Russia's Syria policy seeks stark choice between radicals and Assad regime

As the prospect of Russian fighters on Syria's battlefield emerges, Russia is taking a page from its playbook against insurgencies in Chechnya and Afghanistan to offer war-weary Syrians a stark choice: stability under a brutal existing regime or life under radical Islamists.

More than four years after Syria erupted into civil war, Russia has launched airstrikes and sent more weapons to defend the authoritarian regime of President Bashar Assad against opposition fighters who include the extremist Islamic State and more moderate U.S.-backed rebels. The U.S. government, which wants Assad out, is complaining that Russian airstrikes are targeting CIA-trained fighters rather than the Islamic State.

Russian President Vladimir Putin “does not distinguish between different types of Islamic rebels,” said Christopher Swift, who teaches national security studies at Georgetown University. “Russia says you’re either for the regime or against it.”

Assad has presided over indiscriminate bombings of civilians, massive urban destruction and the flight of millions of Syrians to neighboring countries. Those were characteristics of Russia’s 1991-2000 conflict in the Russian Republic of Chechnya and the Soviet Union’s 1979-1989 war in Afghanistan, each ruled by a pro-Russian strongman, said Paul Stronski of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

NATO warns Russia on Turkish airspace incursion

On Monday, Russian Adm. Vladimir Komoyedov, the head of the Russian parliament's defense committee, said "it is likely" that paid Russian volunteers would soon fight alongside Syrian army units, according to Reuters.

Putin, who just last week ruled out the use of Russian forces in ground combat, said his military intervention aims to support Assad, his longtime ally, against Islamic State militants who control territory spanning eastern Syria and western Iraq.

Russia, U.S. exchange charges about targets of Syria airstrikes

Officials: ISIL destroys Palmyra's Arch of Triumph

Swift, however, said he agrees with the U.S. contention that the Russians are intentionally targeting rebel forces backed by the U.S., Turkey, Saudi Arabia and their allies.

The U.S. approach to insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan was to identify moderates and work with them, but the Russians “target the groups that are the weakest, politically and militarily,” said Swift, who has interviewed insurgent fighters in the Russian regions of Chechnya and Dagestan for an upcoming book. “It’s what the Soviets did in Afghanistan, what Putin did in Chechnya and what Assad has done in Syria.”

Rather than fight the Islamic State, which is based in eastern Syria near the Iraqi border, Assad’s forces have focused on the secular Free Syrian Army and Ahrar al-Sham, an Islamist rebel coalition. Both groups are active closer to Syria's capital, Damascus.

The humanitarian toll in Syria provides another parallel to the Chechen wars.

Fighting in Chechnya caused 250,000 deaths and displaced about 500,000 people out of a total population of 1 million, Swift said. Syria’s war has caused 300,000 deaths so far, according to the White House, and the displacement of 11.7 million people, more than half of Syria’s 22 million population before the war began in 2011, the United Nations estimates.

Four million Syrian refugees have left the country, including at least a half million who have fled to Europe, creating the greatest migrant crisis there since World War II.

In Chechnya, the Russian strategy worked after years of conflict and a high cost, Swift said. After eliminating moderates, the Russian government killed off religious radicals who formed the remaining backbone of the opposition, and bought off armed criminal gangs by putting them in power, he said.

In Afghanistan, anti-Soviet insurgents were supported by a U.S.-Saudi effort that provided weapons, cash and fighters from neighboring Pakistan. The cash-strapped Soviet effort eventually resulted in failure and withdrawal of its forces.

Russian and Soviet leaders “didn’t anticipate the problems they would face” in Chechnya and Afghanistan, said Stronski, who served as a senior Russia analyst at the State Department and in President Obama’s National Security Council. “They didn’t predict a 10-year bloody occupation,” Stronski said.

Putin’s approach in Syria will prolong the war, but not help Assad win, Swift said. “It worked in Chechnya at an extremely high cost but running the same playbook in Syria isn’t going to work because there are multiple players in Syria with as much to offer in terms of financial support as Putin does,” he said.