Albeit It Does Move!

During the few days leading up to this announcement, tension over the Idlib file was escalated to the maximum limits, with the killing of a group of Turkish soldiers who were moving on Syrian soil without giving prior information about the coordinates of their movements, in contravention of the agreements in place according to Sochi.

This escalation took a dramatic turn not only in the official Turkish statements, which is usual, but much more than that in the American and British statements, in particular, and to a lesser degree in European statements, through declaring "the end of the Astana track", not to mention the intense friendliness Washington has shown toward Turkey, as if it suddenly woke up to remember that Turkey is a NATO member, and forgot the sum of the major differences between the two sides, foremost of which is the strong ties between Ankara and Moscow.
The announcement of "the end of the Astana track" by the Americans is not the first declaration of this kind. It is the same declaration that the US special envoy made at the end of 2018, in the context of the attack on the process of formation of the Syrian Constitutional Committee, which accompanied the attempts to prevent its birth.

"Kassioun" had emphasized on many previous occasions that the massive retreat in the US capabilities to influence the Syrian file has led US to a weak position where its influence became limited to some attempts to play outside the boundaries of intersections and understandings between the members of the Astana trio, and as these agreements and understandings expand and deepen constantly, the US in Syria has become threatened with losing any space for its influence and sabotage.

Within this equation, Washington has done its best during the past few weeks trying to protect Al-Nusra Front and its allies, including alluding to the possibility of terminating its classification as a terrorist group, as well as trying to drive a wedge between the three members of Astana, especially between the Russian and Turkish.

The mass delirium that appeared in the UN Security Council a few days ago during its special session on Idlib, as well as American and British public statements that insisted that the Russians are directly responsible for the killing of Turkish soldiers, in addition to the talk of "the death of Astana" – this delirium carries a clear indication that the scheme to set the two parties against each other failed miserably. That scheme includes some games on the ground, including the exploitation of major US- and Western-made defects and infiltrations within the Turkish structure which are still exerting influence within the outcome of Turkish performance, precisely because such a Turkish structure is still not sufficiently adapted to the new international balance, and this backwardness in adaptation can not be reduced, however, only to the clash of internal interests between Turkish currents, but also to delusions that drive the Turks to overestimate their own importance and weight.

The wheel of history continues to rotate and advance in the same direction; with more American-Western retreat at the universal level, more deepening of understandings within the Astana regional system, in our region, as a system with international outlook, meaning in concrete terms that the Sochi Agreement is going through various complications towards full implementation. This also means that UNSCR 2254 is also moving towards full and comprehensive implementation.

Kassioun Editorial, Issue No. 955, March 1, 2020