US must become part of real anti-Daesh coalition: Pundit

Press TV has interviewed Mark Sleboda, an international relations and security analyst in Moscow, to discuss Russia’s airstrikes against Daesh in Syria.

What follows is a rough transcription of the interview.

Press TV: Looking at it from a military perspective, even one target hit by Russia shows how successful it has been. Over fifty sorties and many targets have now been eliminated, Daesh related or Daesh targets, by Russia. Why is it that the US and its coalition were unable to do what Russia is doing in a matter of just days now?

Sleboda: That is the million-dollar question, isn’t it? The United States and its allies have been bombing, supposedly, we are told, Daesh in Syria and in Iraq for upwards of a year, supposedly thousands of sorties to a cost of billions of dollars, and yet Russia is able to so clearly and easily find and bomb Daesh commanding control nodes, arms depots, columns of tanks, training facilities all across the spectrum in different targets ranging from Raqqa, their proposed capital, to the outskirts of Palmyra, all the way to the outskirts of Damascus.

So the real question is what has the US been doing all of this time? And it leads to, unfortunately, the suggestion that the United States has not been waging a war against Daesh to defeat it, but instead to manage it, to direct it, to prune it where necessary, and to allow it to expand into Syrian territory in its goal of overthrowing the Syrian government. And this is an extremely cynical and dangerous strategy if this is what the US has been doing.

Press TV: This slogan comes to mind when I think of how Russia has executed itself in Syria, and it is, ‘Catch me if you can,’ because we are looking at the US and its allies scrambling to find out how they should react. Meanwhile, Bashar al-Assad has said, ‘You know what? Let’s not even talk about the political aspect of this, let’s just get rid of these terrorists.’ Now Russia has also come out and said without the Syrian army and coordination with the Syrian army, this is not going to be successful, yet there is pushback from the US and its coalition. Why is it there not this importance placed by the US and its allies on getting rid of the terrorists the way Russia is suggesting?

Sleboda: The United States has refused to answer Russian questions of exactly defining who these supposed moderates are, where they are, what they are doing. We know from Washington Post reports that the CIA has trained some 10,000 proxies. It trained them, it has armed them and it pays their salaries.

The question is, where are these proxies and why aren’t they fighting ISIS (Daesh)? Because the big failure of the US bombing campaign, other than it does not seem that they were able to hit many important targets, is that there are no ground forces that are willing to engage ISIS and take and hold territory. That is why the Russian strategy of supporting the Syrian government as well as the Kurdish militias… airstrikes and intelligence above these forces to conquer and control ground in the aftermath, this is a winning strategy and it is quite obvious that not only has the US strategy failed, but it has only perpetrated the war and probably led to many tens of thousands more deaths than were necessary.

It is well past time for the US to drop its geopolitical machinations, get on board and become part of the real coalition; the only proven strategy they can defeat ISIS and restore stability to Syria, Iraq and the region.

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