Truth is, Russia and Islamic State have different projects going in Syria, projects that don’t even overlap much. Syria is more full of bad projects than the ninth-grade Metal Shop class where they set my jacket on fire with a soldering iron (while I was wearing it). That place was full of projects thought up by adolescent psychopaths, all designed to kill or maim, and mostly ineffective.
Which, come to think of it, is not a bad description of Syria at the moment. For a smallish country, Syria has more theaters of war going than a multiplex doing a Private Ryan marathon. The Kurds of YPG/PKK have their own project going in the north, along the Turkish border. The Alawites are trying to survive and carve a rump state for themselves in the coastal hills. The Christians have executed a simple plan: “get the Hell out of here while we can.” Hezbollah’s project could be summed up as, “Ugh, I guess we gotta help these weak-ass Alawites after all, damn it.” Israel’s project is “Attack Hezbollah nonstop, but never touch the Sunni militias because they’re not a real threat.” Jabhat-an-Nusra, Ahrar-as-Sham, and the other Sunni militias are competing for ownership of the inland Sunni state they hope will come out of this chaos.
Here's the straight dope: Russia wants to protect their oil assets in the region, and Russia wants to protect their political assets in the region so that they can eventually gain access to a warm water port (that's not, you know, in the black sea) It's the exact same reason that Russia invaded Afghanistan, why the USSR held so many of the 'Stans. My brother, a history / Poli-sci major, once joked that America has a 4 year plan to take over the world, Russia has a 400 year plan. Anyone interested in Russia's foreign policy in the area should have a look at War at the Top of the World, by Eric Margolis. It focuses more specifically on the worldwide actions in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kashmir, etc, but the concepts also apply here and elsewhere in the middle east and Asia.
Thank you very much for posting these articles, I really appreciate it. I'm in no position to truly fact-check Warnerd's positions, but it's refreshing to get a perspective that is not in any sense nationalistic. You get the impression that everyone else is looking through the lens of an individual faction and Warnerd is at least attempting to stand back and look dispassionately. I'm not sure you can ever really be dispassionate with this subject matter, but at least this blog gives it a very good shot.
It seems to me that Russia is almost doing the US a favor if they are propping up Assad at the expense of ISIS in Syria. The forces backed by the US, even if they are 'moderate' at this moment, aren't going to remain that way, or hold onto power if the US ever managed to help them to push ISIS out. As much as we don't want Assad to be in power, we can't exercise an alternative.
Somewhere, in an ugly corner of the State Department where journalists fear to tread, the whiskey and cigars have been making the rounds since Putin scrambled fighter-bombers. They won't celebrate publicly because obviously Our Designated Enemy propping up The Evil Regime is Literally The Worst Thing Since ISIS but Syria was at its least pigfuckish with Hafez al-Assad's jackboot crushing the fuck out of all dissent. The only reason things have gotten as bad as they have is Bashar was supposed to wear wingtips, not jackboots - power was supposed to pass to this guy: ...but he died in a car crash in '94 and Bashar had to give up on his London optometry practice and he had to learn ruthlessness the hard way. For a few months there it was almost looking like the US would have to lift a finger, but now that Putin took the bait, it's smooth sailing until the Paris Pogroms begin in 2019. Russian involvement in Syria is the cherry on top of the New World Order sundae. The middle east is busily vomiting all over the EU project, Saudi Arabia and Russia are in a race to the bottom to see who can put the North American frackfields out of business without dying first, and now Russia gets to play Afghan War II while we condemn them for not fighting ISIS hard enough from our comfy deckchairs on the USS Roosevelt, which is not in the Gulf for the first time in a coon's age. Meanwhile the Saudis are so twitterpated over Yemen they're actually rolling armor for the first time in the house of Saud, which means at a bare minimum they'll have to buy more. How many F-35s can they get at $40 a gallon? If the world were a game of Risk right now...