Russian President Vladimir Putin acted to reinforce the military partnership he had set up with Iran and Turkey for cooperating in Syria – as a stabilizer to President Donald Trump’s breathtaking accomplishment in manufacturing a Sunni Arab alliance amid his four days in the Middle East.
It was an extreme call. Putin’s partners requested activity to keep a Syrian revolt constrain, supported by US, Western and Jordanian exceptional powers, from taking control of the Syrian-Iraqi fringe. The Russian pioneer needed to figure out how to fulfill them without getting into a conflict of arms with American troops.
On Saturday, May 27, as Trump flew home from his nine-day trip, Putin turned the situation over with his two partners, President Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and the recently chose Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani.
Three days prior, the Russian president was put on the spot by Iran’s National Security Adviser Ali Shamkhani, who touched base in Moscow Wednesday, May 24. He slapped down a request from incomparable pioneer Ayatollah Ali Khamenei for an answer with reference to how the Russian pioneer proposed to put a stop to the takeover by American extraordinary powers and their partners of the eastern territory of Deir ez-Zour and the Al-Tanf crossing at the Syrian-Iraqi-Jordanian outskirt triangle. (See appended outline)
Shamkhani cautioned Putin that without quick activity, the Americans would hinder the courses from Baghdad to Damascus against the section of Iranian and Russian strengths.
The Russian pioneer took a few days to think of a stratagem, which he uncovered to Erdogan amid their discussion on Saturday.
Putin has requested the Russian commandants in Syria to force an aeronautical and exceptional strengths ground attack on the northern town of Raqqa, the Islamic State’s accepted Syrian capital. This move was intended to coordinate the American activity on the vital Syrian-Iraqi fringe, without a military conflict.
Why Raqqa? Right off the bat, it is in the north, a long way from the American positions. Second, Russian insight had obviously found an arrangement between the Kurdish-commanded Syrian Democratic Forces – SDF – and ISIS which permitted the jihadists safe entry out of their fortification towards the south.
The Russian attack on Raqqa was along these lines a move against the US-supported SDF and the Kurds, without getting caught in an immediate confrontation with the US drives in the South: Putin had introduced a Russian-upheld decent footing in northern Syria to counter the US-drove front in the south.
Promptly after the Putin-Erdogan telephone call, a Russian military source in Moscow discharged this story: “Russian knowledge rambles have set up an edge around the city ([Raqqa] to screen conceivable psychological militant escape courses, with battle air ship and extraordinary powers units occupied with keeping activists’ escape.” The report went ahead to caution that any endeavors by ISIS warriors to leave the town “will be squashed.”
Putin’s move in Syria was intended to accomplish three objectives:
1. To offset the America-drove takeover of the Syrian-Iraqi fringe in the south, the Russians would state control of the northern area of that same outskirt.
2. To feature the Russian armed force as the colossal champions battling the Islamic State fear mongers, contrasted and the American troops and their partners who had turned beside this mission, in spite of the fact that President Trump had made it the centerpiece of his nine-day trip.
Putin was mindful so as not to name his target as the success of Raqqa, yet just an attack operation.
3. To hit US partners, for example, the Syrian Kurds in the north, without going head to head with the Americans in battle.