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      Rudy Giuliani's daughter endorses Joe Biden

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      Rudy Giuliani’s daughter has endorsed Joe Biden for president in an essay for Vanity Fair, writing that in this historic election “none of us can afford to be silent”.“My father is Rudy Giuliani,” Caroline Rose Giuliani said in the magazine. “We are multiverses apart, politically and otherwise. I’ve spent a lifetime forging an identity in the arts separate from my last name, so publicly declaring myself as a ‘Giuliani’ feels counterintuitive, but I’ve come to realize that none of us can afford to be silent right now.”The younger Giuliani, a director, actor and writer who lives in Los Angeles, endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016 and voted for Barack Obama in 2012. She writes that since childhood she has engaged in debates with her father about LGBTQ rights, policing and other issues.“It felt important to speak my mind, and I’m glad we at least managed to communicate at all. But the chasm was painful nonetheless, and has gotten exponentially more so in Trump’s era of chest-thumping partisan tribalism. I imagine many Americans can relate to the helpless feeling this confrontation cycle created in me, but we are not helpless. I may not be able to change my father’s mind, but together, we can vote this toxic administration out of office.”Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, is a personal lawyer to Donald Trump and has been one of the president’s loudest endorsers, whether during the Russian investigation, the president’s impeachment or the coronavirus crisis.With less than a month before the 3 November election, Giuliani is back in the spotlight with claims to have found incriminating evidence on a discarded computer of Joe Biden’s son Hunter. Twitter and Facebook have been restricting the dissemination of the New York Post’s article reporting the unlikely and unsubstantiated claim.“If being the daughter of a polarizing mayor who became the president’s personal bulldog has taught me anything, it is that corruption starts with ‘yes-men’ and women, the cronies who create an echo chamber of lies and subservience to maintain their proximity to power,” his daughter writes.“We have to stand and fight,” she argues. “The only way to end this nightmare is to vote. There is hope on the horizon, but we’ll only grasp it if we elect Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.” More

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      in World Politics

      Indigenous Communities Can Counter Naxals and Protect Forests in India

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      On the night of July 11, Naxalites blew up 12 buildings in the forest department’s field office-cum-quarters in the Berkela forest area of Pashchimi Singhbhum district in Jharkhand, India. Naxalites are Maoists who have fought a bloody insurgency against the Indian state in some rural and forest areas for over six decades. In 2006, Manmohan Singh, the prime minister at the time, called this insurgency “the single biggest internal-security challenge” the country has ever faced.

      360° Context: The State of the Indian Republic

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      In recent years, the Naxalite insurgency has ebbed. So, this attack sent shock waves across administration in general and the forest department in particular. Fortunately, no one died in the attack. The Naxals asked staff to vacate the premises and warned of consequences if police were informed before destruction. Even as the police swung into action to apprehend the attackers, forest officials huddled together for introspection.

      Forests, Minerals and Indigenous People

      I have served in the jungles of Jharkhand as a forestry professional. The attack has made me reflect deeply. Naxalite attacks in Jharkhand are not new. For years, Naxals have intimidated state functionaries through various means, including attacks and assassinations. To understand the persisting nature of the Naxalite insurgency, we have to examine Jharkhand closely.

      Jharkhand is a state that lies to the south of Bihar and the west of Bengal, two fertile Gangetic states of India. To its southeast and southwest, it borders two other poor but resource-rich states of Chhattisgarh and Odisha. Jharkhand literally means “bushland.” It is endowed with rich natural resources, including both forests and minerals such as coal, iron, copper, mica and uranium.

      Jharkhand is predominantly inhabited by diverse indigenous communities. The Indian Constitution gives these communities a “scheduled tribes” status. As per the 2011 census, they comprise 8.2% of India’s population. In contrast, scheduled tribes form a much higher 26.3% of the population in Jharkhand. Historically, Jharkhand was a part of Bihar and the people of Jharkhand felt neglected and marginalized. Therefore, they agitated for a separate state both to safeguard their identity and to achieve control over their rich resources of “jal, jungle aur jameen,” Hindi for water, forests and land.

      Embed from Getty Images

      On November 15, 2000, Jharkhand was formed. I remember the date fondly. A grand function was held in Ranchi’s Raj Bhawan, the governor’s house. I was still what is called a “probationer” in government parlance. As an officer of the Indian Forest Service (IFS), I was doing my training at the Shri Krishna Institute Public Administration just across the road from the Raj Bhawan. Many officers were visiting from Patna and staying at the institute’s guest house. They were also milling around the resplendent surroundings of the Raj Bhawan.

      The staff of the guest house who belonged to the scheduled tribes were in a jubilant mood. I asked one of them, a gentleman named Khalkho, as to what the formation of Jharkhand meant for him. His instant response, “abua dishum, abua raj,” which translates as “our state, our rule,” still rings in my ears. Khalkho also went on to inform me that henceforth it would be his children, not dikus, the local term for outsiders, who would get preference in  jobs.

      Despite two decades of abua raj in abua dishum, all is clearly not well in Jharkhand. Berkela is barely 15 kilometers from Chaibasa, the district headquarters of Pashchimi Singhbhum. Scheduled tribes form 67.3% of the population in the district, and the region is rich both in mineral and forest resources. Forest cover forms about 47% of the area, making the district rich in biodiversity. The famous Saranda forest, known for excellent Sal trees and its natural regeneration, is also located here. Much of the Jharkhand’s mineral wealth, especially iron ore, is found under these forests.

      These rich resources have not improved the living standards of scheduled tribes of the area. Instead, the forests have become home to the Naxals who take refuge there. Various development agencies have shied away from this area. Only the forest department dares to venture there to fulfill its duty to protect and conserve Pashchimi Singhbum’s forests for posterity. The Naxal attack will certainly sap the department’s morale.

      To combat Naxalism, the forest department has to connect with local communities. Addressing their livelihood issues is essential for winning the trust of marginalized people in a resource-rich land. Only winning goodwill in Pashchimi Singhbhum and elsewhere would help combat the Naxal menace.

      Yet there is a problem. First, the mandate of the forest department is mainly the protection, conservation and development of forests, not providing livelihood or improving living standards for local communities. Second, the department lacks adequate resources to reach out to communities even if it was given the mandate to do so. The budget allocations for forest departments across India have been low and Jharkhand is no exception.

      Involve Indigenous Communities to Save Forests

      Few realize that forests and indigenous communities have a symbiotic relationship whether in the Amazon or in Pashchimi Singhbhum. They worship nature and tend to revere trees. They have used forest resources sustainably for centuries if not millennia. Therefore, it is important for any forest department to work with these communities. To be fair to the forest department in Jharkhand, it is already making an effort to do so. However, it faces a vicious timber mafia that is hell-bent on chopping down trees to meet rising urban demand. Mining — legal and illegal — is another threat to forests and local communities. Too often, the forest department finds itself outgunned and is unable to protect these communities or the forests they live in.

      Goal 15 of the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations aims to “protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss.” To achieve this, the government of Jharkhand has to focus on people-oriented natural resources governance. Simply put, they have to involve local communities in the conservation of forests and make the forest department work closely with them.

      My experience of working in various forests in Jharkhand tells me that sometimes, overzealous measures by dogmatic forest officials do more harm than good. They often take draconian action against indigenous communities for petty offenses that probably should not have been illegal in the first place. After all, these communities have to live. The forests are their only sustenance. So, draconian implementation of some laws leads to the forest department losing the trust and faith of the indigenous communities.

      Of course, there are many forest officials who are empathetic, courageous and exceptional. They interact with local communities on a day-to-day basis. Indeed, these officials maintain high moral standards even when their very lives are in danger.

      The Naxals are not like Russian or Chinese communists of the last century. They do not really have any ideology. Instead, they have become a vocation for unemployed, disgruntled and misguided youths. Many Naxals are recruited by intimidation and are then subjected to indoctrination. Quite a few of them start enjoying the power that comes from wielding a gun. These youths invariably come from marginalized indigenous communities and find Naxal propaganda seductive.

      To counter the Naxals, both the state and central governments must gain the confidence of the indigenous communities living in the forests. To do so, the government must protect their forest-based livelihood. It must also generate sustained employment through forest-based skill development programs that teach indigenous communities to put their incredibly rare know-how to good use.

      Such policies would increase the living standard of local people. They would also turn the indigenous communities into the eyes and ears of the government, thwarting Naxal violence. These policies would also involve the delegation of some powers and financial authority to local forest officials and indigenous communities. It would be fair to say that it is time for a real abua raj in abua dishum.

      *(Atul Singh, the founder, CEO and editor-in-chief of Fair Observer, provided inputs for this article.)

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in World Politics

      As Climate Change Worsens, How Far Will We Tip?

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      Although there are still those who deny it, the countdown for the planet under the threat of global warming began some time ago. If we were to seek an official starting point, it would probably be in the late 18th century, at the beginning of the industrial age. We now receive confirmation of melting at the poles and warming in the depths of the ocean on a weekly, if not daily, basis.

      The constantly accumulating evidence has overwhelmingly convinced the scientific community not only that the trend is real, but that the consequences will be particularly dramatic for human societies. Humans happen to be the only living species on Earth obsessed by the idea of controlling their environmental habitat for the sake of their own comfort and profit. The rest of the biosphere tries simply to get by with the hand it is dealt.

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      But now the dual goals of comfort and profit appear to be dangerously at odds. Responding to the demand for comfort of those who can afford it provokes increasing levels of discomfort for those societies and individuals that cannot. That simple fact has become one of the contributing factors to the increasingly evident revolt against growing income and wealth inequality.

      A report by the insurance company Swiss Re cited by The Guardian informs us that we are quickly approaching a point of no return. “One-fifth of the world’s countries are at risk of their ecosystems collapsing because of the destruction of wildlife and their habitats,” The Guardian reports. If 20% of the nations of the world succumb, it won’t be long before 30%, 40%, 50% and more are affected as well. It appears that Australia, Israel and South Africa are particularly exposed. The report also cites India, Spain and Belgium.

      In other words, this time it won’t be only the forgotten and neglected developing nations (Donald Trump’s “shithole countries”) that are the first to pay the cost. If people used to luxury and accustomed to thinking of themselves as sheltered from disaster are the ones who may suffer first, alarm bells will quickly start ringing.

      The Guardian cites some worrying figures: “More than half of global GDP — $42tn (£32tn) — depends on high-functioning biodiversity, according to the report, but the risk of tipping points is growing.”

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Tipping point:

      For capitalists, an abstract target to both aim for and avoid, since on the positive side it represents the maximum reward expected from any endeavor designed to exploit and eventually exhaust a market or a body of resources, while, on the negative side, it threatens to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. The balancing act consists of finding the point of equilibrium between maximum exploitation and braking before reaching the tipping point.

      Contextual Note

      In the year 2000, which marks the beginning of the age of internet marketing and social media, tipping points became something to aim for rather than avoid. Malcolm Gladwell’s best-seller, “The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference,” was released in that year. It reads like a recipe book encouraging the kind of viral development successful marketers manage to achieve for a new product or a new practice. 

      Gladwell praised and encouraged business models aimed at creating “social epidemics.” Though it may seem absurd and even macabre today, as the world battles an incomprehensible and unpredictable pandemic, Gladwell’s book offers advice on how to go viral. He even formulates laws and rules that describe the process: the “Law of the Few,” the “Stickiness Factor” and the “Power of Context.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      The trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic may have put a serious dent in the prestige our culture allotted to tipping points two decades ago. In the era of Gordon Gekko’s “greed is good,” epidemic change represented seemed like a complementary and rather more respectable ideal. 

      The year 2000 marked the summit of the dot.com craze that quickly turned into the dot.com crash. Venture capitalists were hurting, but that was only temporary. Social media hadn’t yet taken off, but Gladwell clearly sensed its imminent arrival and understood its deeper logic. Global warming, with its threat of disastrous tipping points, had become an issue but it was already being dismissed by climate change deniers, who preferred to focus on a rapidly rising stock market.

      The rise and more recent fall of the image of tipping points raises a fascinating question about contemporary culture. If we admit that, in the year 2000, the idea of the tipping point promoted by Gladwell had mainly positive connotations and that, today, the prospect of a tipping point sets off alarm bells evoking the fear of imminent disaster, can we identify the tipping point that pushed us from the positive appreciation to the negative one? 

      There seem to be two candidates for the tipping point about tipping points: the economic crisis of 2008 and the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. If the dot.com crash of 2000 felt more like a thrilling roller-coaster ride than a traumatizing event, the 2008 crisis was an earthquake that leveled some institutions and seriously attacked the credibility of some of the previous decade’s ideals.

      The Gladwell version of a tipping point was associated with the inebriation that accompanies sudden commercial success and the rapid achievement of a monopoly position. That had become the goal of every economic actor’s ambition for the 30 years between 1980 and 2010. The current perception of a tipping point, as cited in The Guardian’s article, is one of a risk to be anticipated and avoided. The sense of having a mission of conquest eventually gave way to a simple hope for stability and survival.

      Historical Note

      A tipping point indicates a critical threshold beyond which the return to a previous state of equilibrium becomes impossible. Before Europe’s scientific and Industrial Revolution, people regarded tipping points as fatalities, the result of uncontrollable forces or trends. Since the industrial age, developed countries have evolved a culture of control that supposes human societies will have the ingenuity and the technology capable of fending off catastrophes and avoiding catastrophic tipping points.

      But that belief has recently been shaken by various uncontrollable events. And instead of ensuring mastery, the post-industrial culture of control has developed a perverse tendency to magnify its fear of tipping points. That is what’s behind the “science” of risk management and its method of contingency planning. Intended to increase our security, in the wrong hands it can become an irrational obsession. Instead of discovering solutions, it magnifies problems.

      In 2004, The Guardian broke a story about a secret Pentagon report warning “that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.” The Pentagon’s pessimism — or would it be more accurate to call it paranoiac optimism? — seems laughable today. It tells us more about the psychological climate inside America’s war machine and the budgeting rituals of the military-industrial complex than it does about the reality of the threats the world is facing.

      Today’s more realistic report by Swiss Re reveals that the trends the Pentagon identified are real and increasingly threatening, even if they don’t follow the logic of a Hollywood catastrophe movie that seemed to inspire the authors of the 2004 report. The threat is real, but the timeline was off by several decades. 

      In 2004, the Pentagon recommended to a refractory Bush administration that climate change “should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a US national security concern.” What better way to secure funding from Congress than to amplify their dread of unmanageable catastrophe? Alas, the Pentagon’s fearmongering had no effect on the Bush administration’s policy, though it probably did enable them to slightly pad their budget.

      Swiss Re announced that its objective is “to help insurers assess ecosystem risks when setting premiums for businesses.” This is bound to be more realistic than the Pentagon’s speculation, but the motive similarly focuses on getting other people to pay for what they are told to fear. That principle seems to be baked into the mentality of control cultures. As Malcolm Gladwell demonstrated, understanding tipping points is all about getting richer.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in Elections

      Kamala Harris cancels events after flying with two people who tested positive for Covid – live

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      Harris’s communications director and a ‘non-staff flight crew member’ tested positive
      Senate Judiciary committee to vote on Amy Coney Barrett nomination on 22 October
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      Kamala Harris halts travel after flying with two who tested positive for Covid

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      The Democratic vice-presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, on Thursday abruptly canceled her travel for the coming few days after two people associated with the Joe Biden-Harris election campaign tested positive for coronavirus.Harris was on a flight with both individuals two days before their positive Covid-19 tests. The individuals were Harris’s communications director, Liz Allen, and a “non-staff flight crew member”.Because Harris and these contacts wore medical-grade N95 face masks during the flight and they were not within 6ft of the vice-presidential nominee for more than 15 minutes, they do not meet the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’ (CDC) definition of “close contact”.For that reason, Harris does not meet full quarantine criteria, which would normally require an individual to be in isolation for two weeks.But “out of an abundance of caution” the campaign has canceled her events through Sunday. She will still attend virtual campaign events.The individuals were not in contact with the Democratic president nominee, Joe Biden.The Harris campaign put out a statement saying the news of the positive tests came in late on Wednesday.NEWS: Sen. Harris’s campaign communications director and a non staff flight member have tested positive for COVID-19. The Biden campaign is canceling some of Harris’s planned travel. pic.twitter.com/TBme8kjFv4— Daniel Strauss (@DanielStrauss4) October 15, 2020
      It added that the California senator and vice-presidential candidate would “deep a robust and aggressive schedule of virtual campaign activities to reach voters all across the country” and that she intended to return to in-person campaigning on Monday.The precautions, the statement noted, are “the sort of conduct we have continuously modeled in this campaign”.The campaign said that Harris last tested negative for coronavirus on Wednesday and she will be tested again.More details soon … More

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      in US Politics

      Ohio's quarter-mile early-voting lines? That's what voter suppression looks like | David Litt

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      In-person early voting started in Ohio this week, and in the state’s largest cities, it was a total mess. In Columbus, the line stretched for a quarter of a mile. In Cuyahoga county, the hours-long wait began before polls even opened.All of this was entirely predictable. Thanks to an Ohio state law passed in 2006 by a Republican-controlled legislature and signed by a Republican governor, the number of in-person early voting sites is limited to just one per county. That means Vinton County, a Republican stronghold in the state’s southeast that’s home to just 13,500 Ohioans, has approximately 97 times more polling-places-per-voter than Franklin County, the deep-blue bastion with a population of more than 1.3 million.The office of Frank LaRose, Ohio’s chief elections official, recently tweeted that “lines are due to enthusiasm”. But blaming voters for the long lines they endure ignores the massive, intentional disparity in resources between the more and less populous parts of the state. Ohio’s politicians have made voting far easier for Republicans and far more difficult for Democrats. But what makes the needlessly long lines that have appeared throughout Ohio’s cities particularly notable is that they are not merely the result of election mismanagement or an ad hoc act of voter suppression. Instead, they reflect a view of democracy that prioritizes the imaginary preferences of land over the very real preferences of people, and in so doing, undermines the principle of “One Person, One Vote”.To understand exactly what makes the actions of Ohio’s Republican politicians so insidious, and so antithetical to modern democracy, it’s important to understand the history of One Person, One Vote – a concept that sounds timeless, but in fact is younger than George Clooney. At the turn of the 20th century, as Americans began migrating from the countryside to cities, rural politicians came up with ways to retain power without having to retain population. The simplest way to do this was to avoid redrawing legislative district boundaries every year. The population of cities boomed – but the number of representatives allocated to them did not.By 1960, American representation, or lack thereof, had become almost farcical. Maricopa county, Arizona, which contained the city of Phoenix and more than half the state’s population, elected just one-third of the state’s representatives to Congress. “One state senator represented Los Angeles county, which had a population of more than 6 million people,” write authors Seth Stern and Stephen Wermiel, “while another represented three northern California rural counties with a total population of 14,294.” Author Anthony Lewis provides an example from Connecticut: “177,000 citizens of Hartford elected two members of the state house of representatives; so did the town of Colebrook, population 592.” (The most egregious example of what political scientists call “malapportionment” was surely in New Hampshire, where one district’s assemblyman represented a constituency of three.)Another strategy politicians used to maintain control despite dwindling popular support was to distribute power by county rather than by population. The most infamous of these was Georgia’s “county unit system”. Created in 1917, the system gave each county a set number of votes in Democratic primaries: urban counties received six votes, towns received four, and rural counties received two. Atlanta’s Fulton county had a population 80 times larger than that of three least-populous counties combined, yet they received an identical six votes. Because Democrats dominated Georgia, the winner of the party primary was the de facto winner of the general election – which made the county unit system a powerful tool for disenfranchising urban voters in general, and Black voters (who were more likely to live in cities) in particular.These kinds of representation-skewing schemes were immoral. But for most of the 20th century, they weren’t illegal. For decades, the supreme court held that district populations were a political question the judiciary had no business deciding. But in 1962, the justices concluded that malapportionment couldn’t be corrected through the normal electoral process. It left voters powerless to reclaim their power. In Baker v Carr Justice William Brennan declared that malapportionment – if sufficiently egregious – violated the constitution.It’s hard to overstate the impact of the Baker decision. In the months that followed, district maps were struck down in a dozen states. The county unit system was overturned. In 1964, the court ruled that congressional districts, not just state legislative ones, were required to have roughly equal populations. As Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice, notes in The Fight to Vote, 93 of 99 state legislative maps were redrawn in just four years.Chief Justice Earl Warren later called Baker v Carr the most important decision issued by his court. He also summarized the principle behind that decision perfectly. “Legislators represent people,” he wrote. “Not trees or acres.” That principle – that power belongs to the people rather than the land – is what we now call one person, one vote.Sixty years after Baker, the urban-rural divide in our politics is starker than ever. Democrats have become the parties of cities and the denser suburbs, Republicans the party of exurbs and rural areas. Democrats have won the popular vote in six of the last seven presidential elections. But while the Republican party has lagged among America’s people, it represents the vast majority of America’s acres and trees.If there’s a silver lining, it’s that the people have shown themselves willing to fight for representative democracyWhich brings us back to Columbus and Cleveland, where brutally long voting lines have turned casting a ballot into a feat of endurance. It’s no longer possible to directly allocate votes by county (although that’s likely to be tested if Amy Coney Barrett joins the existing conservative majority on the court). But it is still possible to allocate voting resources by county, in an effort to make voting exponentially more difficult for urban voters than for rural ones. The goal of LaRose’s one-polling-place-per-county order is no different than that of the politicians who devised Georgia’s county unit system more than 100 years ago: diminish the political power of the cities at the expense of the countryside.Distressingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, it’s not just Ohio where one person, one vote is under attack. In Georgia’s 2018 election, Atlanta received far fewer voting machines per voter than rural, redder counties elsewhere in the state. States like Wisconsin have been gerrymandered to pack urban voters into a relative handful of districts while giving rural voters as many representatives as possible. Earlier this month in Texas, the Republican governor, Greg Abbott, limited the number of drop boxes for mail-in ballots to just one per county, even though the state’s most populous county has – and this is not a typo – 2,780,000% more residents than the least populous. No wonder that in Houston, long lines of cars are snaking outside Harris county’s single drop-off site.If there’s a silver lining in all this, it’s that the American people have shown themselves willing to fight for representative democracy. Thus far, the attacks on voting in states like Ohio and Texas seem to have backfired, leading to more awareness, more outrage and, ultimately, higher turnout. But in the long term, Americans must reckon with the fact that one of our two political parties increasingly sees representative democracy as either a hassle or a threat.In the 2020 election, there’s good reason to hope that the voters will stand up to defend our system of government. That said, they shouldn’t have to. Democracy shouldn’t be on the ballot every four years. If and when Democrats regain control of Congress, the White House or state governments across America, they’ll have plenty of challenges to tackle. But nothing will be more important – or ultimately, more essential to changing the country’s course – than reasserting a fundamental but fragile principle of our democracy: in America, the ultimate source of power is the people. Period.This article was amended on 15 October 2020 to clarify that the number of polling places per county was limited by Ohio state lawmakers, not the Ohio Secretary of State, as an earlier version said
      David Litt is an American political speechwriter and author of the comedic memoir Thanks, Obama: My Hopey Changey White House Years More

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      Will Idlib Be the Final Move on Syria’s Chessboard?

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      Recent rumblings portend a grim new episode for Syria’s Idlib province. Stretching along the northwestern border with Turkey, Idlib became the last redoubt of forces that oppose President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, namely Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and the National Liberation Front,  when Moscow and Ankara announced the creation of a de-escalation zone in the area two years ago. The 2018 agreement halted a Syrian government offensive that would have brought devastation to Idlib. An uneasy calm hangs over the province, but the delicate diplomatic balance that brought respite now looks close to collapse. Notably, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov visited Syria in September prompting speculation that Moscow and Damascus are set to make a northward push against rebel forces.

      Around the same time, reports emerged of Syrian regime forces shelling opposition frontlines, while Turkey has brought military hardware across the border to bolster anti-Assad forces in the Idlib countryside. Local observers relate that both Russian and Turkish reconnaissance drones have been active over the city of Idlib and the surrounding areas. Syrian forces, backed by Russian airpower, now appear to be hitting HTS positions with more intensity.

      Entangled International Interests

      Idlib may prove to be the final chapter of the Syrian Civil War. But here, Turkey and Russia are the main players. Turkey has long propped up anti-Assad factions and has maintained a military presence in Syria’s north for several years. Meanwhile, it was the assertive intervention of Russia in 2015 that turned the war in Assad’s favor. Russian airpower has been a key factor in Syrian government forces’ advance toward Idlib and the regime’s ability to reclaim rebel-held territory.

      Is Assad Gearing Up for a Final Push in Syria?

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      In our research into the impacts of proxy actors in Middle Eastern conflicts, we interviewed a range of Syrian activists. All of them noted a tangle of relationships and alliances between a plethora of Syrian organizations and international sponsors. In particular, they highlighted the roles of Turkey and Russia, both in the conflict and in the humanitarian crisis Syria faces. One opposition figure expressed his gratitude to Turkey for accommodating Syrian refugees. Yet at the same time, he felt that Turkey’s military involvement had made a complex conflict environment more difficult to resolve. Another activist who had participated in ceasefire negotiations in 2015 noted the dominant role that Russia played in securing agreements.

      In general, Syrian figures we spoke with expressed concern at the intentions foreign powers may harbor for Syria. The prevalent feeling among our interviewees was that the challenges that Syria faces are ultimately for Syrians to solve and that foreign interventions made solutions even harder to find. Major powers jockeying for an advantage over regional rivals have clear geopolitical goals, the pursuit of which generally overrides the interests of local people.

      Local Impacts

      Even after the Russia-Turkey accord reached in 2018, Idlib has not been spared hostilities. As elsewhere in the Syrian conflict, civilians have borne the brunt of the violence. A UN report recorded “rampant human rights violations” in Idlib and western Aleppo in late 2019 and early 2020 as Assad’s forces pushed to retake the province despite the de-escalation agreement. Up to a million civilians were uprooted, the largest single displacement of people during the entire war. UN investigators detailed numerous instances where pro-regime forces bombarded schools, markets and hospitals. Investigators also accused HTS of indiscriminately targeting civilian areas.

      Embed from Getty Images

      In February, 33 Turkish soldiers were killed in a Syrian airstrike spurring Turkey to undertake a spate of retaliatory attacks. In the wake of this flare-up, Ankara and Moscow reached another deal to curtail hostilities. This latest agreement demonstrates once more that the fates of Syria and its hapless people are largely in the hands of external powers. It seems that the conflict is only in abeyance while powerful actors maneuver for advantage across the chessboard that Syria has become.

      In Idlib, the interests of the key players are clear. Ankara wants to maintain a foothold in Syria. Long calling for the removal of Assad and championing anti-regime forces, it plays the role of protector to Idlib’s militias and civilians fleeing the regime’s advance. Should Idlib fall, a new wave of refugees would surge toward Turkey, something that Ankara can ill afford. Russia, meanwhile, retains access to its only Mediterranean naval base thanks to its relationship with Assad, and thus Moscow wants to ensure the Syrian president’s longevity.

      Linking Damascus and the northern city of Aleppo, Idlib is a central piece of the strategic jigsaw for Assad. Retaking the province, which has been an opposition stronghold since 2015, would be highly symbolic, drastically weakening rebel groups and being another step toward the regime’s final victory.

      Machinations in Moscow and Ankara

      Domestic concerns in Turkey and Russia also come into play in what happens on the ground in Syria. Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Russian President Vladimir Putin have both used international adventures to further their own agenda. Erdogan’s approval surged after authorizing forays into Syria against Kurdish-led forces in Afrin in early 2018 and in the northeast in late 2019. More recently he has intervened in Libya in support of the Government of National Accord. For his part, Putin rose to prominence at the turn of the millennium fighting Chechen insurgents and underlined his tough-guy credentials by strutting into Georgia in 2008 in a conflict over the breakaway region of South Ossetia.

      Both leaders are currently under pressure, Erdogan as Turkey’s economy falters, and Putin facing criticism after the poisoning of Russia’s prominent opposition figure, Alexei Navalny. Creating a distraction by upping the ante in Idlib would be a convenient way of rallying domestic support. Heightened tensions between Russia and Turkey, each of which backs different sides both in Libya and in the escalating conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh, further complicate matters.

      Significantly, other international interventions by Russia and Turkey have been against considerably weaker opponents. Do Eurasia’s two military heavyweights really want to directly face off in Idlib? Turkey and Russia maintain outwardly amicable relations, but they have different goals in Syria. Decisions made in Moscow and Ankara will determine whether the tenuous peace in Idlib endures. Should it fracture, it will be the long-suffering people of Syria, yet again, who will bear the greatest cost.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

      [*Dr William Gourlay and Professor Shahram Akbarzadeh are based in the Middle East Studies Forum at Deakin University, Australia. This research was facilitated by Carnegie Corporation of New York (Grant number: G-18-55949): “Assessing the impact of external actors in the Syrian and Afghan proxy wars.”] More