The New US Plan to Partition Syria

Alarming news is coming out of Syria. Of course, it’s all very well that Palmyra has been liberated and cleared of mines and that a concert by Russian musicians took place there. In the meantime, the Americans have thrown together a “New Syrian Army” of Syrians—Kurds and Arabs under the command of American “volunteers.” The army set up camp on the border with Jordan and is now about to depart for Raqqa, the “capital of the Islamic State” in the east. Another Kurdish-Arab army, “The Lions of Rojava,” also under the command of American officers with the direct participation of U.S. Special Forces, is headed to Raqqa from the north, from Rojava.

Syrian contacts tell Komsomolskaya Pravda that lately the Americans have dramatically increased their profile. Last Friday, a photo of American soldiers in armored vehicles with Kurdish army insignias on their shoulders appeared in the newspapers, which caused an outrage in Turkey. They consider the Kurdish army to be terrorists there, and the new Turkish Foreign Minister Cavusoglu has already said that the American soldiers might just as well have worn the insignias of the Islamic State, a terrorist organization banned in Russia.

What do we care, the naive reader will say, who kills the terrorists and takes Raqqa? If the Americans want to, let them take it, whether with the Kurds or without them, as long as the threat of terrorism is eliminated. But if the Americans take Raqqa, Obama will be there the next day to declare an American victory over terror. And our victories, Russian victories, will be forced out of the public’s consciousness in the same way that the Europeans forget about the Soviet Union’s victory over Hitler.

Then eastern Syria will be torn away from Damascus for good, and a pipeline from Qatar to the Bosporus will pass through there. Syria will be partitioned once and for all. Peace and order will be established in that place at the gunpoint of the U.S. Army, while in the rest of Syria the war will continue right down to the last Syrian, just as it is doing even now. Qatar’s gas will begin to flow to Europe through Jordan, eastern Syria and Turkey, driving, incidentally, our Gazprom out of the market.

At a Russian Ministry of Defense briefing, appeals to the United States to join forces against the terrorists were heard once again. But these appeals, it seems, are futile. The Americans are fighting against the Russians and for their own interests. Yet again, the State Department has spoken about the need to remove Bashar Assad, and yet again the leading industrial nations that comprise the Group of Seven 7 is calling for new sanctions against Russia.

President Assad’s Syrian army is weary and hardly fit for combat. But Russia could take advantage of the U.S. patent by creating militias of Syrians under Russian command and moving ahead to liberate the country from the militants. It’s necessary to frustrate the American plan to partition Syria.