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Russian jets in Syria mean no-fly zone is 'out of the question', warn experts
Vladimir Putin is carrying out Russia's biggest military intervention outside the old Soviet Union for almost 30 years
Russia’s deployment of jet fighters in Syria has effectively destroyed the West’s option of imposing a “no-fly zone” over the country, experts have warned, as the British Defence Secretary said the intervention risked deepening the crisis.
The Kremlin’s operation in Syria amounts to the biggest deployment of Russian forces outside the former Soviet Union since the withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989.
So far, President Vladimir Putin has dispatched about 500 troops to the city of Latakia and the adjacent port of Tartous on Syria’s Mediterranean coast.
He has also deployed 28 warplanes, 15 military helicopters – including MI-24 gunships – and at least two batteries of SA-22 surface-to-air missiles. Four of the warplanes are SU-27 Flanker fighters, which are designed for air-to-air combat.
Michael Fallon suggested the operation was an added obstacle to peace in Syria. “The Russian action in the last few weeks, putting ships and aircraft into the region, further complicates an immensely complicated situation,” he said.
Russia’s declared purpose is to help Bashar al-Assad’s regime to fight the terrorists of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil). But neither Isil nor any other rebel group in Syria possesses air power. The SU-27 jets and the SA-22 missiles have no military use against Isil.
Instead, their arrival is designed to send a pointed signal to the West, according to Jonathan Eyal, the director of international security studies at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI). “What the Russians are putting in now indicates an intent to be there for a long period,” he said.
The deployment of the SU-27s was the “key” to gauging Mr Putin intentions, added Mr Eyal. Their presence makes it impossible for the West to impose a “no-fly zone” over Syria, at least without Russia’s consent.
 “If you are talking about a no-fly zone over the whole of Syria, that’s probably out of the question now,” said Mr Eyal. “The effect of this is to make sure that Russia is locked in to any kind of deal that is going to take place there.”
The arrival of Russian firepower in support of Assad’s regime has already compelled America to deal directly with the Kremlin over Syria. Ashton Carter, the US defence secretary, has spoken to his Russian counterpart about the situation in Syria. President Barack Obama, meanwhile, is expected to meet Mr Putin at the United Nations General Assembly in New York later this month.
More evidence of the Kremlin's military build-up emerged on Tuesday when IHS Jane's, a defence consultancy, said that two more bases were being prepared to "receive Russian forces". Satellite pictures showed that construction work was underway at Istamo weapons storage complex and Al-Sanobar military base, both located north of the airport in Latakia where the Russian warplanes are located. "These new discoveries highlight how the rapid build-up of Russia’s expeditionary force in Syria is continuing apace, giving it a significant capability to target rebels opposed to the Syrian government and to secure the Latakia homeland of President Bashar al-Assad," said IHS Jane's.
Mr Fallon said: "Thousands of people have already been killed, millions are being displaced. You have a regime that is barrel-bombing its own citizens and you have Isil with its own brand of barbarity. So it is urgent that we find a way through to bring peace to that particular country. The Russian intervention certainly makes the situation even more complicated."
Following the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader, Mr Fallon indicated the Government would need the support of rebel Labour MPs to win any Commons vote on extending RAF air strikes against Isil into neighbouring Syria.
"The Prime Minister has made it very clear that to extend our operations into Syria we need the support of Parliament and we will not go and ask for that support until we are sure of getting it. We will have to make the argument on both sides of the House," he said.
Mr Fallon added that Russia’s ambitions had made the world a more dangerous place than it was five years ago. “We’ve seen a revanchist Russia reheating the Cold War, menacing its neighbours and increasingly using hybrid warfare to pursue its goals,” he said.


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/11883107/Russian-jets-in-Syria-mean-no-fly-zone-is-out-of-the-question-warn-experts.html








Equating Assad & ISIS West helps to prolong conflict

Russia’s military support for Syria can only be considered controversial or wrong to those who maintain that a moral equivalence exists between ISIS and the Assad government.
Prolonging the conflict in Syria and the suffering of the Syrian people is a direct result of the mendacity and perfidy that informs the West’s stance towards the region. Indeed the lack of any moral clarity, leadership, and competence on the part of Western governments has been nothing short of criminal, with scant evidence of it changing anytime soon. Only in an upside down world could any equivalence be drawn between ISIS in Syria and the Assad government. Yet this is exactly the equivalence that the West continues to make, thus hampering efforts to destroy a movement that is intent on turning the clock back in Syria to the seventh century, embracing inhuman levels of butchery and barbarity in the process.
ISIS is the Khmer Rouge of our time, holding to a similar objective of turning an entire nation into a cultural, human, and physical desert. It revels in its cruelty and bestiality, enslaves and rapes women on a grand scale, and has been allowed to grow to the point where it now constitutes a direct threat to centuries of human progress. Thus we are talking about an organization that has no program that can be negotiated with, nothing to offer except carnage and chaos, making its complete and total destruction a non-negotiable condition of saving millions of people from a horrific fate.
In contradistinction to ISIS the Assad government is secular, believes in modernity, and upholds the rights of minorities, both Muslim and non-Muslim. More crucially, regardless of the huge campaign of demonization that has been unleashed against it in the West, it retains the support of its people, who understand more than any Western diplomat, politician, or ideologue the nature of the struggle they have been engulfed in these past four and half years.
Yet just as when it came to Saddam Hussein and Iraq, along with Muammar Gaddafi and Libya, we are being bombarded with the inference that Syria consists of one man in the shape of its leader. This narrative is employed to condition and shape domestic public opinion when it comes to currying support for seeing said leader’s removal, even though the empirical evidence of Iraq and Libya’s descent into an abyss of sectarian violence, mayhem, and societal collapse is undeniable in this regard.


Assad's crime is not that he is a dictator or that he is oppressing his own people, as his detractors would have us believe - else why on earth does the West count among its closest regional allies Saudi Arabia, arguably the most corrupt, venal and barbaric regime in the world today? The problem with the Assad government in Syria is that it has long been marked for regime change as a pole of resistance to a US hegemonic agenda going back to the Bush administration. It is an agenda being driven most vigorously by US regional allies such as Israel, the aforementioned Saudis, and Turkey in pursuit of their own interests, which are self-evidently inimical to achieving stability.
There is no and never has been a fully formed liberal democracy waiting in the wings to take over in Syria, just as there wasn't in Iraq or Libya when it came to either Saddam Hussein or Muammar Gaddafi. But even so, like a blind man groping and lurching around a china shop, the West remains attached to a blinkered strategy that only succeeds in sowing mayhem with each step it takes in pursuit of it.
Russia’s rational and coherent alternative stands in marked contrast. President Putin has been calling for an international coalition to combat terrorism and extremism for some years now and been continually rebuffed. He has also been calling for a diplomatic and political solution to the conflict in Syria, but again those efforts have been continually thwarted by Western leaders whose obduracy is literally killing people, in addition to creating the worst refugee crisis the world has seen since the Second World War.
Russia’s refusal to relinquish its support for Syria, despite coming under huge pressure to do so and instead to increase that support demonstrates commendable principle and courage given the risks involved. It will undoubtedly have a significant impact on the ground, raising the morale of the Syrian Arab Army and the Syrian people, whose courage and tenacity has been extraordinary. Not only have they resisted an invasion of the country by thousands of foreign extremists and jihadists, they have done so in the teeth of massive external pressure from the West throughout.
The barbarians are at the gates with Russia, and Russia alone, heeding the call to intervene in order to save not just the Syrian Government or Syria, but civilization itself.

http://www.rt.com/op-edge/316204-syria-isis-russia-assad/