Mike Eckel
Nine years ago, a caravan of hulking military cargo planes and aging naval ships began shuttling back and forth from Russian bases depositing a massive expeditionary military force to western Syria, cementing Russia’s muscular presence in the Middle East and ultimately saving the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Assad is now gone, the fate of those bases are now jeopardy, and the question of Russia’s entire Middle East strategy is now very much up in the air.
The fall of the Assad regime this past weekend was a tectonic event, reverberating across the entire Middle East and further. The Kremlin’s 2015 Syria intervention, which scrambled the regional calculus, is now being scrambled yet again as Moscow tries to figure out what to do next.
As of December 9, there were no confirmed signs of any Russian pullout from Syria. An unnamed Kremlin official told the TASS state news agency that Russia had reached an agreement to ensure the safety of its military assets in Syria. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov declined to comment to reporters.
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