10 March 22
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I recently spoke with my colleague Anand Gopal, a contributing writer at The New Yorker, who has written extensively about the Syrian civil war for the magazine and elsewhere, and is currently at work on a book about the conflict. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed Russian military strategy, why Ukraine has proved more difficult for Russian forces than Syria, and what the Syrian intervention suggests about how Putin sees Russia’s place in the world.
When Putin’s intervention in Syria started, in 2015, what was the state of the Syrian conflict, and what did you initially view as the Russian aims?
Well, at that point, in 2015, the conflict was a stalemate. Really, the two sides had been entrenched. You had Iran and Hezbollah intervene on the side of the Syrian regime, and that had stopped the rebels’ momentum by 2013. From 2013 to 2015, there was more or less a stalemate. So Russia’s intervention, in retrospect, tilted the balance. But at the time that wasn’t clear, because Russia had intervened essentially in what they said was a very limited engagement to stop various jihadi groups from reaching the Syrian coast, where there are minority groups. So that was a stated aim of their intervention, but it very quickly became apparent that they weren’t actually targeting the jihadi groups; they were targeting primarily the democratic opposition.
What else do you now see as their actual goals?
Well, it was clear that their first goal was to shore up the Assad regime, and shoring it up against what they viewed, I think, was the gravest threat to the regime, which wasn’t the jihadists but that democratic opposition. That’s why they directed the vast majority of their firepower against the democratic opposition. Since then, I think the aim was to end the war and then, two, to take advantage of the postwar environment. In particular, they were hoping to secure reconstruction contracts. So one of the things that Russia has wanted is to end the sanctions regime against Syria, and it was hoping to attract Western reconstruction money, which Russian companies would be in a favorable position to capitalize on.
In terms of the way the Russians fought the war, my sense of it is that they were effective fairly quickly in turning the tide of the war. Is that your sense, too? What was the sense on the ground in Syria of the quality of the Russian military operation?
Yeah, it was clear very quickly that it was a game changer. First, it was primarily because of Russia that the regime was able to retake all of Aleppo and then also was able to retake areas in the Damascus countryside that had been opposition strongholds. And they did this primarily through overwhelming air power. So their campaign in Syria was largely an air campaign. We think there were, and still are, thousands of Russian soldiers on the ground, but they weren’t really leading the fight. It was the Syrian regime conscripts that were leading the fight on the ground, but it was Russian air power that really changed the game. And they wielded their air power both in a more technologically sophisticated way than the Syrian regime and in a devastating way, where they were targeting not just rebel positions but markets, hospitals, schools, with, in many cases, huge civilian casualties in their attacks.
Obviously, the war was fought with incredible, awful brutality by some of the jihadi forces, as well as the Syrian regime and the Iranian regime that was helping Syria. And then America entered the conflict and was responsible for a lot of civilian casualties. How did the Syrian regime compare with the different countries waging war there? Was it more brutal?
Well, the Russians had air power, so that distinguished them from jihadi groups. ISIS, of course, was quite brutal, but the other jihadi groups that were anti-ISIS and anti-regime certainly did commit crimes, but I think nothing on the scale that the Syrian regime or the Russians committed. And so the Russian massacres were numerous. They were using cluster munitions. As I said, they were attacking crowded markets. Just to give an example of the type of brutality that the Russians brought to Syria, the United Nations shared a list of hospitals and clinics in Idlib Province with the Syrian government and the Russians basically in the hopes of getting the Russians to avoid accidentally hitting these places. And, instead, the Russians used this list to target these hospitals.
So it was part of the Russian strategy—to attack hospitals. And that was, I think, partly to break the morale of not just the rebel movement but the population. And also, of course, if you are fighting a war against an enemy and you destroy their health centers, then you make it difficult for them to reproduce themselves on the battlefield. So it got to a point where people in Idlib had to put their clinics literally underground. I saw hospitals that were underground because the Russians would target anything that looked like a humanitarian center or a hospital.
What about the Russian non-air presence? You said that there were Russians on the ground and still are. How effective were they, and what exactly were they doing?
So you had a few thousand Russian soldiers. We don’t know the exact number because Moscow doesn’t release them. Some of them are military police, others are working closely with the Syrian regime forces, others are involved in calling in air strikes. Then you also have private military contractors—Russian private military contractors—such as the Wagner Group, which is very closely linked to the Russian state but is, I guess, technically independent. And so they are active in the country. Then you also have militias. These are primarily Syrian militias, but they are funded and controlled by the Russian government. You count all that up, and you’re talking about probably thousands of people under arms, either directly or indirectly by Russia.
How much do you think the success of Russia was connected to its brutality? Was the reason that it was able to be successful partly that it was willing to do these things and had air power? Or was there something else about the Russian intervention that you think made it kind of strategically valuable?
I think it really did come down to air power, and overwhelming air power. They had more than twenty thousand air strikes. This is an overwhelming amount of firepower that’s being brought to bear. And they’re not unique in this. This is the reason the United States was able to defeat ISIS, as well. The U.S. strategy and the Russian strategy are very similar: they are heavily reliant on air power with a small number of troops on the ground. And, in both cases, they were able to turn the tide against their respective enemies. It’s important to say that they were up against irregular forces, untrained forces, guerillas. It’s a very different question if we’re talking about facing a professional army equipped with anti-aircraft weaponry and an air force.
What was the reaction of people within Syria to the Russian intervention and to either Russians on the ground or the Russian presence generally?
In the opposition area, they’re viewed as occupiers. And I think they were understood as really the power behind the throne, that the Assad government would probably not have survived until today without the Russians. Even the Iranian support, I think, would not have been sufficient. So it was really Russia that saved the Assad regime. And so Syrians who risked their lives to fight against the regime see Russia as kind of the source of the dictatorship.
What do you think we learned about the Russian intervention or the Russian regime in Syria that you’ve been thinking about in the last several weeks?
Well, to the extent that we can kind of understand what’s actually happening on the ground in Ukraine, which is difficult, it seems like Russia is being somewhat restrained compared with how it conducted itself in Syria. Now, that may be partly because it is up against a more formidable, well-armed opponent in Ukraine, and more international attention is on Russia. But what Syria showed is that the Russian forces are willing to basically go to any lengths, if pushed, to meet their objectives. And so I think Syria is kind of the nightmare scenario for Ukraine. And, thankfully, it seems it hasn’t got there yet.
Why do you think they haven’t gone all out?
I think the international attention’s got to be part of it. And on the ground in Syria you had a regime that was basically fighting an existential war. So, for the Syrian regime, that was no-holds-barred. You had Russia, which was supporting the Syrian regime in this existential fight. And so I guess in that sense it’s not surprising that Russia would sort of calibrate its attack at the same level that the Syrian regime was conducting itself. Circumstances are quite different here with Ukraine. You have a state that has air power. It has anti-aircraft weaponry, which is something the Syrians never had. Its war chest is much fuller than anything the Syrian rebels ever had. It’s almost a difference in kind in terms of the type of enemy that they’re facing now. So, I think, that probably accounts for the difference more than anything else.
Syria seems to fit, in some ways, with Putin’s world view—or at least the world view he’s expressed—more than Ukraine, in the sense that in the past he’s kind of laid a lot of emphasis on not overthrowing countries’ leaders, whether in Libya or Iraq.
Yeah, I think so, but I wonder how much of that world view is just making a kind of virtue of necessity. Because if it had been the case that—let’s say another power had taken over in Syria, had overthrown the regime, I’m not sure that would’ve all of a sudden stopped Putin from wanting to intervene. Russia has had long-standing interests in Syria going back decades. The Soviet-Syrian relationship was a very close one during the nineteen-eighties and into the early nineties. The Soviet Union was an important source of aid for Syria. So Syria’s always seen to have been in Moscow’s sphere of influence. When you had the uprising, you had really, from Moscow’s perspective, a grave threat to Moscow’s sphere of influence. In that sense, it’s similar to Ukraine—that the potential expansion of NATO is also seen as a threat to Russian imperial interests. So I think there’s more parallels there than differences.
Can you talk a little bit more about the then Soviet relationship with Syria, and Russian policy in the broader Middle East?
Well, at that time the Soviet Union was an ally to other states, such as [Gamal Abdel] Nasser’s Egypt, for example. These are all putatively left-wing regimes. And so, in the context of the Cold War, they had allied to various degrees with the Soviet Union. In Syria’s case, in particular—I wouldn’t call it a rentier state, but—the Soviet Union played a key role in shaping its political economy.
In the years after the Soviet Union’s collapse, the Syrian regime lost an important source of aid, which was one of the reasons Hafez [al-Assad, Bashar’s father] and later Bashar were forced to privatize basic industries and neoliberalize the economy. And that made the basis for the upheavals, really, of 2011 and onward. Today, the situation is a little bit different, because Russia is in competition with Iran throughout the Middle East—even in Syria, for example. They’re nominally on the same side in supporting Assad, but there are actually deep rivalries that sometimes broke into open hostilities between the Russians and the Iranians. They support different factions within the Syrian government. And there’s actually, within Russia, in Moscow, in regime-linked newspapers, open denunciation of Assad. So there’s a sense in which Iran has gained a lot after 2011, to the detriment of Russia. So in these countries such as Syria, where Russia previously had hegemony, it’s now a more crowded field.
And Russian-Iranian rivalry is increasing, because there’s a kind of scramble for the spoils after the war in terms of postwar reconstruction, in terms of contracts to exploit mineral resources, et cetera. Russia is supporting Rami Makhlouf, who is the richest man in Syria. He’s a magnate of the telecom industry. He used to be very close to Assad and has recently been pushed aside. And that’s seen by a lot of observers as the Iranians trying to move against some of the big businessmen of the regime to try to push their own guys in.
How do you think the Syrian intervention has changed the Russian position in the region?
Well, in some ways it’s a Pyrrhic victory for Russia, because the state that it now inherits, or the state that it backs now, is hardly a state. There’s basically mafias and gangs that control large parts of the state. There are hundreds of militias. The government is seen to be, by Moscow, hopelessly corrupt. And so I think the ambitions that Russia had in intervention haven’t really been realized. They haven’t been able to rebuild Syria and profit off the reconstruction contracts. They haven’t been able to exploit gas reserves and mineral reserves to the extent that they want to. So it has been seen, at least until now, as a bit of a failure on their part. And you can say similar things about their interventions elsewhere. Russia intervened in Libya, as well, and was effectively arrayed against Turkish-backed forces, and they didn’t acquit themselves well on the battlefield there. So it seems to me that the Russians are not in as strong of a position as they would’ve hoped going into these interventions.
What was the intervention in Libya meant to do?
They were supporting General Khalifa Haftar. And the Turks were supporting their factions, anti-Haftar factions, and the Russian proxies were getting hammered by Turkish drones. And this is a very low-stakes engagement. And it’s interesting. If you think about Syria, they entered Syria after four years of conflict, when things had ground to a stalemate and the opposition was in some ways demoralized and discombobulated.
And they used just overwhelming air power. Whereas in Libya, the circumstances were a bit different. So both of those examples lead one to think that, when in Ukraine and you’re up against a modern army with air power and with the support of much of the international community, then it’s not surprising from that perspective to see them getting ground down.
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