In December, the rapid fall of the Syrian government to Western-backed jihadists stunned the world and sparked a wide range of reactions amid the fallout. Unsurprisingly, the collective West was quick to celebrate the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad, a long-time U.S. foreign policy objective billions of dollars in the making. More unexpected were the public comments made by Russian President Vladimir Putin, who dismissed the notion that Assad’s ouster represented a strategic defeat for Moscow.
To the contrary, Putin insisted Russia had achieved its goal in Syria of preventing the creation of a “terrorist enclave similar to what we’ve seen in Afghanistan,” citing the cosmetically rebranded character of the al-Qaeda-affiliated Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) militants who seized power in Damascus. The Saudi-born leader of HTS, Ahmed al-Sharaa—who until recently had a $10 million bounty on his head offered by the U.S. State Department—even dropped his nom de guerre (Abu Mohammad al-Julani) after dissolving the Syrian constitution and appointing himself president.
Now sporting a blazer instead of fatigues and a turban, Sharaa still required a female CNN news anchor to wear hijab for an interview and refused to shake hands with German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock during a state visit. Was Putin’s wishful thinking serious, or was he trying to save face? The Russian parliament recently passed a law allowing the reversal of bans on listed terror groups which would enable Moscow to normalize relations with both the Afghan Taliban and Syria’s new regime.
While the extent to which the so-called “moderate rebels” in Syria have tempered their extremism is highly questionable (as the recent mass killings of Alawites and Christians attest), Putin was speaking from experience. Just a thousand miles from Sochi, one of the primary motivations for the Russian intervention beginning in 2015 was the legitimate security risk of Syria becoming a hotbed of terrorism that could reignite Chechen separatism in the Caucasus.
Hellbound and Down 