Afrasianet - Oraib al, Rantawi - From the perspective of the new regime in Syria, the priority of survival and continuity makes it open to all options and alternatives, including reaching out to yesterday's adversaries, Assad's allies and supporters
The visit of the Syrian foreign and defense ministers to Moscow, and the warm welcome with their meetings with their Russian counterparts and the Kremlin leader, have revived many speculations about the future of Russia's role in Syria, whether Moscow is a candidate to restore this role and resurrect it, what contexts, alignments, and functions can shape the features, functions, and priorities of this role, and what are the positions of the major players in Syria on such an issue?
Damascus does not utter or "leak" anything, unlike Moscow and Tel Aviv, where the leaks that go to the minimum of normalization and resumption of relations, after reviewing the agreements concluded during the time of the "Assad" regime, reached the maximum of "committing" Syria to Russia again, according to the estimates of observers, considering it a "restraining force" for Turkish influence on the one hand, and a factor of reassurance for "Israel" on the other hand, and an international destination that is less conditioned in its international relations, and in a way that – perhaps – relaxes the new order, which whenever It faces an international or regional capital, which has been hit by a storm of demands and preconditions.
In my opinion, these estimates at their extremes, the maximum and the lowest, involve a degree of underestimation and intimidation. The new regime in Damascus, even at the height of its sudden victory, has never proposed a break with Moscow, but has talked about resuming relations with new rules, including more balanced and balanced equations. The story of "al-Tadzim" involves a lot of "excesses" and reveals a simplistic-reductive vision of the system of regional and international relations surrounding Syria, which governs the directions of its movement and development.
From the perspective of the new regime, the priority of survival and continuity makes it open to all options and alternatives, including extending a hand to the opponents of the past, Assad's allies and supporters, which, as we have already said, has explicitly expressed the "strategic importance" it attaches to its relations with Moscow, after ridding it of the impurities of the past, and the new regime, which is very enthusiastic to alleviate all the plankton and obstacles of the past, if any, which facilitates its difficult task of managing a country that has suffered from devastation, siege and destruction. The door is not completely closed to the scenario of expanding Russia's role in Syria, but in this context, and only in it.
From the Israeli point of view, Ron Dreamer, the Minister of Strategic Affairs and Netanyahu's confidant, has already devoted an important part of his two visits to Moscow and Washington, to discuss "renewed confidence" in the two Russian bases, on the basis that maintaining the Russian presence in Syria would restrain Erdogan, repel his "Ottoman dreams," and most importantly, be an effective tool to prevent the establishment of a "Sunni arc" to replace the "Shiite crescent" that Damascus was the "mediator of its contract."
Israel has tested with fire the "sincerity of its intentions" in Syria, and it still remembers with great gratitude Moscow's reluctance to provide Damascus with more advanced air defense systems, and it still enumerates the benefits it reaped following the "gentleman's understanding" between Netanyahu and Putin on the "deconfliction mechanism" in Syrian airspace (2015), an "understanding" that Russia has preserved, respected, and adhered to in its entirety.
In the past, Israel did not object to the establishment of the Russian army and the Syrian forces affiliated with it, close to the occupied Golan Heights, in Quneitra and Daraa, but preferred this role and stipulated it to refrain from conducting ground incursions deep into Syrian territory, and for this purpose it established a multilateral "operations room" to manage the scene in the three southern provinces of Syria, before the collapse of the Assad regime ".
This track record of cooperation and management of conflicting interests between Moscow and Tel Aviv leads observers to believe that the scenario of developing and expanding Russia's role in Syria seems not a bad option from Israel's point of view, and that there is no "red card" that Tel Aviv can show in Moscow's face, if it is likely to do so.
Turkey, for its part, one of the three major regional players in Syria, along with Israel and Saudi Arabia, does not prefer such an option, but it is not afraid much, it does not prefer it because it realizes that one of its goals is to reduce its role in Syria as much as possible. It is not afraid, because it has gained deep and extensive experience in managing its differences with Russia in and around Syria, and even at the height of Russia's "hegemony" in Syria, it succeeded in managing and expanding its interests, and made the Astana process and the "de-escalation" zones a fence to protect its three areas of operations, and provide safe havens for the "Emirate of Idlib", which will one day rule all of Syria, as well as the factions under its security, intelligence, and political umbrella.
What Ankara will always be reckoning with is how Moscow will deal with the "Kurdish entity," an illusion that amounts to a "strategic threat" to Turkey's national security. In this file, Russia has "rubber" positions, from the great openness to the SDF and the Kurdish movements, and the presentation of a draft "federal" constitution for Syria in the early stages of the Astana negotiations, to the expression of suspicion and suspicion of the Syrian Kurds, after it became clear to them that they are throwing all their eggs in the basket of the United States. In this sense, there are no "final positions" on the "Kurdish question" for Russia, which has become inclined towards solutions that preserve the unity of the Syrian land, people, state and sovereignty, away from a Soviet-era passion for "self-determination."
The third regional player, Saudi Arabia, on behalf of a group of Arab and Gulf states, will have no difficulty in understanding and swallowing Russia's return to an increasing role in the Syrian crisis, as long as it comes in line with the goal of consolidating the pillars of the new regime, as long as it serves the goal of limiting "Turkish expansionism," as long as it may work to reduce the friction between Syria and Israel in some way, and as long as it is not a "Trojan horse" that can be hidden in its "belly" A role for Iran or any of its allies.
All these Arab countries, whose roles are almost reduced by the Saudi role, have become a "trusting button" with the Kremlin, and they will flock to Moscow for the first Russian-Arab summit of its kind next November, including President Ahmed al-Shara, as Lavrov hoped after his meeting with Shaibani.
The biggest obstacle on the way to a renewed return to Russia's role in Syria is the American position in particular, and here in particular, more complex calculations and considerations come into play, not necessarily related to the thorny Syrian file, but rather to the thorny US-Russian relations, and from a fundamentally global perspective, especially against the background of the division over Ukraine.
Throughout the years of the Syrian crisis, the United States has not looked at the Syrian file from a comprehensive strategic perspective, and Syria has not enjoyed a central place in American strategic thinking, it has given priority to Israel's security and interests, and it will certainly continue to do so, and it has played the Kurdish card, sometimes to pressure Turkey and Erdogan, and at other times to blackmail Moscow, Tehran, and Damascus. In my opinion, nothing substantial has happened in the American approach after December 8, except that it has tried to "use the background of the new regime" and build on it to ensure that Iran is cut off, Hezbollah's sources and arteries are dried up, and that security deals are normalized between Damascus and Tel Aviv.
The future of Russia's role in Syria will be greatly affected by the development of relations between the Kremlin and the White House, and it is not imagined that the two countries will go to a rupture in Ukraine and on it, and that Washington will give Moscow a green light to expand and deepen Russia's role on the shores of the Mediterranean. But if the ongoing consultations and talks end in "understandings" of some kind, the road between Moscow and Damascus could become paved, and perhaps even passable in both directions.