As the latest attempt at U.S.-Russian cooperation in Syria goes up in flames, the back story includes Pentagon resistance to the plan and the bloody U.S. airstrike on a Syrian military outpost, reports Gareth Porter for Middle East Eye.
By Gareth Porter
Another US-Russian Syria ceasefire deal has been blown up. Whether it could have survived even with a U.S.-Russian accord is open to doubt, given the incentives for Al Qaeda and its allies to destroy it. But the politics of the U.S.-Russian relationship played a central role in the denouement of the second ceasefire agreement.
The final blow may have came from the Russian-Syrian side, but what provoked the decision to end the ceasefire was the first ever U.S. strike against Syrian government forces on Sept. 17. That convinced the Russians that the Pentagon had no intention of implementing the main element of the deal that was most important to the Putin government: a joint U.S.-Russian air campaign against the Islamic State militant group and Al Qaeda through a “Joint Implementation Center.” And it is entirely credible that it was meant to do precisely that.
U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter.
The Russians had a powerful incentive to ensure that the ceasefire would hold, especially around Aleppo. In the new ceasefire agreement, Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov had negotiated an unusually detailed set of requirements for both sides to withdraw their forces from the Castello Road, the main artery for entry into Aleppo from the north. It was understood that the “demilitarization” north of Aleppo was aimed at allowing humanitarian aid to reach the city and was, therefore, the central political focus of the ceasefire.
The Russians put great emphasis on ensuring that the Syrian army would comply with the demilitarization plan. It had established a mobile observation post on the road on Sept. 13. And both the Russians and Syrian state television reported that the Syrian army had withdrawn its heavy weaponry from the road early on Sept. 15, including video footage showing a bulldozer clearing barbed wire from the road. The Syrian Observatory for Human…