U.S. - SecState's Moscow Visit Unlikely to Bridge Divide on Syria
AX INTEL BULLETIN: U.S. - SecState's Moscow Visit Unlikely to Bridge Divide on Syria
DATE: 21MAR2016
While the U.S.-Russian collaboration in Syria is a work-in-progress, no major breakthroughs should be expected from DOS Secretary of State John Kerry’s visit to Moscow. Both countries endorse political negotiations as the means to reaching a peace agreement in Syria, but they remain divided over…
AX INTEL BULLETIN: U.S. - SecState's Moscow Visit Unlikely to Bridge Divide on Syria
DATE: 21MAR2016
While the U.S.-Russian collaboration in Syria is a work-in-progress, no major breakthroughs should be expected from DOS Secretary of State John Kerry’s visit to Moscow. Both countries endorse political negotiations as the means to reaching a peace agreement in Syria, but they remain divided over major substantive issues about the political process and military operations in Syria. Kerry will use his meeting with President Vladimir Putin to ascertain the drivers of Putin’s decision to drawdown his forces in Syria and its implications for Russia’s Syria policy in the short-to-medium term.
Though they have not failed yet, the Geneva negotiations have yet to make any progress on the substantive issues in the political roadmap outlined by U.N. Security Council Resolution 2254. Though the Syrian opposition and their regional backers hailed Putin’s decision to partially withdraw his forces in Syria as a positive development, it is still too early to assess how it will affect the future course of the negotiations.
The Syrian regime’s 10-point position paper at the negotiations stated that the priorities should be on fighting terrorism and preserving Syria’s territorial integrity. Their negotiation strategy has so far been focused on procedural issues as a way to avoid delving into the principal substantive issue of political transition. The opposition team’s position is that the entry point to a final settlement in Syria is a political transition in which Assad cannot play a role. One point on which both regime and opposition agree is rejection of federalism in Syria on the basis that it will lead to Syria’s partition along ethnic and sectarian lines.
This position is not shared by Syrian Kurds who have just announced the establishment of an autonomous Kurdish region along Turkey’s southern border. Excluded from the Geneva negotiations, Syrian Kurdish parties are trying to outpace the political negotiations by creating a fait accompli on the ground—a feat they are able to achieve thanks to the military assistance they are receiving from both the United States and Russia.