Syria's president Bashar al-Assad was back in Damascus yesterday after a surprise visit to Moscow to meet his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, to discuss the Kremlin's support for his regime.
The move was widely seen as a further effort by Russia to assert its position as a player on the Middle East stage and its potential to help broker a settlement in the Syrian war.
The Kremlin kept the talks between the two leaders under wraps until yesterday when Mr Assad, who is not known to have travelled overseas since the civil war erupted in Syria four years ago, was already back in his home country.
But the unannounced visit sent a strong signal of Russia's abiding support for the Syrian leader as he battles enemies ranging from Islamic State to opposition groups backed by the US and many countries in the Middle East.
Russia responded to a plea for help from Mr Assad on September 30th, launching air attacks on rebel positions in Syria. The daily bombardments have enabled Syrian government forces to reverse some of their earlier territorial losses and shore up control of Mr Assad’s strongholds.
Terrorism and politics
“Syria is a friendly country for us,” Mr Putin told Mr Assad at their meeting in Moscow, according a transcript of the talks published on the Kremlin website. “We are ready to contribute not only in the armed struggle against terrorism but also in political processes.”
Mr Assad thanked Mr Putin for his support since the start of the Syrian crisis and for backing the country’s unity and independence. Without Russian help, he said, terrorists would have extended their grip even further and Syria would be facing a “more tragic scenario”.
The surprise talks between the two leaders underscored the added layer of complication that Russia’s military intervention has brought to the Syrian crisis.
When launching the Syrian air strikes, Mr Putin said Russia would target positions held by IS, the extremist militant group that has taken advantage of the chaos unleashed by the civil war in Syria to seize large swathes of territory in Syria and Iraq.
However, Syrian anti-government rebels that took up arms after Mr Assad ordered his troops to fire on a peaceful demonstration in 2011, say the Russian attacks have mainly focused on opposition forces. Russia’s military intervention has heightened tensions with the US which has been leading a separate coalition conducting air strikes on IS in Syria and is virulently opposed to Mr Assad.
US officials say the Russian air raids are not constructive and a lasting settlement of the conflict in Syria won’t be possible if Mr Assad stays in power.
Russia and the US have overlapping interests in Syria to prevent IS and other militant groups from taking their battle to the West. But "Russia also has another agenda to prevent the West from enforcing regime change in Damascus and retaining its patron-client relationship with Syria," wrote James Nixey, head of the Russia and Eurasia programme at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London.
Mr Putin is gambling the bombing campaign in Syria will help end Russia's international isolation caused by the Ukraine crisis and earn his country a leading role in deciding Syria's political future. But the US dealt a snub to the Russian leader last week, rejecting a Kremlin proposal to send a delegation to Washington to explore possibilities of co-operation in Syria.
With Russian air strikes helping shore up Syrian army positions, Mr Putin needs to "convert early military success into political capital", Dmitri Trenin, head of the Moscow Carnegie Centre wrote on Twitter. In summoning Mr Assad to Moscow, the Russian leader was seeking to launch a "political transition on his terms".
Photographs released by the Kremlin showed Mr Putin and Mr Assad sitting down to supper in Moscow accompanied by other top Russian policymakers. Mr Assad was treated to traditional Russian dishes including “herring in a fur coat”, a salad of smoked fish and beets dressed with lashings of mayonnaise, the Kremlin said.
Aerial bombardment
Recip Tayyip Erdogan, the president of
Turkey
, a country deeply opposed to Mr Assad, spoke to Mr Putin by telephone yesterday to discuss the Syrian leader’s visit to Moscow. Russia’s aerial bombardment of Syria risked increasing the flow of refugees fleeing the war-torn country for Turkey, he said.
Ahmet Davutloglu, the Turkish prime minister, said he hoped Mr Assad would do his long-suffering nation a favour and remain in Moscow.
“If only he could stay in Moscow longer, to give the Syrian people some relief. He should stay there so a political transition can begin,” he told reporters in Ankara.