Front Burner - Inside a Russian 'propaganda tour' of Syria

Episode Date: October 11, 2019

A Turkish military assault on Kurdish fighters is underway in northeastern Syria. It was made possible by a U.S. decision to withdraw American military personnel in that area. Today on Front Burner, CBC Moscow correspondent Chris Brown discusses how Russia, a country with a large military presence in Syria, looks to fill the gap left by the United States. He talks about his recent trip to Syria, escorted by the Russian military, on what he says was, "effectively, a propaganda tour."

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Jamie Pusso. Right now, a Turkish military assault on Kurdish fighters is underway in northeastern Syria. It's been widely condemned across the world and was made possible by a U.S. decision to withdraw its protection of the Kurds. For years, the U.S. worked with Syrian Kurds to fight and largely defeat ISIS. So many critics see this as abandoning an ally.

The Kurds are fighting for their land, just so you understand. And as somebody wrote in a very, very powerful article today, they didn't help us in the Second World War. They didn't help us with Normandy as an example. Well, into this gap left by the United States steps Russia, the foreign country with the largest military presence in Syria. Two weeks ago, the Russian military escorted reporters to the western part of the country, where yet another fight is imminent. CBC Russia correspondent Chris Brown was on that tour.

And today, he's going to tell us what it was like. And we'll talk about what these latest developments mean for Syria, Russia, and the world. This is FrontBurner. Chris, hello. Hello again. Hello. Thanks so much for coming back on the pod. It's so nice to have you here so soon. Yeah, it's great to be back. So, you know, I know that you were in the western half of Syria just a couple of weeks ago.

This half of the country is almost entirely government controlled. And this Turkish incursion happened in the northeastern part of the country in a Kurdish controlled area. And I'm curious, when you were there, were people preparing for this incursion or expecting it? No, not at all. And this is what is one of the interesting things about this, is that people knew something like this could happen, but the speed with which it happened, I think, is very surprising. You know, I follow what the Russians do and say about Syria,

and they repeatedly, every week or so, make a call for the United States to get out of the way, to leave Syria. The presence of your troops is illegitimate. Between our experts and our military and our security services and foreign ministries, we have a constructive dialogue. Well, what happened effectively, even though they haven't left all of Syria, they've pulled out of this area. So I think perhaps the Russians were as surprised as what the Turks were maybe when this happened. Right, just how quickly the United States pulled out. Exactly. We want to bring our troops back home. And I got elected on that. At a military

base in northern Syria, evidence today U.S. troops wasted little time in following orders, already effectively abandoned. You know, we've been hearing from the Russians that this war is over for a couple of years now. In 2017, Vladimir Putin said, you know, the fighting's done, terrorists are defeated. defeated. NANCY RANKIN, CNN CORRESPONDENT, CNN NANCY RANKIN, CNN CORRESPONDENT, CNN NANCY RANKIN, CNN CORRESPONDENT, CNN NANCY RANKIN, CNN CORRESPONDENT, CNN NANCY RANKIN, CNN CORRESPONDENT, CNN

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NANCY RANKIN, CNN CORRESPONDENT, CNN NANCY RANKIN, CNN CORRESPONDENT, CNN NANCY need to start looking at reconstruction. But clearly, especially with the events of the last 48 hours, it's not over. And many people think, in fact, the worst might still be to come. You know, what this has done, there's no real roadmap to peace. And in fact, the whole map seems to be about rewritten again in Syria. And when you say the worst could be yet to come, what are we talking about here? Well, people will look at what happened the last time the Turkish army made an incursion into Syria. And it wasn't all that far from the area where we were in the western part. There's a Kurdish enclave, if you will, in the west as well. At least there was a place called Afrin. And the Turks moved in. They used the same language, said they were fighting terrorists,

in other words the Kurds. There was fighting, civilians died, the Turkish-backed militias were accused of atrocities. According to the United Nations, two-thirds of 323,000 residents have fled the Afrin region since the start of the Turkish offensive. The Kurdish YPG forces pulled out almost two months to the day since Turkey launched a military operation. And then the Kurds who had been living in Afrin were moved out and other people were resettled. The Turkish president has vowed to push ahead. Looking forward, we will continue this process with Manbij,

Kobani, Ras Al Ain, Qamishli, until this strip of land is no longer held by the Kurds. This is what effectively is a much bigger version of what happened then. So there is a lot of worry that we're into something and no one really knows how long it's going to go on for and certainly what the casualties could be. Okay. Well, I want to talk to you today about your trip with the Russians to the western part of the country. But before we do that, I just want to make sure I understand what's happening right now. And am I right to say that the Americans were in the northeastern part of the country,

where the Kurds control a large area. And they were working with the Kurds who helped them fight over the last several years. Despite objections from NATO ally Turkey, the Pentagon is to supply weapons to Kurdish YPG forces battling ISIL militants in Syria. The U.S. said the YPG is the only force on the ground that can successfully seize Raqqa in the near future. So now the Americans have left and the Turks have come in and there's a potential bloodbath that could erupt. In the western part of the country, this is the area largely controlled by the government and by Assad. And these forces are backed by Russia. And that's where you were.

Correct. Now, you know, the map again changes every few months, really. And at one point, Bashar al-Assad's forces controlled, I think it was as little as 30% of the entire country. But now, with a lot of Russian help, they've managed to take back many of the areas that were under opposition control. And so what the Russians do is every year or so, they take a group of foreign journalists down to Syria to try to showcase, in their words, all of their good deeds.

To show how they're helping restore order to Syria, how they're helping the government there, and how they're, you know, on the path to reconstruction. And they really portray it as it's us and everybody else, the Turks, the Americans, the Kurds, they're kind of getting in the way of it. So this visit that we made just at the end of September was really about trying to reinforce that kind of narrative. trying to reinforce that kind of narrative. Syrians were keen to show us they've beefed up the capabilities of their army. This is a special operations drill from a newly formed unit. Supposedly here they're training to take out terrorists. Can you tell me about the trip? Where did you go? What did you see?

It's all part of an organized trip to various spots that the Russians set up in advance, showcasing the different things that they want to show you. And you go by plane, you go by bus, you go by armored personnel carrier. You start often at seven in the morning and you get back to your hotel at nine at night, often with like no bathroom breaks in between. So it's pretty physically punishing.

It seems so grueling. You know, it's grueling. And this is all part of the way that I think they operate. I mean, they obviously want to control the agenda. They want to keep you off balance. They want to make sure that you don't veer off the script and start writing about things that they don't want you to write about. We attempted to put some of the tough questions

about the awful human cost of Russia's war in Syria to the general leading our group, Igor Konishenkov. They run over people with buses and fright trucks. They blow things up. They cut off people's heads with knives. What else do you need to know that this is not opposition? These are just terrorists. And so you have to make a decision before you go, knowing all this.

Is this a trip we really want to do? Do we really want to be stuck with Russia's military for a whole week on effectively a propaganda tour? We decided that we did. We decided we would be skeptical, that we would do a lot of research, and we would go in knowing that this is the way it was going to be, but hoping we would still get a lot of good insights about Syria. And I think we made the right call. And can you tell me about some of the insights that you were able to get? I've been to Syria twice now and on two of these tours and going in, you're never really sure what to expect. Is it a functioning country? How is it functioning? You know, how are people making do all of these things? And so you can tell that large parts of Damascus, they may be run down, but it is still a functioning city.

And there's even some very nice homes, you know, Western-style homes. And then, of course, you realize that if you support the government and you support Bashar al-Assad, your life probably is okay. Right. Talking to regular Syrians was difficult. One of the few opportunities was in the historic battered city of Aleppo. We love him. This is our president. We trust him. That's all we know. Shoppers will come here like they did before, he says, but we have to wait a bit longer before the market is fully rebuilt.

It's all the opponents, everyone else who you don't meet on trips like this. They're the ones that are really suffering. You know, there are, according to groups like Amnesty International, 100,000 opponents of the Assad regime just went into jails and disappeared, never came out again. So that's the kind of thing you really have to bear in mind. And, you know, as far as Russia goes, you can really tell that Russia really did save Assad from falling. When we went in 2017, the opposition forces were only about 20 kilometers away from the Russian military base near Latakia. And now they're, you know, 200 kilometers away. So they really have pushed them back. And Russia has settled in to stay for what appears to be a very long time. I know Russia got involved around 2015. Would it be fair to say that had Russia

not gotten involved, backing up Assad, and you know, Iran has backed up Assad as well, he might have lost this war? I think you can take out the word might. I think they probably would have lost. Now, what's interesting is there's a lot of different players on this very complicated battlefield. What's interesting to me is that really it was largely the Kurds, backed by the Americans that did most of the heavy lifting,

fighting the ISIS so-called terrorists. Right, right. And you know, this idea that the Kurds were fighting ISIS and helping the Americans fight ISIS is one of the reasons why you see so much outrage, even from Republicans in the U.S. right now. They feel that the United States has abandoned their allies. Tweeted Nikki Haley today, Trump's own former ambassador to the United Nations, leaving them to die, she wrote, is a big mistake. One of President's closest allies, Senator Lindsey Graham. It's never in our national security interest to abandon an ally who's helped us fight ISIS.

It's never in our national security interest to create conditions for the reemergence of ISIS. That's right. And, you know, from Russia's point of view, this can only be seen as good news. I mean, not that they necessarily have a whole lot of skin in the game in the Northeast, but I think from their point of view, anything that weakens the anti-Assad forces in Syria probably helps Russia. Right.

I think anything that, you know, makes Russia's role as a potential mediator or increases the potential of Russian diplomacy is probably also seen as a win for Vladimir Putin. And I think what we've seen in the last 48 hours does both of those things. The idea being that the Russians could actually negotiate some sort of deal between the Turks and the Kurds here and even expand their power in Syria. You just mentioned that the Russians will probably be there for a long time. Why are they interested in Syria in the first place?

Initially, their air base right near Latakia was threatened by being overrun by anti-Assad forces. So I think that's what triggered them to come in in 2015, which is basically trying to save their assets. At the UN General Assembly last week, President Vladimir Putin sought to reassure President Barack Obama that no Russian attack inside Syria was imminent. But within two days, the Russian Air Force carried out its first airstrikes. But Russia's playing a long game here, too.

And what they really want is more influence in a part of the world that's very important. And they had that, you know, for decades as the Soviet Union, and then they lost it. And now they're getting some of it back again. So by intervening in Syria, they do a couple of things. They, first of all, have someone like Assad who's indebted to them. So now he owes them some big ones. And maybe that's going to involve, you know, reconstruction and so forth. They get to keep their air base. They get to keep a port facility and so forth. Russian diplomacy is enhanced. And all of this increases

Russia's footprint in that part of the world. And we're that even bigger picture. It helps challenge NATO in the Mediterranean. And these are really some of Russia's big strategic goals, all for a pretty modest investment. At the airbase, you can see maybe 30 or so Russian jets, some helicopters there too, or so, Russian jets, there's some helicopters there too, maybe 5,000 soldiers on the ground. And that's really not that much blood or treasure to expend to get this kind of extra influence. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization.

Empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. I'm curious about your time in Idlib province. So I understand that it is not under Assad's control, but you were able to see part of it that the government with the help of Russian forces have been able to claim. And what's it like there? So it's true. Most of Idlib, which is up near the northwest, near the Turkish border too, is under control of a real hodgepodge of opposition groups. A lot of them are not very nice people at all. A lot of them used to be associated with al-Qaeda. And because of that, the Syrian government and the Russians are quite eager to push into Idlib and get rid of this last major pocket of opposition fighters there.

So about two weeks before we went, just in early September, there was a bit of a Russian and Syrian offensive. Khan Sheikhoun in southern Idlib province is a main population centre. It used to be a place where 100,000 Syrians took shelter before the military escalation began. Rebels withdrew after days of fighting and hundreds of airstrikes. Images released by pro-regime media show the town in southern Idlib empty of residents and fighters. And they captured, you know, maybe 15, 20 kilometers of territory into Idlib,

and that's where they took us to, to see. And it's a very interesting place because it was hard fought over for many, many years. And finally, the Syrians and the Russians got it. Hard fought over to the point that there was a chemical weapons attack. This is Wardah, gasping for air moments after government warplanes bombed Khan Sheikhoun. Rescue workers hosing victims down to try to wash it away. The images were awful. Yeah, that's right.

And it was that awfulness that pushed the Americans to launch bombs actually at Syrian positions in Damascus. So when we went there, the Russians had an agenda. They wanted us to see, you know, this is a town that we've, quote unquote, liberated. And look how grateful the people are. And it's true. You go into the town, you get out of your armored personnel carrier, and immediately you see a whole bunch of scenes in front of you. There's people singing and chanting, we love Assad, we love Assad, we love Russia. They're waving all kinds of flags.

And then there's a bunch of refugees, apparently, who are coming in and they're getting food from Russian trucks. It's very hard to take it all in, but the message that you're getting is, look at the good that we're doing. Now, we have no way to know if those people were brought in from somewhere else. You know, we had maybe a minute to talk to every single one of them. Like, you really just don't know. Eighty-year-old Amina told us she welcomes the return of Assad's troops as she wasn't able to get food or water for days. Haloud Latkhani said the terrorists who were pushed out were killing civilians.

But that's the scene. Speaking of Idlib, there are still areas around this territory that are holdouts, right? And is there a sense that the government forces, with the help of Russia, are trying to take them back now? So there is, and this is, I mean, before what we saw, what we're seeing now in northeastern Turkey, this was supposed to be the next horrible battle was in Idlib. And the reason is, is that as Assad took back all these other parts of Syria, they let some people escape

as part of surrender agreements, some of the fighters and some of the fighters' families, and they all came to Idlib. So in Idlib, there's hundreds of thousands of people who fled from other parts of Syria, mixed in with all these opposition fighters, as I say, some of whom used to fight for al-Qaeda. So you've got 500,000 civilians, 20 or 30,000 former al-Qaeda members, and the real worry here is that those civilians are going to be used as human shields when some kind of a final offensive comes. They've been trying to work with the Turks, because they're so close to that area, to maybe try to separate the civilians from the jihadis. One of the many questions arising out of the events of the last day or two is, what's this going to mean for Idlib?

Is there going to be a final offensive by Russia and Syria in there while the world is looking somewhere else? Is it fair for me to say that we see this battle erupting now in the northeastern part of the country, in the Kurdish-controlled part of the country, but there could also be another imminent and potentially equally devastating battle in the western part of the country in Idlib? trying to pass resolution after resolution to get some kind of a ceasefire, to get some kind of an agreement to prevent this final offensive into Idlib. But the Russians constantly have blocked this. They say this kind of resolution would only help, quote-unquote,

the terrorists in Idlib and wouldn't really help civilians. So Chris, listening to you today, it's clear that Russia's influence has grown exponentially in Syria over the last few years. And there's this last offensive in the western part of the country in Idlib. And then the government forces in Syria and Russia would essentially have complete control over a majority of the country. As you mentioned, the U.S. pulling out of the northeastern part of the country in the Kurdish-controlled area is good for Russia. That could extend their

influence. What I think I'm trying to wrap my head around today is why would the United States cede control of Syria to Russia like this? That's the question right now. They have different goals, and it's difficult to sometimes, you know, permeate the minds of the Kremlin. Clearly, they're looking for expanded influence in the Middle East. And they're looking to challenge, in many ways, American dominance of some of these areas in some of these countries. From the American point of view, there is a reluctance, it seems, to be involved in the same kind of way that the Russians are. You know, one thing we haven't really talked about is Russia's involvement has been intensely criticized by human rights groups. Something like 6,000 civilians died since 2015 by indiscriminate Russian bombing.

These are numbers that have come out over and over and over again by all kinds of human rights groups. And yet here in Russia, those numbers barely make any kind of a blip. Well, the Americans, it's different. They've been blamed, for example, when the Kurds and their forces attacked Raqqa for something like 1,300 deaths. And there may even be more. So to some extent, the two countries work under different rules, because there's different governments that are involved. And you get the sense, particularly from the Trump administration, that there's some fatigue in this. But it's a puzzle, because it did seem to me that the

Russians were probably just as surprised as everybody else that the Americans withdrew their garrisons from the northeast. It did seem like there was a pretty, you know, almost a stalemate between the Kurdish side and the east. And there was not much that the Assad government and Russia could do about that. And now it's been tipped over to Assad's favor. So that's going to have some long-term implications. Right. Okay. Chris Brown, thank you so much. Thanks. So one thing that Chris and I didn't get a chance to touch on in our conversation. Right now in the Kurdish territory in northern Syria, there are some 11,000 ISIS fighters being detained, including at least 32 men, women and children.

What to do with these fighters, whether to repatriate them, has been this ongoing conundrum for Canada and other countries as well. Well, unsurprisingly, it's even more complicated now. A number of security experts believe they could be cut loose by the Kurds and either flee or rejoin ISIS fighters. That's all for today. FrontBurner comes to you from cbc news and cbc podcasts the show is produced by shannon higgins imogen burchard chris berube and elaine chapp derek van der weyk is our sound designer and technician with help this week from billy heaton our music is by joseph shabison of boombox sound the executive producer of front burner iser is Nick McKay-Blocos. Thank you so much for listening.

Have a wonderful weekend and see you all on Monday. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.