Another US-Russian Syria ceasefire deal has been blown up.
Whether it could have survived even with a US-Russian accord is open to doubt,
given the incentives for al-Qaeda and its allies to destroy it. But the politics
of the US-Russian relationship played a central role in the denouement of the
second ceasefire agreement.
The final blow apparently came from the Russian-Syrian side, but what provoked
the decision to end the ceasefire was the first ever US strike against Syrian
government forces on
17 September.
That convinced the Russians that the US Pentagon had no intention of implementing
the main element of the deal that was most important to the Putin government:
a joint US-Russian air campaign against the Islamic State (IS) militant group
and al-Qaeda through a “Joint Implementation Center”. And it is entirely credible
that it was meant to do precisely that.
Withdrawal from Castello Road – or not?
The Russians had a powerful incentive to ensure that the ceasefire would hold,
especially around Aleppo.
In the new ceasefire agreement, US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russsian
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 13 September. And both
the Russians and Syrian state television reported
that the Syrian army had withdrawn its heavy weaponry from the road early on
15 September, including video footage showing a bulldozer clearing barbed wire
from the road. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights also
reported the Syrian army had withdrawn from the road.
But al-Qaeda’s newly renamed Jabhat Fateh al-Sham (previously the
al-Nusra Front) had a clear incentive to refuse to comply with a move that could
open the door to a US-Russian campaign against it. Opposition sources in Aleppo
claimed
that no such government withdrawal had happened, and said that opposition units
would not pull back from positions near the road. On the morning of 16 September,
the Syrian army moved
back into positions on the road.
Kerry and Lavrov agreed in a phone conversation that same day that the ceasefire
was still holding, even though humanitarian aid convoys were still stalled in
the buffer zone at the Turkish border because of the lack of permission from
the Syrian government, as well as uncertainty about security on the route to
Aleppo.
But Kerry also told Lavrov that the…