency tactics have had a similar
result. They have undermined nationalist-leaning
rebel commanders and emboldened the more strident
Islamist and outright salafi-jihadi fighters.
To counter the demolishing of Grozny and
therefore eliminate the visual evidence of its
intensely painful recent history, Moscow gaudily
rebuilt the town at breakneck speed. But as the
Kremlin began to reassert its grip over Grozny,
the insurgency it knew and thought it had soundly
defeated had become decentralized, spreading far
and wide across the region. Russia had
relentlessly chipped away at Chechen
ethno-linguistic nationalism with deadly effect.
The result has given rise to a much
broader Islamist insurgency calling itself the
Caucasus Emirate, led by an ambitious Islamist
commander called "Emir" Doku Umarov. The Kremlin
successfully crushed the dream of an independent
Chechen state and this victory gave birth to the
dream of an Islamic state stretching from the
Caspian Sea nearly to the shores of the Black Sea.
In Syria today, a rebellion that began
with men claiming to fight for a new Syria free of
Ba'athist dictatorship now increasingly shares the
battlefield with men seeking to carve out a strict
Sunni Islamic state in traditionally pluralist
Syria.
Russia, with its decades of
battling well-funded Islamist insurgencies in
Afghanistan and Chechnya, also believes Western
policy makers are naive about the genuine
religio-political dynamics of the Muslim world and
that both Russia and the West will face an
unforeseen salafi-jihadi terrorist blowback from
the collective Arab uprisings.
Russia and
China in their role as historic land-based empires
have had perennially insecure peripheries plagued
by irredentist minorities with recurring
nationalist movements, and are unlikely to
acquiesce to any Western-led intervention
initiative of any sort.
To onlookers,
Moscow and Beijing may appear to be showing
solidarity with fellow authoritarians or simply
fearing the loss of established economic
interests. They view themselves, however, as
defenders of the infallible precept of national
sovereignty against the perceived threat of
internationalist intervention projects - with one
eye on their own internal colonies in Chechnya and
Tibet. Preserving the status quo in Syria has
become their new "red line".
That Putin
was the first world leader to phone George W Bush
after the 9/11 attacks in New York was not
happenstance. Russian leaders were eager to
conflate their ongoing war against separatists in
the troubled Caucasus with the advent of the
sudden, boundless American-led "war on terror".
The United States greatly tamped down its
critiques of Russia's brutal tactics in Chechnya
in exchange for Russian cooperation in the then
new global war.
Russia seeks to fend off
any form of military intervention anywhere in its
present or former spheres of influence, with Syria
now chiefly among these interests. Thus far, China
has followed suit with its stated policy of
non-interference in Syria, indicative of its own
anxiety regarding outside meddling in the nagging
Taiwan and Tibet questions.
The
deleterious effects of the two Chechen wars
reverberate in press reports in Syria to this day,
with unverified accounts of "Chechens" being among
the foreign fighters streaming toward the front
lines in Syria. The Russian government and its
security services have for years propagated the
idea that Chechens are among the most deadly and
widely dispersed of transnational jihadis.
From Pakistani generals depicting tales of
dead Chechens identified following
counter-insurgency operations in North Waziristan
to US Marines believing they were in battle
against Chechen nationals in al-Anbar Governorate
in Iraq, the cliche of the borderless,
bloodthirsty Chechen fighter has now spread to
Syria.
What these reports often fail to
mention is that Syria, like Iraq, Jordan and
Turkey, has a Chechen diaspora dating back to the
czarist conquest of the Caucasus that took place
during the 19th century and in which Chechens were
pushed into the territories of the former Ottoman
empire.
In late January, Asia Times Online
met a "fixer" for the Free Syrian Army in Antakya,
Turkey, who was an ethnic Chechen indigenous to
northwestern Syria. He was dually proud of being
both a Syrian and a Chechen. In the highly
fractious Levant region, such an encounter is not
at all unusual.
Despite the reports
emanating from northern Syria, the archetype of
the roaming Chechen jihadi may have finally
outlived its usefulness. In the lead up to the
2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, to the west of
Chechnya, the Kremlin has gone to great pains to
portray Chechnya as a stable, revitalized
constituent republic led by Ramzan Kadyrov,
Putin's strongman in the Caucasus. Nonetheless,
the meme of the "Chechen trace" promoted for years
by the FSB, the successor organization to the
Soviet KGB, persists.
While Russia was
effectively thrown out of Iraq during the
Anglo-American invasion of 2003, incurring huge
financial losses in terms of arms and energy, it
is trying to move back into Iraq via its principal
state weapons-systems exporter, Rosoboronexport. A
recent arms deal reportedly worth US$4.2 billion
with the government of Prime Minister Nuri
al-Maliki has been in the works, which
demonstrates Moscow's strong desire for influence
in the new Arab order.
On November 10,
Reuters reported a story about the very Byzantine
nature of the Rosoboronexport deal, stating that
Maliki's office had cancelled or at least
postponed the deal while it examined allegations
of graft; at the same time, the acting defense
minister, Sadoon al-Dulaimi, insisted the deal was
to go ahead as planned.
Dulaimi then told
a press conference that Iraq needed to "diversify
its sources" in order to avoid over reliance on
any one supplier (ie the United States), and to
undermine the influence of the well-armed militia
politics endemic to Iraq's fissiparous political
system, according to Voice of America.
With Syria already very much dependent on
legacy Soviet arms makes and models, there is
nothing to indicate Moscow wouldn't continue to
sell weapons systems to a post-Assad Damascus as
it is trying to do in a post-Saddam Iraq. Maliki
is a swing voter between American military
expansionism in the Middle East and the Kremlin's
struggle to stay relevant in an Arab world that is
radically reordering itself.
Unlike Iran,
Iraq cannot stand 100% unflinchingly behind Assad
because of Baghdad's still being heavily tethered
to the United States military-industrial complex.
Washington is still very much the Maliki
government's number-one arms supplier ahead of
Moscow. Within the US bureaucracy however, these
priorities between ideological humanitarianism and
cold military realpolitik eventually collide.
While the US Congress can busily bash and
sanction an entity like Rosoboronexport for arming
the Syrian and Iranian regimes, the Pentagon's
procurers have no such ideological luxury because
they require their Cold War foes to supply the
wobbly Afghan Air Force with Mi-17 helicopters in
order to enable an American exit from Afghanistan.
On May 9, Bloomberg News quoted Daryl
Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control
Association in Washington DC, as describing the
highly counterproductive fissure over the
Rosoboronexport conundrum between a sanction-happy
congress and a desperately pragmatic Pentagon as
"... an embarrassing dilemma."
The present
international security architecture dating from
the ashes of World War II will ensure that - with
the entrenched schism between the US, UK and
France on one side and Russia (followed by China)
on the other - the Syrian war will become as
intractable as possible before coming to what will
likely be a very bloody resolution.
It
also has the possibility of attaining a more
problematic regional dimension of formally pulling
in the peripheries of neighboring states such as
Lebanon and Turkey, somewhat analogous to the
diffusion of insurgency from being firmly rooted
in Chechen nationalism to a pulling in a swath of
neighboring republics in the name of forming a
Islamic emirate across the whole of the North
Caucasus.
And just as jihadi activists in
Persian Gulf monarchies funneled Wahhabi money and
fighters into the Caucasus to combat Russian
"infidels" in the 1990s and early 2000s, they do
so now with Syria, the key difference perhaps
being that this is now being done openly with
their state security apparatuses coupled with the
consent of Western intelligence agencies.
With the rise of political and sectarian
violence in Lebanon's North and Bekaa
Governorates, shells being lobbed into Turkey's
vulnerable southern provinces and a sharp rise in
PKK activity across the region, this frightening
scenario may already be in the process of being
realized.
Derek Henry Flood is a
freelance journalist specializing in the Middle
East and South and Central Asia and has covered
many of the world's conflicts since 9/11 as a
frontline reporter. He blogs at the-war-diaries.com.
Follow Derek on Twitter @DerekHenryFlood
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