Syria’s agony seems endless. It is now clear that at least 200 civilians have been killed in Russian air attacks against rebel areas from which Basher Assad’s forces have retreated. It is bad enough that Putin’s warplanes are supporting the Damascus regime against the Free Syrian Army. But there is abundant evidence that they are simply targeting any location outside of the dictator’s bloody grip.
With each new outrage, Moscow’s pretense that it is taking on Daesh (the self-proclaimed IS) becomes ever more ridiculous. There have indeed been Russian raids on the terrorists but just as Turkey has finessed its anti-Daesh campaign into air strikes on its home-grown rebel Kurds of the PKK rather than Daesh, they have been few and far between.
Putin made much of cooperating with the US-led campaign. At its most basic level this was supposed to avoid warplanes colliding or worse attacking each other. But the Kremlin also held out the possibility that it would bring its aerial firepower to bear against Daesh in coordination with the Allied campaign. However, that was only ever a ruse. Indeed Putin used the possibility as a cover for his support for Assad. In doing so, he played with the word “terrorist”. For Assad, his own rebellious people were always terrorists and “foreign terrorists” at that. Thus by adopting his vicious ally’s perverted view of the revolt, Putin could say with his habitual poker face, that he was indeed assaulting the scourge of terrorism.
The behavior of Russian planners and the pilots they send out to attack Assad’s opponents is in marked contrast to that of the American and other allied air forces attacking Daesh. US and allied warplanes regularly return with their bombs and rockets because it was not possible to be sure that the targets were exclusively terrorists. The basic ground rule is that deaths among civilians, even those who might be rabid supporters of the terrorists, have to be avoided.
Inevitably this has meant that Daesh fighters have abandoned their obvious bases and relocated themselves among civilians. One multi-story building in Raqqa has become a terrorist barracks but only the first two floors are used. To strike at this target would mean destroying the building above and the civilians who live there. It is reported that a family residing in the building were detained by the terrorists because they were caught trying to move out. Likewise there is good intelligence that Daesh commanders are using hospitals, knowing that these premises will not be targeted.
For the Americans and their allies, the only prey that they can attack with certainty are terrorist convoys, arms dumps and oil production facilities. The calculation is that in the end, these assaults will seriously degrade the men of violence and their ability to support their far-flung positions. As the key Iraqi city of Ramadi appears to be on the verge of falling to government forces, it becomes clear just how devastating the effect of the allied air effort has been on Daesh’s ability to resupply and reinforce its killers.
Russia’s shameful indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas is indeed a war crime, as Amnesty International is claiming this week. And it is a war crime for which strong evidence exists because America and its allies are satellite-tracking everything that goes on in Syria.
