The complex who's who of Syrian civil war
The end is in sight in Syria, but that doesn't make it any less violent or complicated, in the mad rush to bankroll gains.
Thursday 22 February 2018 08:45, UK
The who's who of the Syrian civil war is fiendishly complicated.
Diagrams linking who is fighting with who against whom don't help either. They just end up looking like bowls of spaghetti.
Start with the easy bit. Islamic State. No one likes it and no one is allied to it and it's lost most of its territory anyway. It's also been fighting almost everybody at one point or another.
But its collapse has made everything more complicated because there is a scramble to fill the vacuum and everyone is now free to fight other groups again.
There is the sense that the end is in sight in Syria but that has not made it any less violent or complex. There is now a mad rush to bankroll gains and put in place incontrovertible facts on the ground.
Take the Turks. Their number one fear? The Kurds, who have fought with American backing more effectively than most against Islamic State.
Turkey has been fighting a separatist war with them on and off for decades and has invaded Syria to prevent a de facto Kurdish state springing up on its southern border.
:: Syria war: UN calls for end to 'hell on earth' violence in eastern Ghouta
So one Nato country, Turkey, is pummelling allies of another, the US, which has around 2,000 troops in Syria, in Kurdish areas to the east.
Turkey's allies in this used to be on the same side in this war as the Kurds. The Free Syria Army that began life fighting the Assad regime and also clashed with IS. It enjoys Turkish patronage and so has now thrown in its lot with them against the Kurds in Afrin.
That has drawn in the Syrian government, worried about the FSA and about losing territory to the Turkish invasion. So it is sending militia to Afrin, to help the Kurds even if they have been on opposites sides in the past.
Confused? You will be. But you're not the only one.
The rest is a little simpler. The war began as an uprising against the Assad regime. It remains in place battered but stronger than it has been for years, thanks to Russian support and the Iranians. They are Shia Muslims, Assad is a member of the Alawites, a Shia sect.
And Syria is vital for Iran's strategic interests to bolster Lebanese Shia militia, Hezbollah, a thorn in the side of Israel, Iran's arch foe in the region.
That Russian-Assad-Iranian alliance is winning the war and winning back territory. What remains of the rebel groups is a hotchpotch of Islamists and freedom fighters with a variety of names.
Their erstwhile backers from Sunni countries mainly in the gulf know the writing is on the wall.
These groups are now trapped in a small patch of territory in the suburbs of Damascus and in the north west province of Idlib where they are being decimated piece by piece by Syrian Russian airpower and Shia militia led by the Iranians on the ground.
:: Turkey on a collision course with Syria over Kurdish support in Afrin
There remain two important sideshows: one to the east and one to the south.
Israel is looking on with alarm. Its longstanding enemy Iran has made significant gains in this war and now poses a serious threat just over Israel's northern border.
Israel has used airstrikes against Iranian and Hezbollah targets in Syria to degrade that threat, but remains worried and is urging its Russian allies to reduce Iran's influence. The Israeli Iranian fault line is a dangerous one.
As are tensions between America and Russia. A recent US attack left hundreds of Russians dead or injured in the east of the country. They are thought to have been mercenaries but operating with the blessing of the Kremlin. Russia has chosen to play down the incident, but it highlights the dangerous combustibility of this intractable conflict.