By Ben Hubbard , Anton Troianovski , Carlotta Gall and Patrick Kingsley, Oct.16, 2019
As the United States withdraws from Syria, Russia is stepping in, running patrols to separate warring factions, striking deals and helping President Bashar al-Assad advance.
DOHUK, Iraq — Russia asserted itself in a long-contested part of Syria on Tuesday after the United States pulled out, giving Moscow a new opportunity to press for Syrian army gains and project itself as a rising power broker in the Middle East.
Russian and Syrian troops drove through a key town where the United States had held sway and picked over abandoned American outposts to announce their presence in the area and deter the Turkish incursion that began last week.
The Russian advance, enabled by President Trump’s decision last week to withdraw, may boost Russia’s Syrian ally, President Bashar al-Assad, while blunting the Turkish incursion. It was a telling demonstration of how influence over the eight-year-old conflict in Syria has shifted from the United States to Russia. But in this case, there appeared to be little balance left in the Americans’ favor.
“Look at how they were preparing the base,” a Russian-speaking reporter said in a video shot inside an abandoned American outpost in northeastern Syria, its water tanks, communication towers, tents and fridges full of soda all left behind. “They thought they were going to be here for a long time.”
The abrupt order by Mr. Trump to remove United States military personnel from the area set off days of violence that sent more than 150,000 civilians fleeing, shattered the American partnership with Syria’s Kurds, raised fears about an Islamic State revival and allowed Mr. Assad’s troops, backed by their Russian allies, to sweep up new territory without a fight.
Pentagon concern about the safety of the departing United States forces amid the chaos in northern Syria intensified, as seen in a low-flying buzz of a Turkish-backed militia on Tuesday by American Apache helicopter gunships. The militia was about four miles from the Americans at the time of the incident, which was first reported by Fox News and confirmed by an American military official.
Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo plan to meet with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey in Ankara on Thursday. The White House said Mr. Pence and Mr. Pompeo would relay Mr. Trump’s demand that Mr. Erdogan negotiate a cease-fire in Syria and reiterate the president’s threat to impose economic sanctions if he does not comply.
It remained unclear on Tuesday whether President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia intended to keep his forces in the area indefinitely. But for Russia, the reshuffling of northeastern Syria, which had in recent years been a virtual American protectorate, yielded two main benefits. It empowered Mr. Assad, a longtime Russian patron, to accelerate his quest to regain control of all of Syria’s territory, and gave Mr. Putin another place to advertise Russia as a good friend to have in the Middle East.
“What’s happening now is a very complicated knot being untied,” said Aleksandr Shumilin, a Middle East specialist at the Institute of Europe of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. “This is an unexpected gift for Putin.”
As the United States has sought to reduce its commitments across the region, Mr. Putin has increasingly cast Russia as a worthy alternative. On Tuesday, as American troops were leaving their bases near the Syrian town of Manbij, Mr. Putin was on a state visit to the United Arab Emirates after a trip to Saudi Arabia the day before.
Throughout the war in Syria, Russia has been Mr. Assad’s most loyal foreign backer, protecting him from sanctions by the United Nations and sending Russian troops to support his forces and jets to bomb his enemies.
As of last month, Russia’s assistance had helped restore Mr. Assad’s control over most of Syria, the largest exception being the northeast, where the United States had partnered with a Kurdish-led militia to fight the Islamic State and had maintained a contingent of about 1,000 troops, in part to keep Mr. Assad away.
But that changed last Wednesday when Turkey launched its military incursion, setting off new violence that sent American troops scrambling to get out of the way. Feeling betrayed by the Americans, the Kurds made a deal with Mr. Assad that would put his army along the Turkish border.
The United States has begun moving its troops onto bases elsewhere in Syria as the first stage in a near total withdrawal from the country.
On Tuesday, the United States and its international allies used a single tweet to announce their departure from Manbij, a contested area where they had sought to prevent fighting between their Kurdish-led militia allies and Syrian fighters backed by Turkey.
“Coalition forces are executing a deliberate withdrawal from northeast Syria,” Col. Myles B. Caggins III, a spokesman for the coalition, wrote. “We are out of Manbij.”
Syrian government forces soon drove through town with tanks and Russian military vehicles, residents said, before digging throughnearby outposts and expressing surprise at how much the Americans had left behind.
“I am on an American base where they were just yesterday morning, and this morning we’re here,” Oleg Blokhin, a pro-Kremlin reporter embedded with Russian troops in Syria, said in a video on his Facebook page. “Now we’ll take a look at how they lived, what they were doing.”
Another video posted by Anna News, a pro-Kremlin outlet, declared “Manbij is ours!” and gave a virtual tour of the base. A wireless router sat on a desk and cables hung from an office ceiling. A tube of Pringles and a bag of animal crackers lay on a table. A military canteen was stockpiled with boxes of cereal, multiple bags of bagels and four fridges full of soda and juice boxes.
A post on the outlet’s Telegram channel observed that “the Americans packed so quickly that they left behind some of their property and personal items.” A photo showed a door marked “Emergency Exit.”
Throughout the war, Russia has used means ranging from military force to creative diplomacy to make itself a central player in Syria — at the expense of the United States. In 2015, it dispatched forces to help Mr. Assad by heavily bombing his rebel enemies, turning the overall battle in his favor and away from the opposition supported by the United States. The Russians have repeatedly blunted Western attempts to hold Mr. Assad’s government accountable for using banned chemical weapons.
And to steer diplomacy away from United Nations peace talks the West hoped would remove Mr. Assad, Russia opened an alternative track with Iran and Turkey that sidelined Western nations.
Mr. Shumilin, the analyst, said Russia also had found ways to benefit from Western missteps.
“It must be said that all of Russia’s most significant successes in Syria have not been reached as a result of deliberate efforts by Moscow,” he said. “They simply crashed down onto Putin and Moscow as manna from heaven as a result of the peculiar behavior of the Western countries and of Turkey.”
Mr. Putin had also hoped to use Syria in the service of a broader geopolitical goal: to strengthen ties with Turkey and pull it away from NATO.
“Turkey’s operation drives the wedge even deeper between Turkey and NATO,” Mr. Shumilin said. “That is even more important for Putin.”
The Kremlin said in a statement Tuesday night that Mr. Putin had spoken by phone with Mr. Erdogan, who accepted the Russian leader’s invitation to visit Russia in coming days. The statement also said Mr. Putin had stressed the importance of “avoiding conflict between subdivisions of the Turkish army and Syrian government forces.”
The Russian Defense Ministry said on Tuesday that its military police were patrolling the northwestern borders of the Manbij area to avert clashes between Syrian government troops and Turkish-led forces who were also set on seizing the district.
Russia’s special envoy for Syria, Alexander Lavrentiev, said during Mr. Putin’s visit to Abu Dhabi that Russia and Turkey were in contact to prevent such clashes — a role previously played by the United States.
Mr. Lavrentiev also said Russia was facilitating talks between Mr. Assad’s government and the United States’ erstwhile allies, the Kurdish-led militia.
“If this trend prevails, it will be a big step toward the restoration of sovereignty, territorial integrity, and independence of Syria,” he said.
4 Big Questions About Syria’s Future
The surprise American withdrawal from parts of northern Syria reshuffled old alliances and touched off a new stage of the eight-year war.
Despite an agreement with the Syrian Kurds that would put Syrian government troops on the border with Turkey, they stayed clear of the border region near Ras al-Ain, where Syrian Kurdish troops were fighting alone.
The agreement with Damascus comes at great cost to the Kurdish authorities, who are effectively relinquishing self-rule.
Syrian Kurdish militias established autonomy in northern Syria in 2012, when the chaos of the Syrian civil war gave them the opportunity to create a sliver of independent territory free from the central government.
The fighters greatly expanded their territory after they partnered with a military coalition led by the United States to push the Islamic State from the area.
After the Kurdish-led fighters captured ISIS territory, they assumed responsibility for its governance, eventually controlling roughly a quarter of Syria. They also guard thousands of ISIS fighters in prisons and tens of thousands of their relatives in squalid camps.
The fighting has raised questions about who will ultimately take charge of these people and what will be done with them.
The Kurds’ control of the land in Syria enraged Turkey, since the militia is an offshoot of a anti-Turkish guerrilla group that has waged a decades-long insurgency. Turkey had pressed the United States to abandon its alliance with Kurdish fighters, but Washington rebuffed Turkey’s requests for years.
That all changed last week, when Mr. Trump made a sudden decision to withdraw troops — first from the pathway of the Turkish incursion, and later from all of northeastern Syria.
Turkey’s actions have angered the West. Britain paused arms sales to Turkey on Tuesday, one day after all 28 European Union member states agreed to do so. It was the first time the bloc had reached such a decision about a NATO ally.
But Mr. Erdogan has made clear he will resist pressure to halt the offensive, which has also included the threat of new sanctions by Mr. Trump. Turkey’s NTV television reported Tuesday night that Mr. Erdogan told Mr. Trump he would never declare a cease-fire in northeast Syria and was not concerned about sanctions.
Ben Hubbard reported from Dohuk, Iraq; Anton Troianovski from Moscow; Carlotta Gall from Ceylanpinar, Turkey; and Patrick Kingsley from Istanbul. Reporting was contributed by Ivan Nechepurenko and Oleg Matsnev from Moscow; Hwaida Saad from Beirut, Lebanon; Iliana Magra from London; and Eric Schmitt from Washington.
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Ben Hubbard is the Beirut bureau chief who has spent more than a decade in the Arab world, including Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Yemen.
Anton Troianovski has been a Moscow correspondent for The New York Times since September 2019. He was previously Moscow bureau chief of the Washington Post and spent 9 years with the Wall Street Journal in Berlin and New York.
Carlotta Gall is the Istanbul bureau chief, covering Turkey. She previously covered the aftershocks of the Arab Spring from Tunisia, reported from the Balkans during the war in Kosovo and Serbia, and covered Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Patrick Kingsley is an international correspondent, based in Berlin. He previously covered migration and the Middle East for The Guardian.
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