News that Syrian rebel factions are negotiating with Russia in Turkey to relieve the siege of eastern Aleppo highlights a Middle East-wide trend whereby leading actors are looking to Moscow instead of the US. It also underlines the extent to which Bashar al-Assad, the improbable survivor of almost six years of civil war, is a pawn of his Russian and Iranian patrons.
Syria has been centre stage in President Vladimir Putin’s reassertion of Russian influence in the Middle East, after his air force arrived in September last year to save the Assad regime. Since then, ferocious Russian bombing and the siege of rebel enclaves, alongside a string of offensives spearheaded by Lebanese, Iraqi and Afghan Shia fighters deployed by Iranian revolutionary guards, have expanded the rump state to defensible perimeters.
But Mr Putin has to think of what happens after the fall of rebel Aleppo. Russia has reached beyond tactical sallies against US hegemony in the Middle East and is reacquiring the onerous obligations of great power-dom.