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MAR-MSY-RU:160205:(05-FEB-16 D):Putin Shapes Chechen-Style Regime for Syria after Assad’s Exit 1

MAR-MSY-RU-US:160205:(05-FEB-16 D):US & Russia Prepare to Massively Obliterate ISIS in Syria. 2

TIS-MSY-AF:160205:(05-FEB-16 D):Al Baghdadi Plans to Run Away from US-Russian Blitz to Africa or Arabia. 3

MAR-MSY-RU:160205:(05-FEB-16 D):“Little Syria” Awaits Bashar Assad in Moscow Exile. 5

IS-RU:160205:(05-FEB-16 D):Some Israeli Generals Are Strangely Prone to “Russification”. 6

MAR-MSY-RU-US:160205:(05-FEB-16 D):Obama Acts to Curb Kurds’ Slippage into Secession and Russia’s Ken  7

 

MAR-MSY-RU:160205:(05-FEB-16 D):Putin Shapes Chechen-Style Regime for Syria after Assad’s Exit

Debka 05-Feb-16

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Last week, DEBKA Weekly 695 (of Jan. 29) broke the story of the pact struck quietly between Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin for a joint effort to end the Syrian civil war. We offered exclusive details of their political and military agreements.

The current issue now unveils the first chapter of its implementation.

The centerpiece, as revealed by our intelligence sources, is Putin’s plan for deposing Syrian President Bashar Assad, possibly by April or May, and replacing him with a military clique, or a single Syrian general, who will be subservient to the Kremlin.

Before him is a list of five or six generals, whom the Russian military intelligence GRU has picked as the military junta for ruling Syria as a virtual Russian dependency.

Putin leans more toward a single general as ruler. He is casting about for a military figure which most closely resembles Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov.

For 17 years, the autocratic Kadyrov clan and militia governing Chechnya have taken part in Russia’s military operations. The incumbent leader, son of ex-president Akhmad Kadyrov, who was assassinated in May 2004, was installed as president by a decree signed by Putin in February 2007. Since then, he has ruled Chechnya with an iron fist, brutally repressing any sign of Islamic extremism, as well as all political or personal opposition to the Russian president.

The Chechen regime is the Kremlin’s preferred model for Syria, by virtue of its military record and services to Moscow.

The Kadyrovs gained their kudos by succeeding – where the Russian army failed – in crushing the guerilla war waged in Chechnya by militias linked to al Qaeda and other Muslim groups, and going on to rebuild the Chechen state and rehabilitate its economy as a Russian federal republic.

Chechen law, furthermore, obligates its young men to serve the Russian army for missions in any of the predominantly Muslim federal autonomous republics of the Northern Caucasian.

Kadyrov also makes his security services and special operations counterterrorism divisions available to the Russian army on demand.

In Damascus, Putin hopes to set up a regime that likewise controls the national armed forces while being subject to the higher authority of the Russian high command in Syria.

While far from certain that the Syrian war can be polished off in three months, the Russian president is pushing forward with his plans for the post-Assad era, setting up new ruling frameworks that will be ready to go when the time comes.

Russian officers are reported by DEBKA Weekly’s military and intelligence sources to have begun dividing up the country into separate regions, the better to impose local ceasefires between the Syrian army and rebels.

The Russian military is furthermore engaged in four steps for assuring the Syrian army’s victory and ruthlessly smashing rebel resistance.

1. Russian warplanes are flattening rebel-held towns, strongholds and supply centers, leaving them with two options: Surrender or flee. In the last 10 days, Russian air strikes have pulverized rebel targets in both the northern and southern parts of the country.

2. At the end of each battle, Russian officers step in to re-establish local government under a Syrian general.

3. These Syrian generals are designated for seats on a new national ruling council to be established by Russian officers as a transitional regime.

Under this plan, Bashar Assad will have to transfer his powers to the head of this transitional council. If he refuses, he will be confined to his palace and cut off from connections with government, military and intelligence institutions.

4. The Russians are busy rallying Syria’s ethnic and religious minorities behind their scheme for Syria’s future. One incentive they are offering is professional assistance for them to form their own armed militias.

This week, Russian officers arrived in Jabel Druze in the southeast and went to work on a new local fighting force. In the northeast, they handed Kurdish fighting groups their first batch of advanced weapons systems withheld hitherto by the Americans.

(A separate article in this issue deals with the Kurdish militias)

Moscow is in full thrust for scaling down the fighting, without waiting for the politicians to come to terms on Syria’s fate. The UN-sponsored Syrian peace conference that opened in Geneva this week is therefore a sideshow. In any case, it was adjourned Wednesday, Feb. 3, for three weeks.

As we reported last week, the two big powers are acting to close all the participants’ options, excepting only to the follow the script dictated by the US and Russia.

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MAR-MSY-RU-US:160205:(05-FEB-16 D):US & Russia Prepare to Massively Obliterate ISIS in Syria

Debka 05-Feb-16

The White House and the Kremlin are looking at the weeks from mid-April to May as their provisional timeline for a massive assault to uproot the Islamic State presence stalking Syria.

The US, Russia, Britain, France, Germany and Holland are assembling a bomber fleet for the offensive, DEBKA Weekly’s military and counterterrorism sources report. The bad blood between Moscow and Ankara makes Turkey’s participation doubtful. (On Jan. 29, Turkey accused Moscow of another violation of its airspace. It was denied.)

The plan on the table is for the bombers to take off in waves from US and French aircraft carriers, bases in the US and Russia and points in the Middle East, to ceaselessly pound the de facto ISIS Syrian capital of Raqqa until it is reduced to rubble. Ground forces will then move in and take the site over.

A source close to the planners compares the coming Raqqa blitz to the allied Dresden operation at the end of World War II when, for three days in February 1945, heavy US and British bombers dropped 4,000 tons of explosives on the German city, killing 25,000 people and reducing it to smoking embers.

For the assault on ISIS, the Netherlands was the last to join the combined force. On Jan. 29, Prime Minister Mark Rutte announced that a six-fighter Dutch squadron stationed in the region for striking ISIS in Iraq will be joining two more squadrons in Syria for a mission scheduled to last until July 1.

That date fits in with the time frame drawn by US and Russian planners for winding up the counter-ISIS campaign in Syria.

Its disclosure also offers the first glimpse of the US-Russian agenda in Syria for the first half of 2016:

From January to the middle of April – a ground campaign in Syria and the installation of a provisional regime to replace President Assad.

(This process is covered in detail in a separate item).

From mid-April to July 1 – a massive allied air offensive against ISIS.

Ready for this offensive, Moscow is already flying in from Russian bases Tupolev Tu-22Ms strategic bombers for their first raids in Syria. They were followed last week by the deployment to Syria of Sukhoi Su-35 warplanes. Specializing in hitting ground targets, their assignment will be to strike ISIS convoys trying to escape the savage bombing raids over Raqqa and reach Iraq.

But this escape route is to be cut off. The allied air campaign will be coupled with an offensive to tighten the screws on ISIS’s Iraqi seat in Mosul, 450 km away from Raqqa, so as to deprive the jihadis of shelter and a chance to regroup at an alternative base.

According to US and Russian planning, the allied ground offensive in Raqqa should find the jihadis who survived the air blitz trapped with nowhere to go.

For this leg of their anti-ISIS operation, Moscow has been exhorting the Obama administration to arrange a jumping-off air base in Iraq from which the Russian air force can strike Mosul.

Washington has resisted this demand until now but, as their shared Syrian peace process takes shape, the Obama administration may reconsider.

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TIS-MSY-AF:160205:(05-FEB-16 D):Al Baghdadi Plans to Run Away from US-Russian Blitz to Africa or Arabia

Debka 05-Feb-16

At the same time as Syrian President Bashar Assad is preparing to relocate to Russian exile, in line with the Kremlin’s script (See previous article) – Islamic State chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is planning his getaway from the noose tightening around his armies’ necks in Syria and Iraq.

The ISIS chief is looking at two hideaways: The Yemeni region of Hadhramaut, which is ruled by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), or the Suhel and Sahara Deserts, large tracts of which are under the thumb of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).

(See attached map)

He won’t hang around until the Russian bombers start pounding his strongholds in Raqqa and Mosul (See the article on the US-Russian war plans for ISIS). Neither will he make the mistake of going to ground in Syria or Iraq, having learned the lessons of the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein whom Kurdish special forces captured in an underground bunker near Tikrit in December 2003; and Al Qaeda’s Iraq commander, the late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whom a US Delta Force killed in a hideout north of Baghdad in June 2008.

Unlike Zarqawi, who was poor, the absconding “caliph” has a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars to assure him of a warm welcome from AQAP or AQIM in either of those putative refuges.

But he may have left it too late. According to DEBKA Weekly’s intelligence and counterterrorism sources, the Americans and Russians have placed obstacles on his likely escape routes from Syria or Iraq, and British and French Special Forces are standing by to catch him before he sets up shop in North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, or other parts of the Middle East.

The latest movements of US, British and French Special Forces offer clues to the intelligence they are garnering on Al-Baghdadi’s preparations for his getaway.

The US Special Forces team that visited Al-Hasakah in northern Syria in late January, while establishing the first US airbase in Syria, also performed a clandestine mission, which was to block al-Baghdadi’s escape route from Raqqa to Mosul.

A Jordanian Special Forces team is deployed in the western Iraqi province of Anbar to place a second impediment in his path, in case Al-Baghdadi decides to take advantage of ISIS control of eastern Syria to slip into Iraq via the Euphrates Valley.

It was a Jordanian intelligence tip-off that gave the Americans Al Zarqawi’s precise whereabouts eight years ago.

On another continent, 4,000 kilometers away, US Special Forces are in position in Libya between Sirte in the center, Tripoli in the west and Benghazi in the north, to trap Al-Baghdadi if he makes for Sirte, or from there transits Tripoli to reach the Libyan-Tunisian border. Once there, he can link up with AQIM.

Another of his options is to head north from Sirte to the eastern Libyan town of Darnah to join the violent Islamist militias nesting there.

The information about Baghdadi’s planned run for Libya comes mostly from Russian intelligence and has not been verified by other agencies. On Dec. 9, Iranian sources, quoting Russian informants, reported that al-Baghdadi, fearing his life was in danger, had gone into hiding in Sirte, hometown of the late Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi which is under ISIS control.

Some Western intelligence agencies dispute this account. They say it is far more plausible for the ISIS “caliph” to seek sanctuary in the AQAP-controlled Yemeni Hadramauth, a desert region of the Arabian peninsula, whose harsh terrain has historically defied attempts at access by foreign military, and would therefore be a virtually unassailable hideout.

Neither the US nor Saudi Arabia has ever tried to send elite forces into Hadhramauth. However, AQAP’s plans for terrorist attacks in foreign countries would sit well with the ISIS chief”s own program of expanded terror for Europe and North America. He could stay in full operational mode, safe from harm, in this desolate corner of Arabia, while still keeping his followers on the mark in Iraq and Syria.

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MAR-MSY-RU:160205:(05-FEB-16 D):“Little Syria” Awaits Bashar Assad in Moscow Exile

Debka 05-Feb-16

 

The two men who bear the heaviest responsibility for the five years of bloodletting in Syria are poised to flee the country – a bitterly ironic development revealed here by DEBKA Weekly.

Bashar Assad, his extended family, his brother the general, and a drove of close cronies in high positions, have started packing their bags ready to relocate to Moscow.

In another part of Syria, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-appointed Caliph of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, is set to abandon his bloody realm and flee to more hospitable climes – either AQAP turf in Yemen, or AQIM-controlled regions in the Sahara Desert.

(More about this in another article)

Damascus is buzzing with President Vladmir Putin’s plan to force the Assads and their hangers-on to depart the country by mid-2016 – or thereabouts – and go into exile in Russia.

And another historic irony finds Russia’s FSB and GRU intelligence services helping the Assads prepare their departure, 37 years after a team of CIA agents secretly assisted the Shah of Iran and family to wind up his affairs in Tehran and flee Ayatollah Khomeni’s Islamic Revolution that was overrunning the country.

Moscow was Assad’s final, but not only, choice of exile.

He declined a recent invitation from Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to settle down in Tehran. Unlike previous offers, our Iranian sources report, this time, Khamenei was willing to allow Assad to engage in political activity from Tehran.

The supreme leader had decided that the exiled Syrian ruler would be useful for countering Russia’s approaching takeover of the levers of power in Damascus. His machinations would also silence circles in Tehran, starting with the Revolutionary Guards generals, who had long warned that giving the Russians too free a hand in Syria would boomerang against Iran’s interests and national security.

Since the Russian and US presidents started colluding on a plan for ending the Syrian war, influential Iranian sources circles maintain that Tehran paid too high a price for the nuclear accord extracted from Iran by the US.

Having settled on Moscow as Assad’s place of exile, the Russians and his underlings are make every effort to make his exit from the Syrian stage organized and dignified – not like the abject flight of a ruler on the run.

An estimated 1,000 to 1,500 Syrians will go into exile with him – cabinet ministers, Baath party politicians, military commanders (in fear of war crimes trials), secret service chiefs, and tycoons whose wealth derives from their Assad connections.

The absconding Syria ruler stipulated as a condition for leaving that a portion of the national financial reserves be transferred in his name to banks of his choosing.

Western spy agencies are tracking those transfers to monitor his preparations for departure.

In his new home, Assad will be barred from political activity – but not from engaging in international business transactions. A suburb of Moscow, dubbed “Little Syria,” has been set aside for these “refugees.”

But in case the Moscow location doesn’t work out for some reason, Russia’s secret services are also preparing an alternative venue for the Assad clan in Minsk, the capital of Belarus.

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IS-RU:160205:(05-FEB-16 D):Some Israeli Generals Are Strangely Prone to “Russification”

Debka 05-Feb-16

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Israel’s security elite is divided between a class that fears the adverse effect of Russia’s military intervention in Syria and those who see it as the answer to the threats to the nation emanating from the north.

Israeli Air Force Chief of Staff Brig. Gen. Tal Kalman stepped into the controversy this week by laying out the following doctrine in a lecture in Tel Aviv.

“The IAF aims for maximum independence,” he said. The friend of today could change his tune tomorrow. Israel must act independently of foreign sources in air and space. “Space is Israel’s strategic depth,” he said. “It saves the [qualitative] edge of its army and air force from shrinking in relation to its enemies.”

Brig. Kalman emphasized the air force’s importance as the dominant component of Israel’s security and deterrent strength by the following points:

The IAF stand ready at all times for any contingencies. It is first to arrive at the scene of a conflict and is on 12-hour notice for full-scale war.

The IAF conducts clandestine operations day by day – “a war between wars” – to avert armed aggression.

The IAF can conduct thousands of sorties in a 24-hour period anywhere, at any time. By comparison, Russia is conducting 300 sorties a day in Syria, and the US 100 a day against ISIS in Iraq and Sryia.

DEBKA Weekly’s military sources say that the brigadier general’s treatise bared the concern among the IDF’s top Military Intelligence (MI) and Air Force officers over the growing popularity of Russian military operations in Syria among some high-ranking IDF officers and senior defense officials.

There are two main schools affected by this “Russification:”

1. A group of generals, who hold up the Russian operation in Syria as the panacea for Israel’s security problems on its northern borders. Among them are two former national security advisers, whose opinions are valued by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon.

2. Officers who maintain that so long as the Russians cooperate with US military and intelligence networks, their presence in Syria is an asset for Israel’s security.

A third group of high-ranking officers, including the Military Intelligence (MI) chief Maj. Gen. Hertzi Halevi, and IAF commander, Maj. Gen. Amir Eshel, takes the opposite view.

They are deeply apprehensive of the outcome of Russian intervention in Syria and its endorsement by the Obama administration, urging the IDF, and especially the Air force and Navy, to develop operational capabilities that are independent of Moscow and Washington alike.

Their arguments were borne out strongly this week, DEBKA Weekly’s military sources report, by Russia’s actions in Syria.

A. The Russian air force launched hundreds of sorties to purge the Syrian rebels holding the security strip in the South that Israel and Jordan established adjacent to their borders.

B. Russian officers began building and arming a new Druze militia of 2,000 fighters composed of 22 units opposite Israel’s Golan border defenses. They are accompanied by Syrian army advisors, confirming Israel’s constant concern that a Syrian-led Druze militia in this critical area would be ripe for takeover by Hizballah.

C. Indeed, members of the Russian Spetsnaz (special forces) were sighted this week fighting alongside Hizballah forces on various Syrian fronts – another cause of Israeli alarm. It was also a breach of Russian President Vadimir Putin’s promise to Netanyahu that Russian forces would not work with, or serve the interests of, the Lebanese Shiite terrorists.

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MAR-MSY-RU-US:160205:(05-FEB-16 D):Obama Acts to Curb Kurds’ Slippage into Secession and Russia’s Ken

Debka 05-Feb-16

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The Obama administration, concerned by the possible Kurdish secession from Syria and fall under Russian influence, dispatched a key official to the war zone of northern Syria last weekend.

Brett McGurk, President Barack Obama’s envoy to the coalition against ISIS, visited northern Syria from January 31 to February 1. His delegation, which included British and French officials, first toured the Kurdish enclave of Kobani on the Syria-Turkey border. They then met with leaders of the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) and its YPG militia, which has taken on the Islamic State in successful battles.

McGurk was the first American official to set foot in Syria since the US launched air strikes against ISIS targets last year. But, according to DEBKA Weekly’s intelligence sources, the war on the Islamic terrorists was not the delegation’s focal point of interest, but rather to find out how far Syrian Kurdish chiefs were willing to cooperate with the post-Assad regime, which Russian plans to install in Damascus later this year with US backing.

In other words, will the Kurdish enclaves remain part of Syria? Or will they secede and link up with the Kurdish autonomous republic of Iraq, to form an independent Kurdish state?

As an incentive to refrain from secession, McGurk assured Kurdish chiefs they would be granted a measure of autonomy under the future regime in Damascus.

The visitors were also concerned to find out if the Kurds had accepted the offer coming from a Russian delegation to stock their arsenals with the weapons systems American had so far withheld under pressure from Turkey and Iraq. Russian officials made this offer last month while visiting Qamishli, just a few kilometers from the Turkish border

The Kurdish question holds the seeds of a potential schism between Obama and Putin, whose accord for ending the Syrian war is still in its early stages of implementation.

McGurk, who led the US negotiators for shaping this accord, and Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov, Putin’s special envoy for the Middle East, had agreed to give Moscow a free hand for lining up Syria’s mixed minorities, in the interests of government stability in Damascus.

In those interests, preserving the framework of central government and maintaining Syria’s territorial integrity are deemed paramount in Washington.

To ensure stability in the post-Assad era, the Russians need the Kurds (a minority of three million which account for 15 percent of the population) to participate in the new government, or at least offer guarantees not to disrupt it.

But the Syrian Kurdish leaders are refusing this commitment for three reasons:

1. Neither Washington nor Moscow promises them a seat on the future ruling council in Damascus. The PYD and YPG were not invited to the Geneva conference this week, even through Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said they would be.

2. The Kurds are not sure President Obama will protect them from the ire of Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan and his army. PYD leader Saleh Muslim accused Ankara of blocking the invitation and facing no resistance from Washington.

3. President Masoud Barazani, of the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq (KRG), advised his Syrian compatriots not to trust either the Americans or the Russians. He said that cooperation between the two communities was the key to reaching their goal of independence. And both big powers need the Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga and the Syrian YPG to drive ISIS out and capture its strongholds in Mosul and Raqqa.

Given this standoff, Washington’s main concern now is that Russia will move fast to give the Syrian and Iraqi Kurdish armies the tanks, missiles, helicopters and planes which the US has withheld from them. This step may well accelerate the rise of a pro-Russian Kurdish state of 12 million inhabitants across northern Iraq and northern Syria. This prospect not only scares Ankara and Baghdad, but would also jeopardize future plans for Damascus.

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