Russia’s stepped-up military campaign in Syria is not only offering a lifeline to the embattled Assad regime, it is providing badly needed relief for Iranian proxies that will enable them to move more aggressively in the region’s other conflicts — in particular in Yemen, where a war between Tehran-backed rebels and Saudi Arabia has been raging for months.
Regional analysts said the fallout across the region from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s surprise move is already playing out, with Iran an indirect early beneficiary of the move.
“The reentry of Russian military into the region suggests that things could get much worse in Yemen in the near term, particularly to the extent that there is a division of labor between Russia and Iran of what is happening in Syria,” said Mary Beth Long, a regional security expert who served as an assistant secretary of defense in the George W. Bush administration.
Ms. Long told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday that Lebanon-based Hezbollah, Iran’s main proxy in Syria, will likely be freed up to provide fresh support for Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen — a development that could deepen the conflict by allowing the Houthis to continue their military campaign or demand a higher price for engaging in peace talks.
She said Iranian-Russian collusion is far more involved than often reported in Washington, asserting that the Obama administration “does not appear to be willing to call out either Iran or Russia for what they are doing in the region, nor to understand [their] full motives.”
Given Mr. Putin’s expanded aims and interest in Middle East energy resources, Ms. Long said Washington should be prepared to engage more deeply with its allies in the Gulf, particularly in the hot conflict in Yemen.
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“We should expedite the sale of precision-guided weaponry [and provide] targeting and other assistance to the Gulf Arabs in order to help their military actions be more effective and reduce the number of casualties,” she said.
The Obama administration is already providing backup support for Saudi Arabia’s bombing campaign against the Houthis, but the White House has rejected suggestions the cooperation amounts to a Saudi-U.S. alliance against Iran in the region.
The administration has pointedly rejected the notion that it is getting sucked into a new regional alignment pitting Washington and Riyadh against Iran and Russia.
On Friday President Obama dismissed the idea Russia’s incursion into Syria is somehow strengthening Mr. Putin’s hand in the wider Middle East, and said the incursion reflected Russian “weakness,” not strength. He said that by allying with Syrian President Bashar Assad, Russia “is just going to get them stuck in a quagmire, and it won’t work. And they will be there for a while if they don’t take a different course.”
Mr. Obama also vowed not to allow the situation to devolve into a “proxy war between the United States and Russia.”
Still, several lawmakers at Tuesday’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing appeared to back greater American military support for the Saudis and, more generally, the coalition of Sunni Arab Gulf states that Riyadh has assembled for its campaign in Yemen.
Committee Chairman Bob Corker, Tennessee Republican, said that Mr. Obama’s successful push for a nuclear deal with Iran has only upped the stakes in confronting Tehran’s push for influence across the Middle East.
“Now that the agreement is going to be implemented,” he said, “it’s vitally important that we close the daylight between us and our [Gull Arab] allies.”
A former top U.S. diplomat in the Middle East warned that the Saudi-Iran conflict in Yemen is complex, and said the Obama administration has so far struggled to have real influence over Riyadh’s course of action.
Stephen A. Seche, who served as U.S. ambassador to Yemen from 2007 to 2010, and previously as the charge d’affaires in Syria, told lawmakers that the administration rushed into backing the Saudi campaign on the thinking that it “was better to be in the tent than not in hopes that we could somehow kind of chart the course with the Saudis.”
“The instinct was right, [but] I think the execution has been less than good,” said Mr. Seche. “I think what we have now is kind of a tiger by the tail where we are now complicit in what the Saudis are doing with the coalition in Yemen without a real ability to change the course of what they’re doing.”
• Guy Taylor can be reached at gtaylor@washingtontimes.com.
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