Month: November 2017

 After watching for years as the United States called the shots in the region, Russian President Vladimir Putin is seizing the reins of diplomacy in the Middle East, establishing footholds and striking alliances with unlikely partners.

From the battlefields of Syria to its burgeoning relationships with Iran and Turkey to its deepening ties with Saudi Arabia, Russia is stepping in to fill a void left by the United States first under the Obama administration and now in the vastly inconsistent and largely hands-off policies of Donald Trump.

Embroiled in controversy at home and loath to engaging in the strife-riddled region beyond fighting the Islamic State group, Trump has largely stayed on the sidelines of attempts to help find a political settlement for Syria’s long-running civil war. Those efforts are now led by Russia, in partnership with Iran and Turkey, organizing local cease-fires and creating “de-escalation zones” that have significantly reduced the violence in the country. Russia’s role in Syria has raised its international profile and allowed it to claim fighting terrorist groups such as the Islamic State group while it shored up President Bashar Assad’s government.  

Moscow has stood by Tehran while Trump has refused to re-certify the nuclear deal between Iran and world powers — a stance reiterated by Putin himself Thursday on a visit to Tehran. It has also reached out to Iran’s Mideast rival Saudi Arabia in recent weeks, promising weapons deals and other investments to the Sunni power house.

Bilal Saab, a senior fellow and director of the Defense and Security Program at the Middle East Institute, said that while Russia has clearly become a more influential interlocutor on Syria, there are clear limits to its overall foray into the region.

“What Russia offers is transactional, as opposed to strategic. Arms sales are no substitute for deep political rapport, which is what Washington provides, despite lingering tensions with key partners,” he said.

Still, Putin appears to be positioning himself as Mideast broker, seeking to expand his influence in a region where the U.S. remains the most dominant military actor.

Syria power broker  

Moscow’s military involvement in the Syrian war since 2015 has propped up Assad’s forces and turned the conflict in his favor, while Russian mediation earlier this year launched cease-fire talks in Astana, Kazakhstan. The talks, sponsored jointly with Iran and Turkey, have brokered local deals that have significantly reduced violence in the war-torn country.

This week, Russia announced plans to host Syrian groups and government representatives for political talks on Nov. 18 — just 10 days before a new round of U.N.-sponsored talks are to start in Geneva. The invitation has roiled Syrian opposition groups who described it as an attempt to “bypass” U.N. efforts to resolve the country’s conflict and dictate the terms of any settlement.

Russia invited over a dozen groups, a mix of government representatives and political opposition parties, including for the first time the main U.S.-backed Kurdish party now in control of northern Syria. The Syrian Kurdish PYD has previously been barred from participation in political negotiations at the Geneva Talks, at Turkey’s insistence.

The invitation by Russia has led to speculation that Russia may use the conference to broker a wider reconciliation between Assad and the Syrian Kurds under conditions that preclude long-term U.S. influence in Syria.  

“Russia is accelerating its effort to subvert the Syrian political process by establishing a new diplomatic framework that sets conditions to expel the U.S. from Northern Syria,” said an analysis by the Institute for the Study of War this week.

Badran Ciya Kurd, an adviser for the Kurdish-led self-administration who met with Russian officials ahead of the invite to Sochi, said Russia supports the Kurdish federal project while the U.S. strategy has been vague.

“It is not yet clear what their (Americans) strategy is after Raqqa, and we would like to understand,” he said, referring to the northern city liberated from Raqqa last month.  

Shared interests with Iran

While Iran promised a foreign policy that would be “neither East nor West” after its 1979 Islamic Revolution, Tehran has tilted toward Russia given its antipathy for Washington. Tehran relied on Moscow’s support to complete its Bushehr nuclear power plant in 2011 and received Russia’s S-300 surface-to-air missile system in 2016.

In that time, Russia and Iran also found themselves fighting to support the embattled Syrian president. The countries regularly coordinate on Syria and have provided overwhelming military and political aid to prop up Assad’s government and army.

On a visit to Tehran on Wednesday, Putin strongly backed Iran and its nuclear deal with world powers, saying Moscow opposed “any unilateral change” to the accord after Trump refused to re-certify it.

       Putin made the comments on a one-day trip to Tehran for trilateral talks between Azerbaijan, Iran and Russia, during which he met with both Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Gulf contracts

       Across the Gulf Arab states, the U.S. has been the guarantor of security since the 1991 Gulf War. In recent years, however, Gulf countries have increasingly looked toward making defense deals with Russia, especially after growing wary of the U.S. detente with Iran under President Barack Obama. In the last weeks alone, Russia has gone big into Saudi Arabia, which supported the Afghan mujahedeen against Soviet troops in the 1980s.

King Salman of Saudi Arabia visited Moscow last month and signed multibillion-dollar energy deals with Russia, which also agreed to sell the Iranian rival its advanced S-400 missile system, which Tehran does not possess. Other deals would include Saudi Arabia locally producing Russian anti-tank missiles, rocket launchers and automatic grenade launchers, as well as the latest version of the Kalashnikov assault rifle.

King Salman’s visit marked the first by any Saudi monarch to Moscow and heralded a new era of cooperation and a thawing in a bilateral relation that has been severely strained since Russia’s military intervention in Syria on behalf of Assad.

Close cooperation with Israel

Israel and Russia maintain a close, if sometimes uneasy, relationship on regional issues — particularly when it comes to the war in neighboring Syria. In recent years, the Israeli and Russian air forces have been active in Syrian skies and have maintained, throughout the fighting, a hotline to prevent clashes between their air forces. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has also held a number of meetings and phone conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin, to discuss the situation in Syria.

Still, Israeli officials are concerned about Russia’s cooperation with Iran. But they also believe that Russian and Iranian interests could diverge as both countries compete for lucrative reconstruction contracts and political influence in postwar Syria. Israeli officials believe that Russia considers Iran a potentially destabilizing force in postwar Syria, and are cautiously optimistic that Russia understands Israel’s security concerns.

“Russian and Israeli interests in Syria may not be the same but that doesn’t necessarily mean that Russia cannot play a constructive role in Syria in Israel’s view or that certain understandings can’t be reached between Russia and Israel with regard to Syria,” said Chagai Tzuriel, the director general of Israel’s Intelligence Ministry.

 
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Ankara is anticipating who will succeed Iraqi Kurdish President Masoud Barzani, following his announcement he plans to quit. Relations between Ankara and Iraqi Kurds, once close allies, collapsed after Barzani held an independence referendum. But Ankara could be eyeing his nephew as an ideal successor.

Turkey made little secret of its pleasure at Sunday’s announcement by Iraqi Kurdish President Masoud Barzani that he is planning to step down. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan slammed Barzani for holding an independence referendum, which Ankara feared could fuel similar secessionist demands among its own restive Kurdish minority.

At his weekly news conference, Turkish presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin made clear Ankara was already looking to who will lead Iraqi Kurds going forward.

“A new tableau appears when the term of office of Masoud Barzani is not extended and there will be a transfer of his duties to Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani,” Kalin said.

Nechirvan Barzani, a nephew of outgoing President Masoud Barzani, is widely seen as by Turkey as the ideal future leader. Being a regular visitor to Ankara, Nechirvan has developed close ties with Erdogan. The Iraqi Kurdish prime minister’s coolness towards the independence referendum will likely enhance his credentials in Ankara.

His close ties with Turkey reportedly extend to significant personal business investments. Analysts say he is also seen by Turkey’s political leaders as sympathetic to its calls for more help in its war against the Kurdish rebel group PKK, which is has many bases in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Former senior Turkish diplomat Aydin Selcen established Turkey’s consulate in Iraqi Kurdistan. He said while Nechirvan Barzani is viewed as the ideal new leader of Iraqi Kurdistan, Turkey is being careful not to be seen to be interfering in the succession process.

“We know that Mr. Nechirvan Barzani’s relations with Ankara are best when compared to other political figures in Iraqi Kurdistan,” he said. “So that would be seen as a welcome development [by Ankara], although judging by the statement of Mr. [Mevlut] Cavusolgu, who is the foreign minister of Turkey, the official position of Ankara is that this is the internal political affairs of the Iraqi Kurdistan region, so Ankara will not have an official reaction to this development.”

Despite Nechirvan Barzani’s close ties with Ankara, the Turkish president has refused to meet him along with the rest of the Iraqi Kurdish leadership for several months, a result of the collapse in relations between the once-close allies.

But Turkish presidential spokesman Kalin said a future request by the Iraqi Kurdish prime minister would now be considered, but will hinge on unspecified conditions being met by the Iraqi Kurds.Ankara is demanding the Iraqi Kurdish leadership annul the result of October’s referendum vote, in which 93 percent of Kurds voted in favor of independence.
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A Swiss art museum on Wednesday showcased a new exhibit of artwork deemed “degenerate art” by the Nazis, drawn from a collection of some 1,500 works found hidden in the homes of German collector Gurlitt five years ago.

The Bern Kunstmuseum exhibit features over 200 modern art pieces confiscated in a Nazi crackdown in the late 1930s against so-called “degenerate art” — deemed inferior because they were un-German, Jewish or Communist or, in the case with impressionist and other modernist works, didn’t employ traditionally realistic forms.

But the Nazis were all too happy to sell such works to help fund their war machine.

The art on display in Bern, including Expressionist and Constructivist paintings by artists such as Otto Dix and Franz Marc, opens Thursday to the public.

It is part of parallel exhibits linked to the Gurlitt collection, which came to light in 2012. His father, Hildebrand, was a leading art dealer in the Third Reich.

The other exhibit opens on Friday in Bonn, Germany, with a focus on art looted and stolen by the Nazis — much from Jews. That show includes works from masters including Claude Monet and Albrecht Durer that were hidden from public view for decades.

Authorities stumbled onto Gurlitt’s collection five years ago while investigating a tax case. Cornelius Gurlitt had tucked away more than 1,200 works in his Munich apartment and another 250 or so in Salzburg, Austria.

A will bequeathed the works to the Bern fine arts museum, but a German government-backed foundation has worked with it to ensure that any pieces looted from Jewish owners were returned to their heirs.

Experts initially identified more than 90 works that were likely looted by the Nazis, including pictures by Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri Matisse, Edvard Munch and Rembrandt. Only four works — including a painting by Camille Pisarro — have been returned to the rightful heirs.
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The Islamic State terror group is trying to sell a transnational image, but its future doesn’t lie West of the Middle East, according to analysts.

The group’s claims do not match its actual operational capacity, according to researchers, but the focus by Western media and politicians of IS-inspired or directed attacks on civilians in America and Europe is obscuring the limits of the terror group’s reach.

According to the Terrorism Research and Analysis Consortium, the future of the jihadist terror group lies mostly east of the Levant and not in Western cities as the center of the gravity of its operations shifts to the Philippines and Asia.

In an exhaustive study of attacks claimed outside Iraq and Syria from May to September for the past three years, TRAC found a disparity between IS’s worldwide propaganda campaign and actual attacks.

“IS’s highlighting of terror attacks against civilians in Western Europe, and the mainstream media’s obsession with those attacks, serves to obscure important aspects of Islamic State strategy,” said Veryan Khan, TRAC’s editorial director. The consortium’s assessment “reveals as much about Islamic State’s limitations as its aspirations,” she said.

More than half of all IS claimed attacks outside the Levant are focused on just three countries: the Philippines, Afghanistan and Egypt.

“TRAC contends that these places, which receive scant Western attention, represent the narrative of IS future territory,” the research consortium says in its report “Islamic State – Outside the Caliphate by the Numbers.”

At first glance, IS’s global reach for attacks would appear to be expanding. IS propagandists claimed 21 attacks in seven countries from May 20 to September 22, 2015. The following year for the corresponding four-month period they claimed 80 attacks in 21 countries.

The number of attack claims nearly tripled in 2017 with 222 in 21 countries, but 175 of them, account for 80 percent, occurred in just three countries, the Philippines (99 claims), Afghanistan (43 claims), and Egypt (33 claims). In the case of those three countries, just three areas in them accounted for 115 of the 222 claimed attacks, Marawi city in Philippines’ Autonomous Region of Muslim Majority, Nangahar province in Afghanistan and Egypt’s upper Sinai.

IS also appears to be unable to maintain attacks in several countries. During 2017 the group could not claim repeat attacks, either directed or inspired in 10 countries that had seen attack claims in 2015, Bangladesh went from six claims in 2016 to none in 2017; Saudi Arabia had three in 2015 but none since.

“The inability to repeat attacks in the same location summer after summer highlights the Islamic State’s lack of sustainability,” the TRAC argues.

The number-crunching by TRAC provides an alternative picture about IS’s likely future. Western media coverage focuses on claimed attacks in Europe and America, understandably as those attacks are occurring in their own backyard, but it boosts the IS threat and often fails to provide context.

In 2017, Britain topped the newcomer’s list with three high-profile claimed attacks, which received more attention in the Western media than the siege of Marawi in the Philippines, and the nearly 70 claimed attacks in the country.

Western intelligence agencies say there will be more IS-linked attacks in the West for the foreseeable future, despite the shrinking of the territory the jihadist group controls in the Levant, where it has lost all its urban strongholds and is now confined to the sparsely-inhabited border territories between Iraq and Syria.

Analysts say the so-called Caliphate was useful in the marketing of IS and attracting foreign recruits, as well as allowing the group to differentiate itself from rival al-Qaida, which opposed the setting up of an Islamic state and ridiculed the group’s leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s self-appointment as caliph.

Now one of the only ways for the terror group to remain relevant and to try to continue to outshine its jihadist competitor al-Qaida, say French and Belgian intelligence officials, is to strike the West as frequently as it can. But officials are taking some consolation in the fact that most attacks claimed by the group in the West have been inspired, rather than directed or organized by IS.

“We may look back at the coordinated November 2015 Paris attacks and identify them as the high point in the IS threat in the West,” a senior British intelligence official told VOA.

He added, “What we have seen since are mainly low-tech, opportunistic incidents by lone wolves. That may not be any comfort to the public, but in an odd way it should be. My longer-term concern is what we can expect from al-Qaida, which is re-grouping and has the patience and depth of operatives to pull off spectacular strategic attacks.”
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Following Brexit, the German and Austrian elections, the crisis in Catalonia, and a referendum in northern Italy, new questions are arising among analysts over whether Europe could be in danger of splitting apart. VOA’s Jane Bojadzievski reports.
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