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Waiting for the grander vision to emerge
TURKEY’S bombing of Kurdish YPG militia targets in Syria poses a similar conundrum to Arthur Conan Doyle’s “dog that didn’t bark in the night.”
The non-barking canine on Wednesday night was Russia’s S-400 and S-300 integrated air defence system that covers most of Syria plus much of Turkey, Jordan and Israel.
Moscow’s decision to install these state-of-the-art missile systems followed Turkey’s downing of a Sukhoi Su-24M bomber on the Syrian-Turkish border last November.
VIJAY PRASHAD details how US support for Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa allowed him to break the resistance of the autonomous Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF)
MARK HAZELDEN criticises the Western narrative that the incident was an escalation of Russia’s confrontation with the West, given that Belarus, a Russian ally, warned Poland of off-course drones, and the drones were unarmed, cheap wooden decoys
VIJAY PRASHAD looks at the web of militias and drug-trafficking gangs that emerged in the Sweida region through the Syrian civil war, and how they relate to recent clashes and Israel’s intervention