Untangling the Overlapping
Conflicts in the Syrian War
By SERGIO PEÇANHA, SARAH ALMUKHTAR and K.K. REBECCA LAI OCT. 18, 2015
What started as a popular uprising against
the Syrian government four years ago has become
a proto-world war with nearly a dozen countries
embroiled in two overlapping conflicts:
the two conflicts have cast the United States and Russia as enemies in one war and nominal allies in the other.
Civil War
Rebel groups supported by the United States are focused on toppling the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, not rooting out the Islamic State.
The United States is focused on defeating the Islamic State. While it has attacked 2,600 Islamic State targets, it has not directly attacked the Syrian government and it is backing rebel groups only with money, arms and some training.
Russia, Iran and the Lebanese group Hezbollah want to keep Mr. Assad in power, for now. Russia, in coordination with Syrian ground forces, has aimed the vast majority of its airstrikes at rebel positions.
The Islamic State, meanwhile, wants to both unseat Mr. Assad and create a caliphate stretching beyond Syria’s borders into Iraq and other countries.
Syria’s territory has been fragmented after four years of war.
The government now controls only a fraction of the country.
The United States has been joined by Turkey and several Arab nations in its fight against the Islamic State. They all believe ISIS poses a threat to them in their own countries.
“Most people are realizing now that the best way of dealing with the Islamic State is to contain them,” said Columb Strack, an analyst at IHS Janes, a defense research firm. “If you contain them and start hitting their economic sources, the idea is that in a few years they will collapse from within. That seems what the Americans are going for.”
But because the war against the Islamic State is just one among many, cutting off the group’s resources has been difficult. Porous Turkish borders and private Arab dollars have helped the Islamic State’s rise.
For Syria’s allies, especially Russia, the Islamic State is just one of many insurgent groups that they have called terrorists. While some Russian airstrikes have hit areas controlled by the Islamic State, most have targeted rebels groups.
Kurdish ground forces have been America’s mainpartner in the war against ISIS in Syria. But the partnership poses delicate problems for the United States.
Nearly 30 million Kurds live in territories divided across Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran, and they want more autonomy in those countries, or even a state of their own. The conflict in Syria has given them an opening toward achieving those goals.
American airstrikes against the Islamic State, coordinated with Kurdish fighters, have helped the Kurds seize a broad stretch of territory along the Turkish border. Those gains have increased tensions with Turkey, a major American ally, which has been fighting a bitter war with Kurdish separatists for decades.
Kobani has been the focal point of the U.S.-Kurdish
battle with ISIS. American airstrikes have hit more than
1,000 targets there, almost half of all their strikes in
Syria, helping the Kurds push back ISIS in the north.
In Overlapping Wars, the Danger of a Collision
As their offensives cross paths, all of these run the risk of their battles colliding. Experts say a misguided attack or an errant airstrike could escalate Syria’s two wars and lead to an even wider international conflict.
Russian airstrikes have hit rebel groups supported by the United States and its allies. Russian cruise missiles have crossed areas where American jets have been flying.
Turkey has attempted to hinder Kurdish advances in Syria and is bombing Kurdish rebels in its own territory, despite saying that Turkey shares the American and Kurdish goal of defeating ISIS.
Iran and Hezbollah, Shiite allies of the Syrian government, are fighting rebel groups supported by Saudi Arabia and other Sunni Arab nations.
