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Putin’s Bloody Logic in Syria
Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a weekly meeting with ministers of the government at the Novo Ogaryovo state residence in Moscow on October 29, 2014. Putin's journey from a pariah to an indispensable Middle East power broker has been startlingly fast—and driven by what looks like growing willingness among some Western powers to overlook the Russian leader's sins in Ukraine in the interest of destroying ISIS.Sasha Mordovets/Getty
“To forgive the terrorists is up to God,” was Russian President Vladimir Putin’s characteristically blunt comment on the Paris attacks. “But to send them to him is up to me.” His practical response was no less blunt. The Russian air force kicked up the frequency of its airstrikes on ISIS positions in Syria to over 120 sorties a day and began using long-range Tu-95 strategic bombers, designed to carry nuclear payloads, to drop cruise missiles. The raids destroyed at least 500 trucks carrying smuggled oil—ISIS’s financial lifeblood—as well as training camps, according to Russian Colonel General Andrei Kartapolov. And for the first time, the bombing was coordinated, on a basic level at least, with France and the U.S.
And so ISIS’s attacks on Paris and on a Russian airliner in Egypt have succeeded where two months of talks have failed in uniting the old World War II allies against a common enemy. Even U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry seemed to acknowledge Russia’s dramatic military and diplomatic intervention in Syria as a game-changer. He spoke of “a greater level of exchange of information” between Russia and the West, and of his hopes of a cease-fire between the forces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the non-ISIS opposition “within the next three, four, five weeks.
“Iran, Russia [are] ready for a cease-fire. The United States [is] ready for cease-fire,” said Kerry, who was in Paris to pay his respects to victims of the November 13 attacks. “The faster Russia and Iran can give life to [the political] process, the faster the violence can taper down.”
Putin’s journey from a pariah to an indispensable Middle East power broker has been startlingly fast—and driven by what looks like growing willingness among some Western powers to overlook the Russian leader’s sins in Ukraine in the interest of destroying ISIS.
Handouts from the Russian Defense Ministry on November 18 show oil refinement facilities hit during airstrikes by Russian warplanes in Syria. Russia's intervention in Syria has given the Assad regime a massive morale and military boost and crystallized into a draft peace plan that calls for a ceasefire. It's also generated grim blowback in the form of a bom attack on a Russian passenger plane, claimed by ISIS. Russian Defense Ministry Press Service/AP
Russia’s intervention has already had three dramatic effects. First, it has stopped the retreat of the beleaguered Syrian army and given the Assad regime a massive morale and military boost. Second, Moscow’s full-court press on the diplomatic front has crystallized into a draft peace plan that calls for a cease-fire among all “moderate” opposition groups, while Islamist radicals of ISIS are destroyed, to be followed by nationwide elections (true, it’s a peace plan that so far none of the combatants except the Assad regime support, and in the meantime Washington has account of the events he gave to Russian TV in 2001. “From waiting and observing, [the USSR] can proceed to serious action with unpredictable consequences.”
“Fadlallah was left wondering, Are these crazy Russians really that crazy, to drop a bomb on Qom” recalls the Russian diplomatic source. “And then he thought, Wow, maybe they really are.”
Soon after, a commando team from the KGB’s elite Alpha Force arrived in Beirut. They tracked down a close relative of the hostage takers’ leader, Imad “the Hyena” Mughniyeh, and kidnapped him, castrated him, then shot him in the head. Then the Soviets sent his severed body parts to Hezbollah headquarters, with a message that other relatives would be next.
“The kidnappers made a mistake,” says the diplomat. “They were not dealing with nice Americans who wanted to teach the world to sing.… They were dealing with the USSR. They were dealing with the KGB. And the KGB were even more violent motherfuckers than Hezbollah.”
At the time, Hezbollah had just murdered kidnapped CIA Beirut Station Chief William Francis Buckley after five months of desperate negotiations. Now, it seemed, the USSR was caught in the same nightmare. But no. Just two days after the Alpha operation, the three surviving Soviet hostages were released. No Russian citizens have been kidnapped in the Middle East since.
For Russian policy makers, especially KGB veterans like Putin who grew up on stories of Perfilyev’s heroic showdown with Hezbollah, one thing remains the same—the conviction that Russians know better than Americans how to deal with terrorists. And that Moscow has a special knack for dealing with Middle Eastern politics.
Beirut showed “the way the Soviets operate,” wrote historian Benny Morris, The Jerusalem Post ’s diplomatic correspondent at the time. “They do things—they don't talk. And this is the language the Hezbollah understands.” Or as the Russian diplomat puts it: “Say ‘Beirut’ in a company of [foreign service] veterans, and they will all smile and raise a toast—‘Those were the days,’ they say. ‘We were strong. We were respected. We were feared.’”
It’s easy to see how the Bondian cocktail of ultraviolence and cool professionalism, with a dash of casual nuclear brinkmanship, that Perfilyev dealt out to Hezbollah in 1985 appeals to later generations of Russian Middle East hands. But in fairness, Putin’s plan for Syria is more than mere posturing. The reasoning, as Putin told the United Nations in September, is clear enough. America’s botched focus on regime change in the Middle East produced nothing but the “destruction of national institutions” and created a power vacuum, “which immediately began to be filled with extremists and terrorists.” Russia’s intervention was to prevent the kind of anarchy that followed the fall of Saddam Hussein and Muammar el-Qaddafi by “preserving a functioning Syrian state.”
True, Putin’s cease-fire plan requires all players from Iran to the U.S. and Saudi Arabia to adjust their expectations. And it requires the West to swallow Assad’s own logic that it is preferable to keep a bloody dictator in power—for a while at least—than to tolerate the continued existence of ISIS. But as the reality of ISIS’s ambitions comes home to Moscow and Paris, Putin might just have the only viable plan around.
With Jonathan Broder in Washington
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