The International Business Times is reporting that the Administration is monitoring reports of Russian military operations targeting ISIS in Syria (h/t Raw Story). The Russians have been backing the Assad government because the latter has provided the former with a warm water port on the Mediterranean. In late 2013 and early 2014 reports started to dribble out from Syria that between 1,000 and 2,000 hardened Chechen fighters had joined ISIS. It is these fighters, radicalized in their ongoing dispute with the Russians and their proxy strongman in Chechnya that have always been one of my greatest concerns with ISIS. Not only because of their ability to influence the events in the Levant, but because as Eastern Europeans they can blend in while traveling throughout Europe, as well as the US.* That concern aside their influence was quickly seen within ISIS as they first started issuing threats agains the Hashemite monarch in Jordan and then against Vladimir Putin – their arch enemy and nemesis. According to the IB Times report a group of Chechen fighters, aligned with ISIS, attacked a Russian military base in Dagestan in the Northern Caucasus. Given that Chechen fighters have taken up both sides of the fight in the breakaway eastern provinces of the Ukraine, these reports of Russian actions in Syria bear watching. The Syrian Civil War, the rise of ISIS, and ISIS’s ability to take and hold significant portions of Syria and Iraq are responsible for potentially creating some strange bedfellows. The US, Iran, and Russia are all opposing ISIS in Syria and Iraq while at the same time the US and Russia are in opposition over Ukraine and the US and Iran still, formally have not normalized relations and do not agree on much of anything. While it is hard to find silver linings in civil wars and the suffering that they create, let alone in the rise of ISIS and its horrific and heinous activities, the creation of a common interest, through common enemies, between the US, Russia, and Iran may be one of them. Especially if this common interest can be extended to each state’s clients. Events in Syria should be watched very carefully over the next few days to see what develops.
* My concern over the potential use of the hardened and radicalized Chechen fighters to carry out actions in Europe or the US (or Canada or anywhere else) is not meant to devalue the legitimate grievances that the Chechen people have with both the Russian government and even more specifically with President Putin and his proxy strongman Ramzan Kadyrov. One of the hallmarks of just revolution concepts is that an oppressed people always retains both the right to self defense and to fight to overthrow their oppressors. The Chechens, like everyone else, have the right to determine for themselves how they wish to order their state and society. A right that has largely been denied because of Russian meddling.
BobS
“strange bedfellows” indeed — by far the strangest has been the US getting under the covers with the Free Syrian Army, which can sometimes be hard to distinguish from Jabhat al-Nusra (al-Qaeda?) and ISIS.
Botsplainer
Oh. You mean that evildoers aren’t necessarily brown in all cases? How is a good, honest Heartland Murkan supposed to stay safe if he can’t spot a terrorist by the way they look?
J R in WV
So, if we aren’t careful, we may wind up fighting alongside former Warsaw Pact troops against Chechen fighters fighting with ISIL fighters?
Truth is that truth is sometimes stranger than fiction ever could be. Could even Clancy have imagined US trainers beside Warsaw Pact troops? I suppose maybe, but I’m thinking probably not.
This is as interesting as the Kittens! Which is high praise, after all this is Balloon-Juice, where rescues of nations and kittys are what we do.
MomSense
Ugh. What a mess.
Adam L Silverman
@Botsplainer: To quote Mr. Rock of Brooklyn: “I’m not afraid of Al Qaeda, I’m afraid of Al Cracker.” No offense intended to any of BettyC’s relatives…
daveNYC
@J R in WV:
I think he could have. His books usually had the US vs. Russian scenarios as a strange idealized ‘professional honorable warrior matchup’ type thing.
If he were still around, and his books hadn’t gone down the crapper sometime after ‘Sum of all Fears’ (YMMV), a book about Russian troops and some US commando types being stuck in generic Middle-Eastern town X full of innocents having to fight together to hold off the evil ISIL hoards could have been a thing.
Having Chechens on board with ISIS is a bad bad bad thing.
dr. luba
@J R in WV:
Been going on for some time now, no? Eastern Europe was Warsaw Pact. Ukraine was Warsaw Pact.
Now, US trainers and Russian troops? That would be more unusual.
gene108
Iran’s been willing to go the enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend route with U.S. for most of this century.
Iran volunteered to help us against the Taliban, in Afghanistan, who they bitterly hated and nearly went to war with in the 1990’s, after the events of 9/11/01.
Bush & Co. told them to fuck off. And our relationship went downhill from there, until the recent Iran deal.
BobS
@Adam L Silverman: On the list of Als for Mr. Rock of Brooklyn to fear, neither Al Qaeda nor Al Cracker belong at the very top.
Betty Cracker
It would be nice if some good could come out of the unrelieved awfulness that is the Syrian civil war. I’m not convinced the US legitimately has any role to play, though I understand the impulse to do something.
Lurking Canadian
@J R in WV: Not just “could have”. Did. The last novel in the Jack Ryan continuity had the US and Russia allied against China, and there was a Russian general (I forget his name) hanging around the US Army tank training facility in “Executive Orders”. For that matter, the *hero* of the “environmentalists want to murder everybody” “Rainbow Six” was a retired KGB operative tasked with organizing, arming and aiming terrorist groups in Eastern Europe.
Clancy was a true cold warrior, but he had a kind of gruff, manly respect for Soviet military and intelligence personnel. The best people in the Clancy-verse are US (and allied) military and intelligence. But the *second best* are Soviet military and intelligence.
The pyramid continues, of course, through various layers of decay, until you get to the real scum of the Earth: terrorists, environmentalists and US liberal politicians.
bystander
Secretary Kerry has called for greater US participation in the refugee crisis in Europe. I’m hoping he means letting 50,000 of them in the country, if only to hear the rightwingers howling with butthurt. Especially the deeply Christian among them.
srv
Once again, Putin is arguably the only head of state acting in the EU and US’ best interests.
We did a ‘deal’ with Erdogan to bomb the Kurds. Winning, Obama!
Adam, it’s kind of a waste here, Obama-can-do-nothing-wrong, Putin-evil.
boatboy_srq
@gene108: Typical of the Shrubbery to insist on their purity ponies. Can’t have their dainty hands soiled from working with Those People in the Acksis of EEEEVille.
Omnes Omnibus
@Betty Cracker: We can help with the refugees.
Botsplainer
There is an awesome nonfiction book out that I read (it’s in my kindle) about the May 1945 protection and evacuation of the high value French political prisoners from a a schloss outside Dachau. This was an action that took the combined efforts of regular Wehrmacht, non-nutcase SS AND American personnel fighting off serious SS nutbags who were eager to execute the prisoners. They were severely outnumbered and had to merge disparate tactical training and weapons to make it work.
Thing reads like an awesome movie script.
Botsplainer
Name of the book is The Last Battle
Lurking Canadian
@Botsplainer: Really does. Thanks for the recommendation.
Betty Cracker
@Omnes Omnibus: I definitely support helping refugees. I’m skeptical of providing military aid, though. That always seems to blow up in our faces eventually.
BobS
@Omnes Omnibus: That seems fair, inasmuch as US meddling in the Middle East & North Africa (i.e. Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen) is what’s caused a large part of the problem in the first place.
schrodinger's cat
@Omnes Omnibus: The grandson of Armenian immigrants and a major restrictionist voice on the GOP side, Mark Krikorian, who heads an anti immigrant think tank and is frequent guest on the Snooze hour argues against taking in Syrian refugees in K-Lo’s crazy corner.
Patrick
@bystander:
Especially when the truly Christian thing would be to open our doors to them…
Omnes Omnibus
@schrodinger’s cat: Not getting out of the boat. Krikorian is is loon.
Chris
@Lurking Canadian:
He does this weird thing where he sorts non-U.S. cultures into Worthy Adversary (good people who just happen to have a bad government, or a bad crime/terrorism problem) – Russian, Colombian, Islamic antagonists fit here – and Always Chaotic Evil (cultures that were already evil long before the communists or whoever came along) – Chinese, Vietnamese, and to some extent anything East Asian.
schrodinger's cat
@Omnes Omnibus: But a powerful and an effective one, totebaggers listen to him, so does the Congress.
benw
I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.
Brachiator
@BobS:
iraq, definitely. In Libya, we tried to support democratic efforts, but the subsequent problems likely would have happened no matter what the US or other nations did.
Syria, nope, Assad has been the issue, and here there does not look to be any good solution.
Yemen, beset with internal problems and here the Saudis are doing the major military blundering.
Seems to me the world has been watching for a while. It doesn’t seem to make any difference.
MazeDancer
Adam, your posts are so smart and so important. Thank you for them.
But, please, I’m begging you, break up your paragraphs.
Typography 101 is that the eye likes small “bites” of visual information. (Which is part why captions and “crawl-outs” are the most read bits of type. And, yes, there are decades of research on how the eye likes to read. And they teach you these things in advertising.)
People will read long copy, if it’s presented in small sections with lots of pleasing white space. You present your valuable insights in these massive blocks of type that the eye does not want to read no matter how good the brain knows the info will be.
So, please, consider hitting the return key and making paragraph breaks throughout. You’ll get much higher readership. And we will all be better informed.
Another Holocene Human
@gene108: Bush and his fellow WASPs at the country club have never forgiven Iran for tossing their puppet monarch out on his ass. They executed a coup on their so-called popular leader fair and square, dammit!
Another Holocene Human
@Botsplainer: Wow.
Another Holocene Human
@Chris:
Gross.
BobS
@Brachiator: Right — Libya was about supporting “democratic efforts” — that one always seems to work, along with ‘humanitarian intervention’ & ‘another Hitler’. It sucks to always be the misunderstood good guys wearing the white hats (at least when it’s Democrats doing the invading or enabling).
Naive liberals are nearly as dangerous as the bloodthirsty neo-conservatives.
Adam L Silverman
@gene108: Twice actually. The first time they made the overture, shortly after we went in to Afghanistan after the Taliban, through the diplomatic cutout – Switzerland. Unfortunately, instead of being routed to the appropriate folks at State it wound up with Karl Rove at the White House policy shop. From what I recall of the reporting the Iranians basically offered up just about everything including assistance against the common enemy of al Qaeda for the lifting of sanctions. They were desperate to come in from the cold. While I don’t have any reason to take that offer at face value, the Bush Administration basically turned it down out of hand. The second attempt overture was done via Major General Suleimani the Quds Force Commander. Based on Dexter Filkins reporting from Fall 2013, Suleimani went way out on a limb, as did several US senior military officials in Afghanistan to work out an accord. The Bush Administration made the same decision again and told the US personnel to break contact. This basically pulled the rug out from under Suleimani and caused him to lose some face back in Tehran and Qom. While here too I have no particular information or reason to believe that the Iranians were not pursuing their own interest, this one was, if its possible, even a bigger strategic blunder than the first brush off. Suleimani may be the only real strategist from any of the Middle Eastern states. And if he isn’t the only real one, he is certainly the best theater commander any of these states can put on the ground right now. He has incredible influence back in Tehran and Qom and we basically insulted him and forced him into dishonor with his near connections and relations. Sun Tzu must have been spinning like a top!
Adam L Silverman
@Betty Cracker: There’s nothing we can do to win. This is a problem that the people that live there have to resolve for themselves. And as painful and heart wrenching as it will be to watch, it is going to be ugly and violent and bloody. Even if we did intervene more fully, all we could do is try to manage the situation in an attempt to achieve the least, worst outcome.
Adam L Silverman
@srv: I don’t understand the last part of your comment. So if you were expecting me to respond, I’ll be happy to, but I need you to clarify it for me please.
Thanks!
Adam L Silverman
@MazeDancer: I will try to do better in the future. If I may offer a singular defense – I did this about 2 AM last night… After I found out I had done an unwitting guest post for someone else’s site. Long story, nothing really bad, but I got up to do the post and first had to respond to about three dozen comments somewhere else. Once I took care of that I sat down to do this post as I had originally intended.
redshirt
The Middle East is still suffering the same problems as Africa, post-colonialism: Arbitrary state lines.
But add in oil money and the situation is far more dangerous.
Sadly, the only solution is to let them work it out themselves.
Brachiator
@Adam L Silverman:
@redshirt:
I see this often offered as though it is deep wisdom, but it is worse than meaningless when “resolve for themselves” means that one side is entirely wiped out or reduced to servitude.
This notion, work it out for themselves, falsely assumes that all sides of a conflict are evenly matched. This is rarely the case.
Former Congolese warlord Bosco “Terminator” Ntaganda has pleaded not guilty before the International Criminal Court (ICC) where he is being tried for war crimes, including the rape of child soldiers within his own rebel force. Shouldn’t he just be let go, so that he can work things out with his opponents?
And how does “resolve thngs for themselves” relate to the miserable international refugee crisis? Do we close borders, sink boats and “encourage” hapless victims to plead for their lives? Why even have refugee camps?
We struggle with sometimes useless mediation, attempts at conflict resolution, intervention. And sometimes the struggle may have been worth it. The modern nation of Bangladesh would not exist without the intervention of India in the struggle between East and West Pakistan. And it took Vietnam to step in and halt the terror of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. The United States might not exist had not France and other nations involved themselves in our struggle against Great Britain.
The world struggles. But the suggestion that the world always do nothing but watch is not supported by either logic or history.
J R in WV
@Lurking Canadian:
There we are, the B-J commentariat, on the bottom of clancy’s pyramid somewhere, among the liberal politicians and professional environmentalists.
[ I was one for most of my career, until I retired, so I slid out of that category before Clancy could kill me off in one of his stranger novels, where the terrorists and environmentalists attempt to destroy the world in order to save it. ]
But wait, destroying the world in order to save it, isn’t that Dick “Monster” Cheney’s strategery plan?
J R in WV
@MazeDancer:
I agree with this advice. I was inclined to use huge paragraphs, and nothing I wrote was getting read. But just pressing that enter key made a big difference. MRs J insisted!
So now I hit that magic key pretty often!
See!!?
Adam L Silverman
@Brachiator: You are not wrong, but I definitely could have been more clear. So, if I may: when I say there’s nothing we can do or should do, I’m really talking about using the military in terms of direct action. I’m not saying we shouldn’t be engaging the other types of national power – diplomatic, informational, and economic. I am not trying to suggest that we consign the Syrians or the Iraqis to a lingering, ongoing misery. We must, however, recognize that a lot of what we are seeing in both countries, as well as in others in and outside of the region, is the local populations trying to determine who gets to be a Syrian or an Iraqi.
This process, which played out for over a thousand years in Europe was punctuated by both small and large periods of violence. For instance, the 100 Years War, the 30 Years War, the Puritan Interregnum of Cromwell, the centuries spanning Irish troubles. And this doesn’t even count the fighting that ranged back and forth over many of the states in Eastern Europe that are now suddenly back on edge because of the events in the Ukraine.
Even in the US, where we killed 600,000 to 700,000 Americans in the Great Rebellion (now DBA as the Civil War), we still haven’t worked it out. Jim Crow brought us an estimated 4,000 dead African Americans (and a few Jewish Americans like Leo Frank) to boot. Over 200 years as a nation-state with the original motto of E Pluribus Unum and the original sin of slavery and white supremacy and we still haven’t been able to work it all the way out of our system.
Any large scale military intervention will just push this off and as soon as the boots on the ground return home it will start back up again. I’m not saying that we don’t intervene to prevent an ethnocide or genocide, nor am I saying we shouldn’t do security force advising. And I definitely think we need to be accepting significant amounts of refugees. However, if we intervene in the manner that would allow for us to actually separate the opponents on the ground; get them into neutral corners and really work out who’s who (who we can work with, who we have to even if we don’t like it, who we shouldn’t work with); and then try to leverage this space to push for reconciliation we won’t get it.
I think that Bernard Fall’s wisdom is appropriate to end this response with:
“Civic action is not the construction of privies or the distribution of antimalaria sprays. One can’t fight an ideology; one can’t fight a militant doctrine with better privies. Yet this is done constantly. One side says, “land reform,” and the other side says, “better culverts.” One side says, “We are going to kill all those nasty village chiefs and landlords.” The other side says, “Yes, but look, we want to give you prize pigs to improve your strain.” These arguments just do not match. Simple but adequate appeals will have to be found sooner or later.”
Anne Laurie
Adam, like you, I prefer to write big blocks of text, because that’s how my brain works. But my Spousal Unit, who’s spent 40 years turning what programmers write out into documents other people can understand, has gradually persuaded me that
normalhumans prefer smaller bites of text, with lots of white space for filler.When I’m writing a long post, I go back in after it’s “finished” to insert (more) paragraph breaks.
Sometimes this even helps me find places where my arguments need to be clarified, or my grammar untangled for ease of understanding…
On topic, all I can do is agree with you — “least worst” we can do is provide support for the refugees, and discourage warmongers here & among our ‘allies’ from throwing more weapons at a situation that’s already overstocked in that department.
Adam L Silverman
@Anne Laurie: Is that better? Again, I apologize. I’m used to Typepad, which wouldn’t allow for paragraph breaks in comments, so I didn’t even try to put them in here. Now that I know better I will have more breaks in both posts and comments.