Fighting in Syria may have decreased while the international community tried to arrange an end to the war but make no mistake, it is not over.
In Idlib, the South Aleppo Front, Damascus’ suburbs and East of the Euphrates in Deir az-Zour the fighting is still commonplace, while Russian troops were recently attacked at the Khmeimim base in Latakia.
Still many governments have sent their ambassadors back to Damascus, thinking that peace is on the horizon and that Bashar Assad and his fellow dictators in the Iranian Regime had crushed the opposition.
This has also caused those who are claiming victory, i.e. the Syrian army and Iranian mercenaries, to ignore the Geneva conference as they think the Sochi negotiations will provide them with a win and allow things to return to their pre-2011 state.
Iran has even increased its military presence in Syria, and increased its armament of Hezbollah, which insinuates that the Regime sees the opportunity to increase its influence in Syria very soon.
This behaviour, however, is likely to restart the war in the places where fighting has decreased.
David Satterfield, the acting assistant secretary at the American Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, said that the US opposes Iran’s presence in Syria, but if that is true, then why does the US not do something about it?
Even without the support of Turkey (an important ally against the Syrian Regime which the US recently lost), the US has enough allies and enough military might to get Iran out of Syria, either through diplomatic or military methods.
Abdulrahman al-Rashed, the former General Manager of Al Arabiya News Channel, wrote on Al Arabiya: “As long as the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and its foreign militias are stationing in Syria, we will witness a new round of the Syrian war. It will be like quicksand that’s centred against Iranian forces.”
While Russian troops are still in Syria on behalf of Assad and in alliance with Iran, Satterfield believes that they will soon withdraw once they see that the war does not serve their long-term interests.
Rashed wrote: “The Iranian-Syrian-Russian tripartite wanted to quickly plan a peace deal in Sochi while benefitting from regional and American leniency and military progress. They could have done so but it’s very difficult to ignore and overlook the Iranian factor which Washington thinks confronting it is part of its strategy that did not exit a few months ago.”
Source » ncr-iran