'Syria being punished for resisting US, allies'
The Syrian army has reached the Iraqi border for the first time since 2014. The army announced on Friday that Syrian forces had arrived at the border, situated 50 km north of the al-Tanf crossing in Badia region which hosts a garrison of US troops which they have been using to attack Syrian government forces instead of terrorists. What does this strategic achievement mean? Is victory on the horizon for Damascus? This is the question Press TV has put forward in an interview with Daniel Shaw, a professor of City University, and Frederick Peterson, a US congressional defense policy adviser.
Frederick Peterson maintains that despite the Syrian army’s considerable achievements against terrorist groups in recent months, one must not be overly enthusiastic about the early conclusion of the war in the country.
“It is a multidimensional conflict with many moving parts and many objectives, some of which are legitimate and have to do with preserving an honorable peace and the humanitarian order within the region [and the] others that are being played out by the regional players and international players in order to achieve objectives beyond that region,” the analyst noted.
“So, I would say that this is certainly a military achievement on the ground because it can objectively put the Syrian flag in more acres of terrain. However, the end to this struggle is not yet in sight.”
The other panelist Daniel Shaw described the war in Syria as “an internationalized proxy war” which is being led by the United States against an independent and uncompromising government, adding that a sustainable peace in Syria is only possible when foreign players stop their interventions.
“The United States in 2011 saw the opportunity to go after a nationalist Bashar al-Assad, someone who is not opening up the Syrian borders and who was not collaborating with Israel and Saudi Arabia and others in the US network of good old boys in the region. So, Syria has been subjected to this horrific genocidal campaign,” Shaw said.
He further warned the Kurds in the north of Syria against cooperation with the US government, adding that “the US is getting behind the Kurds not because it respects, for a second, the Kurdish aspirations for having their own homeland; but because they think they can temporarily make use of the Kurds as one proxy force and later on down the line, once they get rid of the Syrian Arab Army and a Syrian state, they can discard the Kurds at their convenience. The Kurds have been used for decades by some of the world’s major powers."
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