Russian strikes steady Assad's position

BEIRUT, Lebanon - Weeks of Russian airstrikes in Syria appear to have restored enough momentum to the government side to convince President Bashar al-Assad's foes and the world community that even if he doesn't win the war he cannot quickly be removed by force.

That realization, combined with the growing sense that the world's No. 1 priority is the destruction of the Islamic State, has led many to acknowledge that however unpalatable his conduct of the war, Assad will have to be tolerated for at least some time further.

The most dramatic sign of that came Tuesday with the statement by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry that Assad's future will be determined by the Syrian people, suggesting in the clearest way yet that he can stay on for now and be part of a transition.

That statement - less a reversal than the culmination of a rethink that had been underway for months - was doubly piquant coming in Moscow, where Kerry was discussing the Syria question with Russian officials.

"The Russians with their military intervention have basically said you can refuse to talk to Bashar Assad, but that means that you won't get a political solution," said Yezid Sayigh, a senior associate at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut. "If you do want that, then you have to deal with this man."

Still, significant gaps remain between the U.S. and Russia on Assad's future, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power said Wednesday, emphasizing that the U.S. position on Assad has not changed.

"There is going to have to be a political transition, and Assad will have to go," Power told reporters ahead of a major international conference on Syria in New York on Friday.

Russia, a key backer of Assad, began airstrikes in Syria on Sept. 30, at a key juncture in the war, when Assad's forces were fast losing ground to the rebels around areas seen as crucial to the government.

While Moscow says its airstrikes target the Islamic State group and other "terrorists" in Syria, much of the Russian air campaign has focused on more moderate forces fighting Assad in the country's central and northern region, where IS has little or no presence.

The results have been slow in coming. Despite nearly 11 weeks of crushing Russian airstrikes, government troops aided by Lebanese Hezbollah and Iranian allied forces have failed to reverse losses in the northern province of Idlib and in Palmyra, the ancient desert town in central Syria that fell to the Islamic State over the summer.

The Russian airstrikes, however, have helped Assad slow or halt rebel advances on several fronts - and he has captured dozens of villages in northern and western Syria.

The government's biggest victory so far was last month's lifting of a three-year siege on the military air base of Kweiras by extremist groups in the northern province of Aleppo.

That was followed Monday by Syrian troops' capture of a sprawling military air base near Damascus that had been held by rebels for the last three years, bolstering the government's presence in an area overwhelmingly controlled by opposition forces.

And on Wednesday, government forces captured a strategic mountain in the northwest, inching closer to a rebel-held stronghold in the coastal province of Latakia. Capturing the mountains of Latakia would reduce threats to the coast and open the way for government forces to advance toward Salma, another opposition bastion.

While it falls short of a strategic shift, the Russian intervention seems to have restored a battlefield stalemate that existed before rebels made a series of startling gains earlier this year that jolted Assad and his Russian allies into action.

Speaking in Moscow on Tuesday, Kerry said the U.S. and its partners "are not seeking so-called regime change" and said the focus now is on facilitating a peace process in which "Syrians will be making decisions for the future of Syria." Syrian opposition members scoff at such remarks and say they reflect America's long-standing reluctance to topple Assad.