Episode Notes:

Earlier today, the defense ministers from Russia, Syria and Turkey met in Moscow. To tell us what this means for Turkish-Russian relations and for the future of Syria, we’re joined today by Aaron Stein. Aaron is the Chief Content Officer at Metamorphic Media and author of The U.S. War Against ISIS: How America and its Allies Defeated the Caliphate.

[:48] Turkish-Syrian rapprochement?

[2:00] Who has leverage?

[6:04] Russia's role in Syria

[9:38] Turkish-Russian relations

[12:00] U.S. Policy

Episode Transcript:

Nicholas Danforth: My name is Nicholas Danforth and I'm an editor at War On the Rocks. You are listening to the War Cast, the members only podcast for what you need to know, now. Earlier today, the defense ministers from Russia, Syria, and Turkey met in Moscow. Here to tell us what this portends for Russian Turkish relations as well as the future of Syria is Aaron Stein. Aaron is the Chief Content Officer at Metamorphic Media and the author of The US War Against Isis: How America and Its Allies Defeated the Caliphate. Great to have you on.

Aaron Stein: It's good to be on this side of the War Cast. Usually I'm in your role, so that's good to see you Nick.

Nicholas Danforth: It's a good topic we have here. What we've heard a lot of talk over the last couple months about potential rapprochement between President Erdogan and Assad. Is this in the cards?

Aaron Stein: Erdogan has certainly said as such, I mean he said that these meetings would take place in a calibrated and staged manner in which he acknowledged the intelligence to intelligence talks, which I think had been the worst kept secret in Ankara and Damascus and around the world for quite a number of years now. And he said that they could move forward beginning with defense to defense talks, which I think we are just witnessing now. I think to include foreign minister to foreign minister at a later stage and then ultimately holding back, which is the grand carrot, at least from Erdogan's perspective, which is a leader to leader meeting.

And in this context, Erdogan himself was highlighting the role of Moscow as the potential third party here. And so I think the talks being held in Moscow, all the pieces fit together that this is part of that rollout from the Turkish state, prepping the population for what is a relatively large about face in their policy vis-a-vis Bashar al-Assad.

Nicholas Danforth: And, when we've been following this in the past, it seemed like Assad was actually the one that was hesitant to meet with Erdogan. He had specific demands from Turkey, nominally the withdrawal of all Turkish troops on Syrian territory, something that Turkey did not seem eager to oblige. The fact that this meeting is happening at this level right now, is this the result of Russian pressure on Assad to come to the table or to send his defense minister to the table?

Aaron Stein: It certainly seems that way. I think the devil will always be in the details as to what they're discussing. We may get some leaks, particularly from the Russian to the Syrian side about what this is, but my guess is that the ultimate sticking point here will be territorial integrity of Syria itself, as both sides define it. The Turks will define that as joint solidarity against Kurdish groups, and I think the backdrop here is the potential invasion of Syria or renewed invasion of Syria by Turkish forces. And on the Syrian side, it's the presence of thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands of Turkish troops occupying checkpoints all over the place from Idlib all the way out to the Euphrates River and even on places on the other side of the Euphrates River, all part of Turkey's at least four offensives in Syria that began in 2016.

Nicholas Danforth: And so this comes on the heels of a lot of discussion about whether there was going to be a new Turkish offensive in Syria. The U.S. Was against it, Russia was against it, Iran was against it. Is the meeting potentially payoff for Turkish pressure? Is there a sense in which by pushing, by threatening this invasion, which clearly the Assad regime was against, that was something that enabled Russia to basically say, "All right, if you don't come to the table, we're going to green light this Turkish activity."?

Aaron Stein: Yeah, that's the known unknown, and I think that goes both ways as well. Ankara likes to say it doesn't need a green light or permission from anybody to expand its intervention space in Syria. And of course the backdrop here is on November 13th there was a bombing in central Istanbul, Istiklal Street for people who have been there, killing six people, injuring upwards of 80. And Ankara is saying that this attack emanated from Syria itself, and so we need to continue in our efforts to clear out a 30 kilometer zone along the entirety of the border, it's so called safe zone, and to eliminate, as they call it, a terror corridor. Now of course, this goes back to the territorial integrity issue that I was talking about in the previous one. Moving forward, if you really do have a normalization between the two countries, how can you as the Syrian government normalize the presence foreign troops on your soil? Now they may not have any say so over that because they don't have power to oust them, but that's certainly to be a sticking point may be something that could be negotiated in some sort of agreement.

But the Russian role in this is that Ankara learned, particularly from what was ultimately a successful operation, but sort of catastrophically carried out, Operation Euphrates Shield, is that they need continuous air cover over the top of its invading forces. And that Russia, even though it has a diminished capacity, even though it has problems that it's facing in Ukraine, still has leverage in that sense, and it has capable air defense systems in Syria and it still has air assets in Syria and nobody wants horizontal escalation. And so it can "close" the airspace, keeping the Turks at least in negotiations with them on how to de-conflict air operations. And perhaps that was the leverage they used to push this meeting forward. The coming together of Turkish domestic politics, the operations in Syria, and the Russian leverage, however diminished in this case, bringing all three actors together.

Nicholas Danforth: Now, just step back for a minute and talk about that Russian leverage. How big picture here since the start of the war in Ukraine has Russia's position in Syria shifted? I mean both vis-a-vis the actual military assets that it can or has deployed there and it's complicated and evolving relationship with Turkey, which in some ways it is now more dependent on, given the situation in Ukraine?

Aaron Stein: Totally. I mean, the correlation of forces have always favored Turkey. Russia has a small, skinny, expeditionary operation. It's always been sort of a combined fixed-wing regiment, with some air defenses attached to it and all that fun stuff. If you were to stack up the "numbers", of course the Turks have more, they're on the border, but that never really captures the dynamics at play here, which is the two sides are neighbors, they share a maritime border across the Black Sea, and they've become quite symbiotic in terms of how they operate in the region, but also how they're economically intertwined from everything from tourism to agricultural to energy trades. And so it's much more beneficial for the Turks from a number of aspects. Nobody wants escalation between the two sides, least of all Ankara, least of all Moscow, to somehow come to some arrangements.

And so the presence of Russian forces hasn't actually precluded Turkish operations, they've just made Turkish operations have to be calibrated and de-conflicted with Russian forces. And so you often have these back and forth sort of trips and negotiations, usually culminating in Erdogan-Putin phone call. They talk a lot, I always like to say, and that leads the way to at least de-conflict operations in ways that doesn't really threaten the territorial integrity, doesn't threaten the government's control in Damascus. This is no longer a regime changed operation, it's more like these are narrowly calibrated around Turkish counter-terrorism interests that doesn't necessarily impact like the broader trajectory of Russian considerations in Syria, which are to make sure that the regime is ensconced.

And I think that that's the major step back here. So if you were to look at the culmination of Russian-Turkish relations in Syria, that did reach a low point when the Turks shot down a Russian bomber in November, 2015, but the reprisal actions Moscow taken, while not violent, they were economic in nature, forced a Turkish capitulation, and an apology from Erdogan in June, 2016. And following that, you had a recalibration of Turkish interests in Syria where it became less about pushing, using the opposition that it backs to push Bashar out and more about accepting Bashar via an intermediary, in this case, the Russians and the Iranians as a viable negotiating partner with the Turkish-backed opposition and some sort of power sharing arrangement.

And so I very much see this as a continuation of that. Ankara gave up on regime change and so Ankara's operations, again, we're talking about 30 kilometers here, it's not very much territory extending deep into Syria, doesn't actually threaten the regime, and so Moscow and sort of its broader interests can tolerate these actions so long as it gets reciprocal Turkish concessions, which it's so far gotten.

Nicholas Danforth: Now, in March, 2020, we saw there was a conflict between Turkish and Russian forces on the front lines in Idlib. Ultimately, in that situation, Moscow proved willing to directly attack Turkish forces, killed 34 Turkish soldiers, and the result was a ceasefire taking place under Putin's supervision in Moscow. Is that dynamic still in play? I mean, could we see today, would Russia still be willing to do something like that? Is that still a possibility or has that dynamic shifted?

Aaron Stein: Yeah, you're talking about the incident that Ankara doesn't actually acknowledge, right? Which is when one of its outposts in Idlib was bombed by Russian jets killing, what was it? 36 soldiers? And what is a flagrant action by a hostile power. That the context there was also that Turkey responded with a series of airstrikes on Syrian regime forces, largely conducted by drones, and ultimately shot down, I believe, three Syrian jets as a part of its countervailing offensive in idlib to shore up its front lines.

As is always the case in these dynamics with Turkish-Russian relations, it depends on who's telling the story who "won". Right? Some people will say the Russians won because the regime solidified its territorial gains that it carved out and its offensive, and it was able to bomb Turkish forces without reprisal. People who spin the Turkish narrative is that they punished the regime when they were able to stop an offensive before it reached the border. It's really in the eye of the beholder.

I think in this case we're not, we're not talking about Turkish expansion of its territorial control in this one particular area. We're talking about areas that are confined towards Kurdish majority areas, which again, in some cases can impinge on regime interests, but are part of that broader counter-terrorism nexus that Moscow can perhaps tolerate with the greater payoff that Erdogan and Bashar ultimately meet so that its broader, overarching mission in Syria, which was to stand back up the regime when international support actually succeeds throughout the entirety of the Middle East and its adjacent parts to include Turkey.

Nicholas Danforth: Final question here. What are the implications of this for U.S. policy? We saw a media blitz from SDF officials in Washington over the past month, very much trying to get the U.S. more engaged in stopping a potential Turkish offensive. By and large, it seems like for the last two years, the Biden administration has felt like the situation in Syria was sustainable. The U.S. role in Syria was sustainable. If push comes to shove – has push come to shove? – what is this going to require the administration to do? Is this changing the administration's thinking about what their plans are for the region?

Aaron Stein: Again, it's too early to tell, we're in a wait and see mode. The Biden administration's policy is very clear, which is that it tends to retain forces in Syria in a counter-terrorism role in a slimmed down place, and those forces aren't going anywhere. The danger, of course, as always, is that a Turkish intervention, a Turkish invasion like risks sparking off a larger conflict between the U.S. backed forces in Syria and its NATO allies. And so the U.S. continually tries to keep these two sides apart with mixed success.

It will depend on what was agreed or if anything was agreed, and if the Turkish intervention zone expands as an outcome of this. And there's an outcome of this, if that happens, if that upends the U.S. presence via the horizontal escalation of conflicts between Syrian Kurds and Turkish forces. In aggregate, if you were to get some people in the Biden administration say that you had normalization of Turkey with the regime and that normalization didn't entail any significant concessions to Ankara on the Syrian-Kurdish issue, but perhaps wrap the Syrian-Kurdish issue into a broader dialogue to end the conflict, it could actually serve U.S. interests. So it ultimately depends on how it turns out. It's too early to tell, but I ultimately think we'll figure this out in the coming months as the story unfolds.

Nicholas Danforth: And we'll certainly have more coverage of this both on the Warcast and in War On the Rocks over the coming months. Thank you for joining us.

Aaron Stein: My pleasure. Thank you.