Syrien: Wie lange wird das Abkommen zwischen Russland und den USA halten?

„In the late summer of 2011, President Barack Obama declared the reign of Bashar al-Assad ‚illegitimate‘ and told him the time had come to ‚step aside.‘ In the early fall of 2015, U.S. officials laughingly dismissed Vladimir Putin’s unexpected direct military intervention into Syria as an accident waiting to happen at Russia’s expense. Today, Secretary of State John Kerry formally legitimized Assad’s military by way of delimiting its zone of combat; and he welcomed the Russian Air Force as a prospective U.S. partner prosecuting an increasingly complex and muddled war against the so-called Islamic State and al-Qaeda, two separate and competitive terrorist organizations in Syria. Significantly, the latter group often intermingles with U.S.-backed insurgents.

In a tardy press conference in Geneva that most reporters were so sure would never happen they began ordering champagne and pizza, Kerry mapped out this fingers-crossed bilateral plan of action. His remarks were leavened with repeated qualifications and conditional tenses as he described an agreement that must perforce be founded on trust between the United States and Russia would not in fact be based on anything of the sort. ‚If, and again I want to emphasize the if –‘ Kerry began his presser tonight, ‚If the plan is implemented in good faith, if the stakeholders do the things that are available to them to do and are being called on them to do, this can be a moment where the multilateral efforts at the diplomatic table… could take hold and you could really provide the people of Syria with a transition.‘ Except that nobody really believes that. (…)

For almost six years, Assad and his surrogates have claimed that the regime is exclusively at war with some shade of ‚al-Qaeda,‘ while Putin has insisted since September 2015 that he has been mainly striking ISIS, against all empirical evidence and Pentagon assessments to the contrary. ‚If the Russians do as they did last time, a cessation of hostilities was attempted and continue to bomb the anti-regime rebels – under the guise that are in fact »terrorists« – this thing will fall apart in short order,‘ said retired U.S. Air Force Col. Rick Francona, formerly the air attaché stationed in the U.S. Embassy in Syria.“

(Michael Weiss: „Will the U.S.-Russia Deal Bring Syria Peace? Don’t Hold Your Breath“)