Syria Superthread [merged]

[Altair]

So is Putin essentially abandoning Assad with this withdrawal? No more Russian Hinds and Frogfoots engaged in CAS in support of the Syrian Army against ISIS?

Defense News

I have notices that Ukraine has been pretty quiet with a chuck of Russian forces in Syria.

I wonder if that changes now.

 

[a_majoor]

And more on the withdrawl from the Guardian:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/14/vladimir-putin-orders-withdrawal-russian-troops-syria

Vladimir Putin orders Russian forces to begin withdrawal from Syria
Russian president says soldiers should begin pulling out of country as military intervention has largely achieved its aims

Vladimir Putin announces withdrawal of Russian troops from Syria
Patrick Wintour in Geneva and Shaun Walker in Moscow
Tuesday 15 March 2016 07.11 GMT Last modified on Tuesday 15 March 2016 10.37 GMT

The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has abruptly declared that he is withdrawing the majority of Russian troops from Syria, saying the six-month military intervention had largely achieved its objective.

The news on Monday, relayed personally to the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, in a telephone call from Putin, followed a meeting in the Kremlin with the Russian defence and foreign ministers. He said the pullout, scaling back an intervention that began at the end of September, is due to start on Tuesday.

His move was clearly designed to coincide with the start of Syrian peace talks in Geneva and will be seen as a sign that Russia believes it has done enough to protect Assad’s regime from collapse.

More on this topicSyria's civil war: five years of Guardian reporting

Putin said he had ordered his diplomatic staff to step up their efforts to achieve a settlement to end the civil war which has cost at least 250,000 lives and is due to enter its sixth year on Tuesday.

Western diplomatic sources were both sceptical and startled by Putin’s unexpected and mercurial move. “We will have to wait and see what this represents. It is Putin. He has announced similar concessions in the past and nothing materialised,” a diplomat at the talks in Geneva told the Guardian.

Putin and US President Barack Obama spoke on the phone on Monday, with the Kremlin saying the two leaders “called for an intensification of the process for a political settlement” to the conflict. The White House said Obama welcomed the reduction in violence since the beginning of the cessation of hostilities but “underscored that a political transition is required to end the violence in Syria.”

Syrian activists and rights groups have accused the Russian campaign of indiscriminate attacks and causing enormous civilian casualties, something Russian officials have repeatedly denied. Moscow has also come under fire for targeting moderate opposition groups, while claiming to be fighting Islamic State.

The Syrian opposition delegation had been given no notice of Putin’s announcement but said it hoped it was a potential signal that the Russian president was demonstrating that he, and not Assad, would decide any endgame in Syria.

“If there is seriousness in implementing the withdrawal, it will give the talks a positive push,” said Salim al-Muslat, spokesman for the rebel high negotiations committee. “If this is a serious step, it will form a major element of pressure on the regime, because the Russian support prolonged the regime. Matters will change significantly as a result of that.”

The talks are likely to be deadlocked on the extent to which Assad will be allowed to remain in power during any political transition and after any fresh UN-supervised presidential elections due in 18 months.

More on this topicThe Guardian view on the refugee crisis: dial down the rhetoric, and have the difficult debate | Editorial

In a statement announcing the withdrawal, the Kremlin said Putin and Assad agreed that the actions of Russia’s air force in Syria had allowed them to “profoundly reverse the situation” in connection to fighting terrorists in the region, having “disorganised militants’ infrastructure and inflicted fundamental damage upon them”.

“The effective work of our military created the conditions for the start of the peace process,” Putin added. “I believe that the task put before the defence ministry and Russian armed forces has, on the whole, been fulfilled. With the participation of the Russian military … the Syrian armed forces and patriotic Syrian forces have been able to achieve a fundamental turnaround in the fight against international terrorism and have taken the initiative in almost all respects.”

Moscow will, however, maintain a military presence in Syria, and a deadline for complete withdrawal has not yet been announced. Putin said that the existing Russian airbase in Hmeymim in Syria’s coastal province of Latakia and a naval facility in the Syrian port of Tartous would continue to operate. The Russian air force has been capable of running 100 sorties a day from the base and would be able quickly to re-equip it if it felt the military balance required it to do so.

The Russian defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, said on Monday the intervention had led to the death of 2,000 rebels fighting against the Syrian government and the killing of 17 field commanders. He added that more than 200 oil installations had been attacked, 400 settlements taken and the chief route to supply rebel fighters from Turkey had been cut off.

Russian airstrikes killed 4,408 people including 1,733 civilians between September 2015 and early March 2016, according to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Given that Russia-backed separatists launched one of their biggest offensives in Ukraine in February 2015, just as Putin joined other world leaders in negotiating a ceasefire, there will undoubtedly be scepticism over whether the announcement of the end of the Syrian mission can be taken at face value. However, Russia’s overarching goal of securing a lead seat at the table over the fate of Syria has clearly been achieved. A withdrawal will prevent the inevitable “mission creep” that appeared to be on the cards.

“Essentially, they’ve achieved their goals,” said Mark Galeotti, professor of global affairs at New York University and currently based in Moscow. “They’ve stabilised the regime, turned momentum round on the battlefield so the regime has the upper hand, and now we’ve got a ceasefire and political talks.”

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As the talks opened in Geneva, Staffan de Mistura, the UN special envoy for Syria, reminded negotiators that a whole generation of Syrian children – more than 3.5 million under the age of five – had never experienced anything but war. De Mistura will brief the UN security council meeting in New York in a closed session from Geneva and his aides were making no initial response to the Russian move.

Western governments, along with Turkey and Saudi Arabia, have repeatedly accused Putin of deploying his air force not to bomb Isis targets but rebel forces including the moderate Free Syrian army, often hitting schools and hospitals. Earlier this month, Nato’s military commander in Europe, General Philip Breedlove, accused Putin of “deliberately weaponising” the refugee crisis from Syria in an attempt to overwhelm Europe.

Muslat, meanwhile, has denied the Russian intervention has seriously weakened the opposition’s negotiating hand. Speaking to the Guardian, he said: “We are closer to a solution now more than ever. We have been patient and we hope to see something in the coming few days, at least some light at the end of the tunnel that says at this, or that, time there will be something for the Syrians.

“Before, we saw all doors closed; now we see some doors open. We want to see an end to the nightmare. We want to see it today and before tomorrow. The future of Syria should be decided here and decided very soon.”

He claimed the shaky two-week ceasefire and the start of humanitarian convoys was changing the atmosphere inside Syria. But in a sign of how perilous the talks are likely to become, the Syrian foreign minister, Walid Muallem, set out the government’s determination to keep Assad’s future out of the talks. “We will not talk with anyone who wants to discuss the presidency ... Bashar al-Assad is a red line.”

Muslat countered: “The political transition process has to be without Assad. You do not want to keep a murderer who has killed half a million people and destroyed a country. There is no place for Assad in Syria. He is not acceptable to the Syrian people.”

Significantly, he added that it might be possible for Assad to remain for a period if there was a clear guarantee that he would stand down. “At the least, we have to see something that Assad will go and we do not want to hear from Russia that nobody should discuss the future of Assad.”

He stressed Assad “could not be a member of any transitional governing body”.

 

[The Bread Guy]

I have notices that Ukraine has been pretty quiet with a chuck of Russian forces in Syria.

I wonder if that changes now.

op:

 

[Altair]

op:

Russian soldiers should be owed some leave after this deployment.  We all know what Russians soldiers do on leave.

 

[PuckChaser]

I have notices that Ukraine has been pretty quiet with a chuck of Russian forces in Syria.

I wonder if that changes now.

Could be that Russia was unable to support 2 warfighting deployments at the same time, which is very telling considering how close Ukraine is.

 

[MilEME09]

Could be that Russia was unable to support 2 warfighting deployments at the same time, which is very telling considering how close Ukraine is.

Reading a lot of news about Ukraine lately, many in NATO and Ukraine are monitoring build ups, intelligence is showing training for an amphibious assault on Mariupol, so a spring offensive by the separatists is being well anticipated and likely. Never was a ceasefire in reality on the ground, just a calm period.

 

[George Wallace]

I suppose "Winter" has a calming affect.  (Now the climatologists are going to declare Global Warming as a factor in the outbreak of hostilities.)

 

[Ostrozac]

Never was a ceasefire in reality on the ground, just a calm period.

It's called winter.

Nobody likes to go on the offensive in the winter. It happens sometimes (the Chinese offensive in North Korea during the winter of 1950-51 immediately comes to mind) but both sides digging in for the winter is pretty common in extended warfare.

 

[tomahawk6]

Or Putin is confident of the outcome of peace talks.

 

[The Bread Guy]

Back to Syria, a couple of updates:

• "Splinter!" (1):  "The Syrian Kurdistan (commonly known as Rojava) are expected today to declare a ‘federalism system’ in the north of Syria, said a Syrian Kurdish official.  The Syrian Kurdish authorities are allegedly to bring the three cantons under one federal system that would mean "widening the framework of self-administration which the Kurds and others have formed," Reuters reported, citing Idris Nassan, an official in the foreign affairs directorate of Kobani ..." (map attached)
• "Splinter!" (2)  "Syrian government representatives have ruled out starting direct negotiations with the opposition, as UN-backed peace talks entered a third day in Geneva.  On Tuesday, opposition leaders said they were ready to meet face-to-face.  But chief government negotiator Bashar al-Jaafari rejected the idea, calling his opposition counterpart a terrorist ..."

 

[CougarKing]

The full article doesn't state what kind of artillery...2S1 Gvozdika self-propelled guns?  ???

Reuters

Russia pulls most strike aircraft from Syria, now using artillery: U.S.
Reuters
March 18, 2016 12:59 PM

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Russia has withdrawn most of its strike aircraft from Syria, the U.S. military said on Friday, adding that it was now entirely carrying out strikes in support of Syrian government forces using artillery instead of aircraft.

"They still have helicopters and some transport aircraft. But what we've seen is that the majority of Russian strike aircraft have left Syria," Colonel Patrick Ryder, a spokesman at the U.S. military's Central Command, told Pentagon reporters.

Ryder said the United States had not seen Russia carrying out any air strikes in recent days, including around the Syrian city of Palmyra and was instead using artillery.

(...SNIPPED)

 

[The Bread Guy]

The full article doesn't state what kind of artillery...2S1 Gvozdika self-propelled guns?  ???

Reuters

Here's a tidbit from a Reuters story about a map from November of last year:

... The map was shown on Russian state television footage of a briefing at defense ministry headquarters on Tuesday evening, when Putin was being shown how the Kremlin was intensifying its operations against Islamic State.

Spotted by an eagle-eyed Russian military blogger, the map featured a dot near to the settlement of Sadad, between the cities of Homs and Damascus, accompanied by the words: "5 Gabatr 120th ABR 2A65 Msta B, six pieces from 14:00 06.11."

"Gabatr" is an acronym commonly used in the Russian military for "Howitzer Battery." The acronym "ABR" stands for "Artillery Brigade". The designation "2A65 Msta B" describes a type of howitzer in use by the Russian military.

The Russian military has a 120th artillery brigade, based in Siberia armed with 2A65 guns. A duty serviceman contacted by Reuters on Wednesday confirmed the brigade was based in Siberia, but said he did not know whether it was active in Syria ...

The map in question (attached) appears to have been shared by Jane's:

The Russian Ministry of Defence has confirmed US claims that it has deployed helicopters and artillery deep into Syria.

The apparently unintentional confirmation came during a televised briefing on 17 November that included a close-up of a map showing the military situation around the towns of Sadad and Mahin in Homs province, where Russia is helping Syrian government forces repel an offensive by the Islamic State.

The deployments marked on the map included four Mi-24 attack helicopters and one Mi-8 utility helicopter at Al-Shayrat Air Base and a unit of the 120th Artillery Brigade deployed at a Syrian Arab Army (SAA) base just to the south with six 152 mm 2A65 Msta-B towed howitzers.

From that position, the guns could cover both the airbase and provide fire support to Syrian forces operating around Mahin, 25 km to the southeast ...

This ORBAT (RUSI) shows the following:

... -- Six 2A65 Msta-B towed howitzers from the howitzer battery of the 8th Artillery Regiment (Simferopol, Crimea) – seventy men
-- Eighteen 2A65 Msta-B howitzers from the howitzer battalion of the 120th Artillery Brigade (Kemerovo, Siberia) – 270 men
-- Four 9A52 Smerch vehicles forming two MLRS batteries which might originate from the 439th Guards Rocket Artillery Brigade (Znamensk, Astrakhan Province) – 50–60 men ...

 

[tomahawk6]

The presence of 2 North Korean Army units has been revealed.A bit surprising but its the middle east for you. :camo:

http://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2016/03/22/North-Korea-troops-fighting-in-Syrian-civil-war-delegate-says/1021458696828/

 

[ueo]

I think worrisome is a better term.

 

[tomahawk6]

US Special Operations personnel surrounded IS Finance Minister and #2 in his car in Syria.He was given a chance to surrender,instead he opened fire and he died in a hail of bullets.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/03/25/backstory-behind-terror-takedown.html?intcmp=hpbt1

 

[CBH99]

Anybody else call total BS on the North Korean troop thing?

 

[winnipegoo7]

North Korea has had a long military relationship with Syria. It seems likely that some North Korean soldiers are there. The real question is how many and in what capacity.

 

[Altair]

Wonder what would happen if some north Korean troops got captured by a group like isil.

Now I don't wish that fate on anybody but it would be interesting to see how the dear leader reacts to his men in a isil propoganda video.

 

[tomahawk6]

Supported by Russian forces the Syrian Army has retaken Palmyra.IS forces only line of retreat is towards Iraq,so out in the open they should be destroyed in detail.

http://news.yahoo.com/syrian-troops-drive-historic-palmyra-063630529.html?nf=1

 

[Retired AF Guy]

Anybody else call total BS on the North Korean troop thing?

Back in 2012 the UN was investigating reports that, among things, accused the N. Koreans of  illegally supplying weapons to Syria. Other reports, including one in 2013 have also mentioned a small number of N. Korean soldiers in Syria acting as advisors but so far nothing confirmed.

So, it is possible, but I, like you, remain a little doubtful.