AMMAN (Reuters) - A suicide car bomber blew himself up at a police officers' club in a residential district of Damascus on Tuesday, killing several people, Syria's interior ministry said.

It said a number of people were also wounded in the blast in Masaken Barza, a middle class district where several major government buildings are located.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which tracks violence across the country, said eight police officers were killed in the blast and at least 20 wounded after a vehicle was detonated in a parking lot in the police officers' club.

The interior ministry said in a statement that security forces prevented the suicide bomber from entering the heavily patrolled complex and that the blast took place at its gates.

Syrian state television earlier reported that the blast took place in a busy market place in that area. It later retracted the news.

The last major blast in the Syrian capital took place on January 31 in a district of Damascus where Syria's holiest Shi'ite shrine is located. The blast which killed over 70 people, including at least 25 Shi'ite fighters, was claimed by Islamic State militants.

Suicide bombings in the heart of the Syrian capital have generally subsided in the last two years. Insurgents however continue to frequently rain mortars from rebel held eastern suburbs of the capital .

(Reporting by Suleiman Al-Khalidi; Editing by Andrew Heavens)

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More than one million Syrians are trapped in besieged areas, a new report says in a challenge to the United Nations, which estimates just half that amount and has been accused by some aid groups of underplaying a crisis.

The fate of Syria's besieged is at the heart of peace talks that quickly fell apart last week in Geneva and are set to resume by Feb. 25. Negotiators for the opposition had insisted that the Syrian government stop besieging civilians before talks could truly begin.

The new Siege Watch report, issued Tuesday by the Netherlands-based nonprofit PAX and the Washington-based Syria Institute, comes a month after images posted online of emaciated children and adults led to an international outcry and rare convoys of aid to a handful of Syrian communities.

The town featured in the images, Madaya, was not listed by the U.N. as a besieged community at the time. Aid workers who entered last month reported seeing skeletal people and parents who gave their children sleeping pills to calm their hunger.

The Siege Watch report says 1.09 million people are living in 46 besieged communities in Syria, far more than the 18 listed by the U.N. It says most are besieged by the Syrian government in the suburbs of Damascus, the capital, and Homs. In the eastern city of Deir el-Zour, about 200,000 people are besieged by both the Islamic State group and the Syrian government. The report lists two communities besieged by armed opposition groups.

"Electricity and running water are usually cut off, and there is limited (if any) access to food, fuel, and medical care," the report says. Deaths have been reported from malnutrition, disease, hypothermia and poisoning while scavenging for food. Some communities have been besieged for months or years.

The estimates are based largely on information provided by local contacts in the communities, including local councils, medical workers and citizen journalists.

With the spotlight on the besieged, the United Nations last month raised its estimate by almost 100,000, saying that 486,700 people are affected.

That's still less than some aid groups and others estimate. They argue that the world body's numbers set the tone for humanitarian response efforts and that more urgency is needed.

"Many remain unaware of the extent of the crisis, and the international response has been muted as a result," the Siege Watch report says.

In meetings this week with U.N. officials and member states, PAX says it will call for the immediate lifting of sieges as a way to build confidence in the peace talks. Syria Institute executive director Valerie Szybala said the new report has not been shared with Syria's government.

The U.N. says it considers an area besieged if three criteria are met: The area is surrounded by "armed actors," humanitarian aid cannot regularly enter, and civilians, including the sick and wounded, cannot enter and exit.

"Of course, differences of opinion do occur," Amanda Pitt, a U.N. humanitarian spokeswoman, said of criticism of the U.N.'s estimates.

The aid group Doctors Without Borders goes well beyond the figure in the Siege Watch report, estimating that 1.9 million Syrians live in besieged areas.

Doctors Without Borders said it defines Syria's besieged areas as ones "that are surrounded by strategic barriers (military or non-military) that prevent the regular and safe inflow of humanitarian assistance and the regular and safe outflow of civilians, the wounded and the sick."

The United Nations places an estimated 4.5 million Syrians into a separate category called "hard to reach," a step below besieged. It defines that as "an area that is not regularly accessible to humanitarian actors for the purpose of sustained humanitarian programming as a result of denial of access."

Doctors Without Borders said it doesn't use that distinction, "as the medical consequences for both types of region are similar." Medical supplies are almost never allowed in, it said, and medical evacuations are rarely allowed out.

The aid group has said that since convoys reached Madaya last month, at least 16 people there have died and at least 33 were in danger of dying of malnutrition.

The United Nations now considers the town of 20,000 besieged.

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As a school counselor in Malmö, Sweden, Pooja Sharafi has heard more than his fair share of suffering. Roughly one quarter of his kids at Sofielundsskolan are "new arrivals," meaning they came to Sweden in the past four years. Many of them fled wars in Iraq, Syria, Libya or Afghanistan. Many have gone through hell to get here.

Earlier this month, however, Sharafi heard something he had never encountered from one of his students: a request for the king's address.

The odd inquiry came from a 12-year-old Syrian immigrant named Ahmed, a charming, quick-witted kid who had arrived in Sweden four months earlier with his parents and little brother. When Sharafi asked Ahmed why he wanted to contact the king, the boy answered simply: "I want to tell him my story."

And what a story it is.

In a letter he showed to Sharafi a few days later, Ahmed laid out his harrowing journey from Aleppo, where his teacher was killed in front of his eyes, across the choppy Mediterranean Sea and through Europe.

"I read his letter to the king and I started to cry," Sharafi told The Washington Post in a telephone interview.

The school counselor is far from the only one to be moved to tears by Ahmed's tale of fleeing fire and death in Aleppo. With Sharafi's help, Ahmed has taken his letter to the Scandinavian airwaves with the hopes of meeting King Carl Gustaf.

But Ahmed's dream also has its fair share of detractors.

Across Europe, young male asylum seekers just a few years older than Ahmed have become a lightning rod for controversy in recent months. In Germany, they have been blamed for a spate of sexual assaults and thefts on New Year's Eve. In France, they are viewed with suspicion after several Islamic State militants posed as refugees before launching their deadly attack in Paris. And even in Sweden, the country that has accepted more migrants than anywhere else in the continent, Swedes have started to look askance at asylum seekers after several incidents high-profile incidents.

In August, an Eritrean migrant snapped after his asylum petition was denied. He fatally stabbed a mother and son inside an IKEA.

And just a few weeks ago January, another asylum seeker stabbed to death a social worker who tried to break up a fight at a center for unaccompanied migrants.

Once viewed as a safe haven for migrants streaming into Europe, Sweden has recently taken a U-turn, closing its borders and promising to deport between 60,000 and 80,000 asylum seekers. Support has surged for anti-immigration parties, and a recent poll found that 40 percent of Swedes think "integration and immigration" is now the biggest issue facing the country, according to the Local.

Ahmed's letter, however, shows that Sweden should put aside its fears and consider its asylum seekers as an asset, Sharafi said.

"Sweden is getting more intolerant and closing its borders and pointing more fingers, instead of listening and including the people coming here," he said. "We should see the value, the benefit of having people that can really contribute to the country instead of blaming them."

Sharafi has some first-hand knowledge of how immigrants are helping Sweden. His parents came to the country from Iran, and his identity as a first-generation Swede helps the 29-year-old counselor talk to recently arrived immigrants.

When Ahmed asked Sharafi to help him send his letter to the king, the counselor agreed. But he also suggested taking Ahmed's campaign to social media. The two set up a Facebook page called Brev till kungen, or "Letter to the king."

"My name is Pooja Sharafi and I work as a school counselor at Sofielundsskolan in Malmö," Sharafi wrote. "One of our students, Ahmed, 12 years old, came to see me two weeks ago and needed to talk about his journey from Syria to Sweden and about the feelings that have arisen during the trip. Ahmed also told about a desire to send a letter to King Carl Gustav and meet His Majesty to tell his story. I asked Ahmed to finish writing the letter in Arabic (his mother tongue). The letter was translated and is now complete. The letter touched me to tears. Help me to share the post so that the letter arrives at his majesty."

Here is Ahmed's letter, translated twice-over:

Hey King Gustav! My name is Ahmed and I am 12 years old. I have a mother, a father and a brother. We have always lived in a beautiful house filled with joy in Aleppo, Syria. My dad had a large factory and shops for children's clothing. He bought many gifts and toys for us. My parents had cars and we lived happily until the war started with the sound of missiles, shooting and terror. Dad's factory burned down, nothing is left of it and the joy that we experienced began to cease. I could not go to school anymore because my teacher was killed by a shot right before our eyes … I cannot forget those seconds. They were my worst moments.

Ahmed's family has asked that their surname not be used. His mother declined to be interviewed by The Post, but did confirm that her son's letter is authentic.

In an interview with The Post, Ahmed said writing the letter was painful, but had brought him great pride.

"It was hard to write it," he said in clipped but courteous English, his third language. "It was difficult because I wrote about my journey from Syria to Sweden."

His parents and his counselor could hardly believe that the 12-year-old had written the moving letter on his own, he said.

"My father said, 'Are you the writer?'" Ahmed said with a chuckle. "Nobody helped me. I wrote it. Only me."

Ahmed told The Post that he misses Syria and worries about family members still there. But he is fond of his adopted country, too.

"I like it very much," he said. "The people here in Sweden smile to my face all the time."

Sharafi says the letter hasn't yet led to a meeting with the king, but the counselor still holds out hope.

Even if the meeting doesn't happen, however, he believes Ahmed's story is opening eyes about asylum seekers.

"He has a gleam in his eye," Sharafi said of his student. "He's ambitious, really goal-oriented, really driven in what he wants to do.

"We need to hear these stories," he said. "And we need to really see these kids for who they are."

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Over the past week, forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad have nearly encircled the city of Aleppo, once the war-torn country's most populous urban center. By doing so, they have effectively cut off all vital routes of supply from Turkey to the rebel-held areas of the city.

On Monday, Syrian government forces seized the northern town of Kfeen, not far from the border with Turkey. The offensive has prompted fears of a new refugee exodus, as well as the real risk that Aleppo, Syria's  commercial capital during peacetime, will fall, marking perhaps the greatest victory for Assad since the 2011 rebellion against his rule first began.

The Assad regime advance was boosted by the support of Iran-backed militias on the ground as well as months of Russian aerial bombardment. Other powers, including the United States, have looked on with a degree of helplessness as Moscow's intervention tilted the course of events on the Syrian battlefield strongly in the regime's favor. What follows in the weeks ahead has huge implications for the future of the Syrian conflict and the complex web of regional agendas and rivalries that surround it.

A new refugee crisis

Some observers believe the Syrian government will opt to starve out the rebels in Aleppo rather than risk a protracted, costly ground battle within the city. This, as my colleague Liz Sly reported last week, led to a new surge in refugees desperate to reach sanctuary. Some 35,000 Syrians massed at the Turkish border crossing near the town of Kilis, which was closed for the fourth consecutive day on Monday.

Turkish officials have repeatedly warned that they're reaching a saturation point. Ankara says some 2.2 million Syrian refugees have arrived and been accommodated in Turkey since the beginning of the conflict, at the cost of billions of dollars in state funds.

Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, whose government has for years called for Assad's ouster and provided tacit support to some rebel factions, warned on Monday that Aleppo "is de facto under siege. We are on the verge of a new human tragedy." He was at a meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who was in Ankara briefly to discuss better cooperation between Turkey and its European partners over the handling of refugees.

Many European leaders, including Merkel, are keen to thin the flow of refugees journeying west in the face of growing popular opposition at home and are negotiating an aid package to give Turkey more incentive to tighten its own controls. For both sides, the refugee influx is proving a moral and political quandary and exacerbating diplomatic tensions.

"On the one hand they say 'open your borders, take everyone in'," grumbled Turkish deputy prime minister Yalcin Akdogan, referring to the European Union. "On the other hand they say 'close your border, don't let anyone through'."

All the while, the plight of Syria's displaced and downtrodden grows even more grim. Fears of a Turkish clampdown meant increased numbers of refugees and migrants attempted the risky sea crossing to Greece. In January, more than 250 migrants drowned while making the trip -- roughly a third of the total number for all of 2015.

The situation is equally dire for those now fleeing Aleppo and its environs, with aid groups struggling to provide adequate humanitarian relief.

"The main route from the north into Aleppo city has been cut off," wrote Christy Delafield, a senior communications officer for MercyCorps, in an email from the Turkish city of Gaziantep on Monday night. "Mercy Corps is able to continue distributing pre-positioned food and other supplies for now. We cannot estimate how long those supplies will last and when we can next get a shipment in. Other routes are still open but these roads are unpredictable and risky."

A policy disaster for the West

Both the slow, brutal misery of the war — as well as the steady gains made by Assad and his allies in recent months — have highlighted the strategic difficulties that the Syrian conflict posed for many Western governments, especially the Obama administration. The White House has staked a lot of political capital on the progress of U.N.-brokered peace talks, negotiations that have already generated far more rancor than optimism.

Meanwhile, with the backing of Moscow and Iran, the Assad regime is steadily stripping away what leverage the Syrian opposition -- a hodgepodge of often competing factions -- and its backers may have had.

"Battlefield realities rather than great power politics will determine the ultimate terms of a settlement to end the Syrian Civil War," noted the D.C.-based Institute for the Study of War, in a policy memo published on Friday. "[Assad] and his allies in Russia and Iran have internalized this basic principle even as Washington and other Western capitals pinned their hopes upon UN-sponsored Geneva Talks, which faltered only two days after they began."

The critics of the Obama administration's relative inaction have grown louder, accusing the White House, in hindsight, of not taking decisive measures sooner to boost moderate rebel elements and curb the Assad regime's relentless bombing campaigns against its own people.

"Aleppo may prove to be the Sarajevo of Syria," writes New York Times columnist Roger Cohen, gesturing to another society that imploded in an orgy of sectarian strife as the world watched.

"Syria is now the Obama administration's shame, a debacle of such dimensions that it may overshadow the president's domestic achievements," Cohen concludes.

The White House and other voices in Washington suggested that Moscow's mission in Syria could soon turn into its own quagmire. They also contended, justifiably, that the recent history of American overreach and missteps in the Middle East ought to be a cautionary tale for intervention in Syria.

But it's the Russians who are "making the weather" right now, writes Cohen, and reinforcing a Syrian ruler who President Obama had earlier insisted must go.

"It's understandable for the United States to bank on a political process and urge the Syrian opposition to join this dialogue in good faith," writes Emile Hokayem, a Middle East scholar at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. "But to do so while exposing the rebellion to the joint Assad-Russia-Iran onslaught and without contingency planning is simply nefarious."

An enduring geopolitical mess

Should Aleppo fall to the regime, it will mark a real turning point in the conflict. As Sly reported last week, the rebel takeover of the city in 2012 had come at a moment when many observers were confident Assad's demise was inevitable. Now, a fractured rebellion will have to soldier on against the odds, probably with the more fundamentalist, Islamist factions leading the fight.

Moreover, world powers — and presumably also the Assad regime — will still want to vanquish the Islamic State, the extremist group that has dominated global headlines since its dramatic rise two years ago and controls territory in Iraq and Syria.

"This is not the end of the war, but could be the beginning of the end, with Assad, Russia, Hezbollah, and Iran as the biggest winners," Patrick Megahan, an analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told Bloomberg News. (Hezbollah, a Lebanese Shia militant organization with thousands of fighters committed to the defense of the Assad regime, is an Iranian proxy.) "Many of the more radical groups will likely continue to fight even if the opposition loses much of its territory," Megahan adds.

As Russia and Iran gain, two other prominent regional actors flounder. Saudi Arabia, which has played its own conspicuous role in supporting the rebellion, last week declared that it would consider sending ground forces to Syria — a scenario that would signal the greatest escalation yet in its regional power struggle with Iran.

The proposal was scoffed at by the commander of Iran's Revolutionary Guards over the weekend.

"They claim they will send troops, but I don't think they will dare do so," Maj. Gen. Ali Jafari told reporters in Tehran, according to Iran's semiofficial Fars news agency. "They have a classic army and history tells us such armies stand no chance in fighting irregular resistance forces."

Turkey, meanwhile, is faced with multiple headaches of its own. The Russian power play in Syria has been a disaster for Ankara: Moscow's air war has both quashed any vague Turkish hopes for instituting a no-fly zone on the other side of the Syrian border and was also a boost for Syrian Kurdish factions, which have claimed more territory in stretches of northern Syria.

A de facto Syrian Kurdish rump state is a non-starter for Turkey, which is in the midst of a renewed counterinsurgency against Kurdish guerrillas in the country's restive southeast. The prospect of a Turkish ground incursion has been floated, but it's a risky move that could intensify an already deadly conflagration.

For his part, Assad has long cast his war as an operation against "terrorists"— no matter the copious evidence often to the contrary. With Aleppo in his hands, and any notion of a viable "moderate" rebellion in tatters, he may get what he wishes.

"Assad has long wanted the contest in Syria to be seen as a fight between his regime and the extremists," writes Daniel Serwer of the Middle East Institute. "He is getting close to driving the relative moderates off the battlefield, fulfilling his own prophecy. The consequences for many Syrians, for Turkey and for the prospects for peace will be disastrous."

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As Russian planes decimate Aleppo, and hundreds of thousands of civilians in Syria's largest city prepare for encirclement, blockade and siege — and for the starvation and the barbarity that will inevitably follow — it is time to proclaim the moral bankruptcy of American and Western policy in Syria.

Actually, it is past time. The moral bankruptcy has been long in the making: five years of empty declarations that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad must go, of halfhearted arming of rebel groups, of allowing the red line on chemical weapons to be crossed and of failing adequately to share Europe's refugee burden as it buckles under the strain of the consequences of Western inaction. In the meantime, a quarter-million Syrians have died, 7 million have been displaced and nearly 5 million are refugees. Two million of the refugees are children.

This downward path leads to the truly incredible possibility that as the Syrian dictator and his ruthless backers close in on Aleppo, the government of the United States, in the name of the struggle against the Islamic State, will simply stand by while Russia, Assad and Iran destroy their opponents at whatever human cost.

It is time for those who care about the moral standing of the United States to say that this policy is shameful. If the United States and its NATO allies allow its inglorious new partners to encircle and starve the people of Aleppo, they will be complicit in crimes of war. The ruins of our own integrity will be found amid the ruins of Aleppo. Indiscriminate bombardment of civilians is a violation of the Geneva Conventions.

So is the use of siege and blockade to starve civilians. We need not wait for proof of Assad's and Vladimir Putin's intentions as they tighten the noose. "Barrel bombs" have been falling on bread lines and hospitals in the city (and elsewhere in Syria) for some time. Starvation is a long-standing and amply documented instrument in Assad's tool kit of horrors.

Aleppo is an emergency, requiring emergency measures. Are we no longer capable of emergency action? It is also an opportunity, perhaps the last one, to save Syria. Aleppo is the new Sarajevo, the new Srebrenica, and its fate should be to the Syrian conflict what the fate of Sarajevo and Srebrenica were to the Bosnian conflict: the occasion for the United States to bestir itself, and for the West to say with one voice "enough." It was after Srebrenica and Sarajevo — and after the air campaign with which the West finally responded to the atrocities — that the United States undertook the statecraft that led to the Dayton accords and ended the war in Bosnia.

The conventional wisdom is that nothing can be done in Syria, but the conventional wisdom is wrong. There is a path toward ending the horror in Aleppo — a perfectly realistic path that will honor our highest ideals, a way to recover our moral standing as well as our strategic position.

Operating under a NATO umbrella, the United States could use its naval and air assets in the region to establish a no-fly zone from Aleppo to the Turkish border and make clear that it will prevent the continued bombardment of civilians and refugees by any party, including the Russians. It could use the no-fly zone to keep open the corridor with Turkey and use its assets to resupply the city and internally displaced people in the region with humanitarian assistance.

If the Russians and Syrians seek to prevent humanitarian protection and resupply of the city, they would face the military consequences. The U.S. military is already in hourly contact with the Russian military about de-conflicting their aircraft over Syria, and the administration can be in constant contact with the Russian leadership to ensure that a humanitarian protection mission need not escalate into a great-power confrontation.

But risk is no excuse for doing nothing. The Russians and the Syrians will immediately understand the consequences of U.S. and NATO action: They will learn, in the only language they seem to understand, that they cannot win the Syrian war on their repulsive terms. The use of force to protect civilians, and to establish a new configuration of power in which the skies will no longer be owned by the Syrian tyrant and the Russian tyrant, may set the stage for a tough and serious negotiation to bring an end to the slaughter.

This is what U.S. leadership in the 21st century should look like: bringing together force and diplomacy, moral commitment and strategic boldness, around an urgent humanitarian objective that would command the support of the world. The era of our Syrian abdication must end now. If we do not come to the rescue of Aleppo, if we do not do everything we can to put a stop to the suffering that is the defining and most damaging abomination of our time, Aleppo will be a stain on our conscience forever.

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The Russian Ministry of Defense warned Turkey against launching a military incursion into Syria last week, announcing on Thursday that it had seen "growing signs" that Turkish forces were preparing to intervene to bolster rebel forces battling pro-regime troops in the north.

Some experts say, however, that Russian President Vladimir Putin appears to be trying to bait Turkey into entering the Syrian battlefield in order to retaliate for Ankara's decision to down a Russian warplane in November.

"Russia is trying to draw Turkey into a fight to avenge the downing of its jet. Putin is confident he can win," retired Brig. Gen. Naim Baburoglu, an adviser to the Ankara-based National Security and Foreign Policy Research Center, told al-Monitor last week.

"He also needs this to counter domestic difficulties. Downing one or two Turkish F-16s will make him a hero at home," Baburoglu added. "It will also be a serious embarrassment to Turkey and the Turkish air force."

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan initially denied reports that Turkish forces were preparing to cross the border. But on Sunday, Erdogan signaled that Turkey would be prepared to intervene in Syria if asked by its coalition partners.

"We don't want to fall into the same mistake in Syria as in Iraq," Erdogan told reporters on Sunday, according to the Turkish daily newspaper Hurriyet. "If ... Turkey was present in Iraq, the country would have never have fallen into its current situation."

He added: "It's important to see the horizon. What's going on in Syria can only go on for so long. At some point it has to change."

Erdogan, a staunch opponent of Russia-backed Syrian President Bashar Assad, was at least partly referring to the Syrian Kurds' sustained expansion westward along the Turkish-Syrian border. That push has largely been facilitated by Russian airstrikes targeting Syrian rebel groups backed by Turkey, the US, and Saudi Arabia.

Signs of growing coordination between Moscow and the Kurds came to a head last week, when Syria's main Kurdish militia, the YPG, helped Russia and the Syrian army isolate Azaz — a strategically important city long used by Turkey to funnel aid and supplies to rebels in the city of Aleppo.

"I don't think there is any doubt that the YPG and Russia are coordinating in the Azaz corridor," Aaron Stein, an expert on Turkish affairs and senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, told Business Insider on Monday.

He added:

The YPG have taken advantage of the airstrikes to advance in areas south of Azaz, in what looks like a strategy to connect the Efrin canton with Kobane and Jazira. The PYD have consistently made clear, both in private and in public, that they can reach a common understanding with local groups in the area, and install a governing council inside the city.

As Turkish-Russian relations continue to deteriorate, Russia's military and political ties to the Kurds are getting stronger. Russia is reportedly looking to open a second airfield in the Kurdish-held Syrian city of Qamishli, and the Kurds have said they will open their first "representation office" in Moscow later this week.

Stein said:

The PYD's office in Moscow has been months in the making. The PYD — and by extension, the PKK — are eager to escape from international isolation. Any country willing to de-facto recognize them as a legitimate political group, and not a foreign terrorist organization, is a net positive for the group.

Fabrice Balanche, a leading expert on Syria and visiting fellow at the Washington Institute, broached the limits of the US's political support for the Kurds in an analysis last week.

"Unlike the United States, Russia does not want to antagonize the Kurds by prohibiting their deeply held goal of territorial unification," he wrote.

"Vladimir Putin wants to put pressure on Turkey's entire frontier with Syria," Balanche added. Indeed, "it is one of the main regional goals of the Russian intervention."

That the Kurds are now closer than ever to linking their territories east of the Euphrates with the Kurdish-controlled city of Efrin in the west — a move that would cross Turkey's "red line" and allow the Kurds to consolidate their de facto state of Rojava along Turkey's southern border — may be enough to draw Turkey into the war.

"The Turkish army is very conservative and risk averse," Jeff White, a defense analyst focusing on the security affairs of the Levant at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told Business Insider in an email. "So while willing to protect its borders, I doubt we will see any large scale operations in Syria — with one possible exception: unification of the Kurdish enclaves/Rojava."

If the Kurds were to unify their cantons, Turkey might be compelled to intervene to prevent them from forming a statelet along the Turkish border, White noted. And that would be a game-changer.

"The Turkish army could defeat any opponents in its chosen areas of operation," White said. "Direct Turkish intervention, if on a substantial scale, could dramatically change the situation."

Incidentally, rumors of a Turkish military intervention began circulating days after Saudi Arabia declared that it would be prepared to send ground troops to Syria to fight the Islamic State "if asked" by its allies.

As such, "Turkey is no longer acting alone," Middle East analyst Elijah Magnier noted on Twitter last week. Though it remains "highly unlikely" that Turkey will invade Syria, Magnier said that if it did, "Russia would celebrate."

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Ankara (AFP) - Turkish soldiers have seized explosives and four suicide vests in the baggage of a group of suspects stopped at the border with Syria, the Turkish army said on Wednesday.

"Between 12 and 15 kilos of explosives and four belts that could be used for suicide attacks were found in two bags," the army said in a statement.

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BEIRUT (Reuters) - At least 500 people have been killed on all sides during fighting in Aleppo province since the start of a Syrian army and allied forces offensive began in early February, a war monitor said on Wednesday.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the war, said this figure included at least 100 civilians. Reuters could not independently confirm the figures.

The Syrian army, supported by Russian air strikes, began a push to retake Aleppo and surrounding areas up to the Turkish border at the start of February.

The news came to light as major powers prepare to meet in Germany on Thursday with the aim of reviving the Syria peace efforts, but with Russia backing a government push for a military victory, opposition delegates and Western officials see little hope of a diplomatic breakthrough.

United Nations Special Envoy Staffan de Mistura halted the first attempt to negotiate an end to Syria's war in two years after the unprecedented offensive by forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad against Western-backed rebels supported by Russian air strikes.

In an attempt to prevent a collapse of diplomatic efforts to end Syria's five-year-old civil war, US Secretary of State John Kerry is pushing for a ceasefire and increased humanitarian aid access ahead of a meeting of the so-called International Syria Support Group (ISSG) in Munich this week.

But one UN diplomatic source said Russia was "stringing Kerry along" in order to provide diplomatic cover for Moscow's real goal — to help Assad win on the battlefield instead of compromising at the negotiating table.

"It's clear to everyone now that Russia really doesn't want a negotiated solution but for Assad to win," said the diplomatic source, speaking on condition of anonymity.

A senior adviser to Assad, Bouthaina Shaaban, told Reuters in Damascus on Tuesday that there would be no let-up in the army advance, which aimed to recapture the city of Aleppo from rebels and secure Syria's border with Turkey.

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Syrian rebels are using US-made TOW anti-tank missiles again in their fight against forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad. 

Reports of the use of these advanced missiles, which are highly regulated by the CIA, have trailed off in recent months. But the use of TOWs seem to have roared back to life in February. 

“The decrease happened after the record number of 115 TOWs recorded in October,” Qalaat al-Mudiq, a analyst of the Syrian conflict told The Daily Beast.

“There were 73 in November and 49 in December. There were no recorded TOW launches in January until the 12th, and that entire month saw only 22 in total," al-Mudiq continued.

The TOW missiles, which had been provided to 39 US-approved anti-Assad militias, made a name for themselves in October of 2015, when rebels carried out what became known as a "tank massacre" on the regime forces.

But after a few quiet months, al-Mudiq reported that there had been 16 reports of TOW missile use in just the first three days of February.

Coinciding with these reports, is a video posted by the Free Syrian Army's Northern Division, one of the CIA-backed groups, which allegedly shows them taking out a group of Russian military officials with one of the TOW missiles on February 3.

Russia's state media outlet TASS did report on the deaths of Russian military advisors in Syria, but attributed the kills to ISIS.

Media associated with the Free Syrian Army later reported that “15 militants, including 3 Russian officers and 4 Assad’s forces officers,” had been killed by the TOW missiles.

While TOW missiles don't represent an overwhelming part of the rebel's arsenal, nor are they the most advanced missile systems currently available, they're interesting because they're highly regulated and monitored by the CIA.

“With the TOW, each 50-man team gets one launcher and five missiles. They’re told to make a video verifying the missiles’ use and bring the spent missile casings to show they haven’t sold them or whatever,” a Jordan-based rebel liaison with knowledge of the TOW supply chain told The Daily Beast. 

The role of TOW missiles in the Syrian conflict show just how much what started as one nation's civil war has become a proxy war between Eastern and Western powers.

SEE ALSO: Russia just helped the Assad regime accomplish 'in a few days what it had failed to do over 3 years'

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NOW WATCH: Refugee kids who fled Syria are thrilled with their first Canadian winter

The US military has released twovideos showcasing the anti-ISIS coalition obliterating a militant oil and gas plant. The airstrikes were conducted on February 2 against ISIS facilities near Deir al Zor in eastern Syria. US Central Command notes that four airstrikes were carried out near Deir al Zor against four separate ISIS plants.

The strikes aimed at ISIS's oil production were part of the broader Operation Tidal Wave II, which was to shutter ISIS's production of oil in eastern Syria and its subsequent sale on the black market.

The Combined Joint Task Force, responsible for anti-ISIS operations, notes that ISIS receives two-thirds of its revenue from oil production. And, according to The New York Times, ISIS is estimated to be able to earn $40 million a month through the production and sale of oil on the black market.

The strikes against the oil and gas facility come amid an intensification of strikes against the militant group. On February 2, the anti-ISIS coalition conducted 20 strikes, with targets ranging from the oil and gas plants to ISIS mortar positions and weapon caches.

We have GIFed two of the strikes below:

You can view the videos of the airstrikes below:

SEE ALSO: Watch a US-led coalition airstrike annihilate an ISIS HQ building

DON'T MISS: US military has released video of its airstrikes pounding ISIS oil trucks

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A UN report detailing the "massive and systematized" violence perpetrated by Syrian President Bashar Assad against his own people "shatters the notion that the regime is somehow a lesser evil" than ISIS.

That is according to Emile Hokayem, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, who said on Tuesday on Twitter that the report is "inconvenient" for those who argue that Assad should stay in power for the sake of creating stability and defeating ISIS and Al Qaeda.

The report concluded that widespread and systematic torture at the hands of the Assad regime — which, according to a Syrian-government defector codenamed "Caesar," had killed over 10,000 people as of July 2014 — amounts to "extermination as a crime against humanity."

The report said:

The accumulated custodial deaths were brought about by inflicting life conditions in a calculated awareness that such conditions would cause mass deaths of detainees in the ordinary course of events and occurred in the pursuance of a State policy to attack a civilian population.

Russia, a staunch Assad ally, has sought to depict the regime as a bulwark of peace and stability against the so-called terrorists, who threaten Assad's power.

Because Russia does not differentiate between jihadist groups and the "moderate opposition," however, rebel groups backed by the US, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia have been aggressively targeted by Russian airstrikes since late September.

ISIS, meanwhile, has largely been spared.

Rebel ranks are therefore dwindling. It has set the stage for a situation that the regime and its allies have been working toward for years: a choice between ISIS — whose crimes are well-documented and publicized — and Assad, whose atrocities in torture chambers across the country were systematically covered up and largely unknown to the world.

The regime has made no effort, on the other hand, to hide its practice of barrel bombing civilian targets such as schools, marketplaces, and hospitals. Whereas roughly 10% of civilian fatalities in Syria last year were at the hands of ISIS, the regime was responsible for at least 75% of all civilian deaths in Syria in 2015, according to humanitarian news group IRIN.

Meanwhile, the regime's detention program — a squalid prison system where, according to the UN report, torture and summary executions are deliberate and commonplace — is ongoing.

After nearly five years of war, however, the international community has become desensitized by the bombing campaign and distracted by the emphasis placed on defeating ISIS by those sympathetic to Assad — and the West.

"Assad all along pursued a strategy of gradual escalation and desensitization that, sadly, worked well," Hokayem wrote for Foreign Policy.

US Secretary of State John Kerry accused Assad and his allies last month of being the "primary source of death, torture and deprivation" in the conflict, which has killed more than 300,000 people since it erupted in March 2011.

But the Obama administration has been steadily softening its stance on Assad's removal for years, a policy shift that culminated in December when Kerry said that the US is "not looking for so-called regime change" in Syria.

As such, Russia and Iran, two of Assad's biggest allies, are backing into a corner the remaining supporters of the Syrian revolution.

And they are doing so, experts say, with the knowledge that the US has prioritized the fight against ISIS — and, as such, won't take any meaningful action to bolster rebel groups fighting Assad.

"Washington has given Moscow a huge political gift in not holding Russia accountable for its pattern of targeting moderate rebel groups and their leaders instead of ISIS," Tony Badran, a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told Business Insider in December.

"And Moscow," he added, "is going to leverage it."

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NOW WATCH: Refugee kids who fled Syria are thrilled with their first Canadian winter

The Syrian Civil War is reaching a turning point. Over the past two weeks, the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad seized several villages north of Aleppo, the country's largest city and one of the last remaining strongholds of Syria's non-jihadist rebels.

The advance cut off Aleppo's anti-regime groups from their last remaining supply lines into Turkey, and put Assad in a position to retake a fiercely contested city that had a pre-war population of over 2 million.

Assad's gains have come on the backs of foreign militaries that are themselves showing signs of strain. Iran has been forced to send Afghan refugees to fight in Syria while Hezbollah, Iran's Lebanese proxy, has seen as much as one-third of its fighters killed or injured in the country's war. And the Aleppo offensive would have stalled without Russian air support — Damascus failed to retake substantial territory when it first launched its Aleppo offensive six months ago.

A map from Fabrice Balanche, a visiting fellow at the Washington Institute of Near East Peace gives an idea of what's probably coming next within Syria. With Assad's army on the march, the regime, and Kurdish militias who are not necessarily opposed to the regime, are now in a position to retake the entirety of the Turkish-Syrian border.

At the same time, the rebel defeat in Aleppo — one of the non-jihadist rebel movement's last remaining strongholds — means Assad may now have the opportunity to angrily ISIS's Raqqa enclave by sweeping across eastern Syria:

The near-term looks promising for the regime. As the map shows, it has options now that the Assad and his partners have broken the Aleppo stalemate.

That still doesn't mean Assad's won.

Assad's gains have revealed his dependence on Iranian and Russian support. And as Balanche writes, the regime's gains may trigger an alarming shift in strategy among anti-Assad regional powers like Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Assad's opponents could try to open up new battle lines that would threaten the regime's survival in a best-case scenario — while endangering Lebanon's stability and expanding the regional character of the war.

Balanche writes that Syria and Saudi Arabia could "open a new front in northern Lebanon, where local Salafist groups and thousands of desperate Syrian refugees could be engaged in the fight." It's a high-risk, high-reward strategy: "Such a move would directly threaten Assad's Alawite heartland in Tartus and Homs, as well as the main road to Damascus. Regime forces would be outflanked, and Hezbollah's lines of communication, reinforcement, and supply between Lebanon and Syria could be cut off."

At the same time, it would expand the scope of the conflict into an already unstable neighboring country, deepen the involvement of outside powers, and trigger even more Russia and Iranian investment in sustaining Assad.

The Syrian Civil War could intensify even with Assad "winning," and even without the opening of an additional front. It will take months, or perhaps even years of intense combat for Assad to consolidate the gains depicted in Balanche's map — Aron Lund, editor of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's Syria in Crisis website, told Business Insider by email last week it's conceivable it could take the regime "many years" just to fully retake Aleppo.

Assad's existing gains have also come at a enormous human cost. Tens of thousands of people have already fled Aleppo, creating a wave of refugees that neighboring states are already struggling to address — and that could complicate Europe's struggles to integrate the continent's existing refugees from the conflict. As French ambassador Gerard Arau tweeted on February 5th in connection to the impending siege of Aleppo, "The Syrian Civil War is now an existential threat to the EU."

As the past four years in Syria demonstrate, turns in battlefield momentum can say surprisingly little about where the conflict is actually going.

SEE ALSO: Russia just helped the Assad regime accomplish 'in a few days what it had failed to do over 3 years'

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NOW WATCH: In 2000, the CIA predicted what the world would be like in 2015 — here’s what it got right and wrong

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia's Defence Ministry said on Thursday that U.S. aircraft had carried out a bombing attack on the Syrian town of Aleppo on Wednesday, which the U.S. later said had been carried out by Russian planes, the TASS agency reported.

TASS cited a defense ministry spokesman as saying that two U.S. A-10 ground attack aircraft, flying from Turkey, had bombed objects in Aleppo.

The spokesman also said that a Pentagon spokesman had accused Russia of bombing two hospitals in the town on Wednesday.

(Reporting by Maria Kiselyova; writing by Jason Bush)

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Kurdish fighters backed by Russian bombing raids have driven Syrian rebels from a former military air base near the border with Turkey, a group that monitors the war said on Thursday.

Rebel groups have been distracted by a major offensive in the area by the Syrian army and its Russian and other allies, allowing the Kurds to capture the base and expand their foothold in the north.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which tracks the war through a network of sources on the ground, reported heavy fighting between Kurds and Syrian rebels around Menagh air base, a former Syrian air force facility that had fallen into rebel hands.

Russian warplanes staged at least 30 raids against rebels at the base before the Kurdish fighters were able to seize it.

One rebel commander, Zekeriya Karsli from the Levant Front, said: "The fall of Menagh airport has made the situation on the ground pretty grim."

Kurds in northern Syria have established a degree of autonomy since the start of the war in some areas bordering Turkey, which is struggling to end a three-decade insurgency on its own territory by Kurdish militants who want more self-rule.

Both Syrian and Turkish Kurds, however, stop short of a declared bid for independent statehood, unlike Iraqi Kurdistan, which is already an autonomous region and is moving toward a referendum to declare full independence from Baghdad.

The Russians are happy to help the Kurds in this instance as it means further problems for the Syrian rebels they are trying to destroy.

Kurdish YPG militias have taken advantage of the rebels' preoccupation with fending off the Russian-backed Syrian army offensive launched last week in the northern Aleppo countryside to gain ground near an important border crossing with Turkey, the Syrian insurgents say.

Kurdish fighters based in the city of Afrin, south of rebel-held Azaz, have taken a series of villages, including Deir Jameal and al-Qamiya, which rebels have been forced to evacuate as Syrian troops advance from the south. 

Major offensive

The intensive Russian bombing of rebel towns in northern Aleppo province, while avoiding the Kurds in Afrin, allowed the Kurds to move on Menagh airport, which the rebels had held since August 2013.

"The Kurds have gained from the major offensive in Aleppo to widen their areas of control," Rami Abdulrahman, head of the Observatory, said.

The loss of the air base, which lies near the road between Aleppo and the Turkish city of Gaziantep, reflects the dramatic change in the balance of forces since Russia began its military intervention on Sept. 30 on behalf of President Bashar al-Assad.

Other rebel fighters trapped by Kurdish forces to the west and Syrian army and allied militias advancing from the south, are now seeking to defend Tal Rifaat, heavily hit by Russian bombers in the last two days, the Observatory and a rebel source confirmed.

Syrian troops are only a few kilometers from the town.

Russian bombing had allowed Syrian troops supported by Iranian-backed Shi'ite militias to advance to almost 25 km (15 miles) from the Turkish border, the closest they have come in more than two-and-a-half years.

The Bab al Salam border crossing with Turkey was a main trucking gateway from Europe via Syria to the Gulf before the war. Moscow and Damascus say it is a conduit for arms to the rebels supplied by Turkey.

The Syrian army advance has cut a rebel supply line between the border and the parts of the city of Aleppo which the insurgents control. The army is now seeking to regain full control of what was once the country's most populous city.

The Kurdish campaign to expand in rural areas in northern Aleppo province it considers as ethnically Kurdish has aroused suspicion among mainstream Arab rebels.

"They are trying to advance by exploiting our concentration on fighting the regime to win more territory," Abu Mustapha al-Saleh, a commander from al-Jabha al Shamiya group, said from Azaz.

"On the ground it looks as though they are waging one operation and of course the selectiveness of the Russian bombing confirms this," he added.

The heavy bombing has forced tens of thousands of Syrians to flee to the safety of the border areas around Azaz town. Prevented from entering Turkey, many have also gone to safer areas in the mainly rebel-held north-west province of Idlib.

A spokesman for Turkey's IHH aid organization, Burak Karacaoglu, said: "The Russian strikes are still the single biggest threat to our humanitarian aid work inside Syria."

(Reporting by Suleiman Al-Khalidi and Humeyra Pamuk; editing by Angus MacSwan and Giles Elgood)

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I had an opportunity to chat with a friend of mine, Red, who went to fight for the Kurdish Peshmerga, but ended up incarcerated after an unsuccessful attempt to cross the border into Syria.

SOFREP: So can you walk me through how it went down? Your arrest, I mean.

Red: Well, we were passed off near the border on the Syrian side to two guys in Pesh uniforms.

From there, we drove to the border, which we were told we would be able to get across just fine, so I assumed we’d be going to the YBS (Sinjar Resistance Units) base near Shengal.

Instead, they ended up taking us right to the legitimate border crossing. At that point, we were stopped like every other vehicle, but we had Westerners in the vehicle so they asked who we were, at which point the Pesh guys gave us right up and said they had no idea who we were.

One of the Westerners in the truck with me happened to speak the language. We were all taken to the office there at the crossing one by one and questioned; they were seeing if our stories matched up, which of course they did not because we were all doing different things and hadn’t planned on needing an alibi.

All of our bags were dumped and we were searched, then we waited around until we were shuffled off to Dahuk.

That’s sketchy, bro.

We were told there would be no prison, which I knew was a lie, and we spent the next couple days getting interrogated by the Asayish (Kurdish secret police) at some base there in Dahuk. We did sleep in a hotel, which we paid for. All part of the illusion of us not being prisoners.

Once they got the information they wanted out of us, they told us we would be going to Erbil and getting freed, but they would not give us our passports until we got there. At that point, a prison van with a cage in the back showed up. We were put in the cage and locked up. They once again told us there would be no prison, which I knew was bullshit.

We got to Erbil. They pulled us right into the prison just inside the city, a compound with eyes on the gate. We were unloaded and sent into the booking room where we were searched again.

From there, we were told to remove all personal belongings, our shoes, belts, cell phones, wallets, etc.

We had our pictures taken (front, left, right), and our fingerprints done.

Then we were shuffled down a series of hallways, passing through a series of barred doors, until we ended up in our prison cells.

Did they give you prison clothes?

Nah, just the clothes we had on our backs. Prison there is a lot different than American prisons.

Ah OK, I was just wondering if they gave you ANY clothes. So what happened next?

Two of the inmates gave me an extra pair of clothes. There are a lot of really good people locked away by those pieces of s***. Next was just the waiting. We got into the cell, not really sure how big it was, but we were put in a cell for one night with just us Westerners.

Next day, we were taken out and interrogated. It wasn’t violent, just them playing good cop/bad cop routine shit to make sure we weren’t terrorists.

We got brought back into the cell area, but this time put into the main cell with like 50 other people. We were in there for a week and a half or so, something like that. The only thing shitty about it was the sleeping; we basically slept on top of one another. Everything was regimented: We received three meals a day, and three times a day we were let out of the cell to roam in circles around the “yard,” which was nothing but a cement-floored central area with bars overhead.

Sounds mind-numbing.

We were required to stay seated all day inside the cell, so we basically only got three hours a day to stand up.

So how did you end up getting out?

Once that first week and a half was over, a few new Western prisoners came in, one of which threatened to bring the situation to the Western media. So they put us in another cell with just Westerners. The US consulate, on around the sixth day, came for me and the one other American there. We talked to them, they left, and then they came back like a week later and we were let go after whatever investigations they had to do were completed.

Man, that is wild.

Yeah, I went and stayed with a couple of friends for a few days so I could get my exit visa in order. Once that was set, I flew out shortly after.

Right on, man. I appreciate you sharing.

No problem, brother. Anytime.

SEE ALSO: Syrian Kurds just scored a big victory near Turkey with the help of Russian airstrikes

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NOW WATCH: Kurds uncovered an overwhelming network of ISIS tunnels in Iraq

Ankara (AFP) - Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Thursday threatened to send the millions of refugees in Turkey to European Union (EU) member states, as NATO agreed to deploy ships to the Aegean Sea to ease the migrant crisis.

In a speech in Ankara, Erdogan stepped up his denunciations of Western policy in the refugee crisis, confirming he had threatened EU leaders at a summit meeting in November that Turkey could say "goodbye" to the refugees.

But in a separate move, NATO agreed to send a naval group "without delay" to the Aegean to crack down on the people smugglers who have helped hundreds of thousands of migrants cross to EU territory in the last year.

Alarm is growing in EU capitals that thousands of migrants are still crossing the Aegean daily from Turkey after over a million made the perilous journey last year.

But Turkey, already home to some three million refugees, is also under EU and UN pressure to take in tens of thousands of Syrian refugees fleeing regime advances in the Aleppo region.

Erdogan sought to turn the tables on the EU by saying Turkey had every right to turf the refugees out of the country if it so wished.

"We do not have the word 'idiot' written on our foreheads. We will be patient but we will do what we have to. Don't think that the planes and the buses are there for nothing," Erdogan said.

Greek website euro2day.gr had earlier this week reported that at the G20 summit in Antalya in November Erdogan had angrily threatened to EU Commission president Jean Claude Juncker that Turkey could send the refugees to Europe.

The website had quoted Erdogan as telling Juncker: "We can open the doors to Greece and Bulgaria anytime and put the refugees on buses."

"I am proud of what I said. We have defended the rights of Turkey and the refugees. And we told them (the Europeans): 'Sorry, we will open the doors and say 'goodbye' to the migrants'," Erdogan said in his speech Thursday. 

'Shame on you!'

He also lashed out at UN calls on Turkey to take in tens of thousands of Syrian refugees from Aleppo region massed on the border with Turkey, saying the United Nations has spent less than half a billion dollars in the crisis.

"Shame on you! Shame on you!" said Erdogan, saying the UN should be telling states to take in refugees from Turkey.

Turkey is already hosting 2.5 million refugees from Syria's civil war and hundreds of thousands from Iraq and is increasingly bitter it has been left to shoulder the burden. 

Erdogan said Turkey had already spent some nine billion dollars on hosting the refugees since Syria's almost half decade civil war began. 

The EU has agreed to give Turkey three billion euros in financial aid for the refugees but the funds have yet to be handed to Turkey, two-and-a-half months after they were agreed.

"The three billion euros is not in our budget, where has it gone?" asked Erdogan. "It's for refugees!" 

'NATO to counter trafficking'

The NATO deployment follows a request this week by alliance members Germany, Greece and Turkey for assistance in tackling Europe's biggest migrant crisis since World War II.

Speaking after NATO defence ministers approved the mission, Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said NATO is "now directing the standing maritime group to move into the Aegean without delay and start maritime surveillance activities".

The group comprises three ships that are currently under German command.

He emphasised: "This is not about stopping and pushing back (refugee boats)... but about critical surveillance to help counter human trafficking and criminal networks."

According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), by February 7, 70,365 migrants arrived by sea in Greece from Turkey, an average of 2,000 a day. It said 319 perished on the way.

In the latest tragedy in the Aegean, Turkish security forces Thursday found the body of an eight-year-old girl washed up on the shore close to Didim in the Aydin region.

The girl had been dead for some 15 days, had no clothes and her body was starting to rot, the Radikal online daily said. 

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Saudi Arabia has made a "final" decision to send ground troops into Syria to fight ISIS, the spokesman of the Saudi-led coalition force in Yemen told reporters on Thursday.

Brig. Gen. Ahmed Al-Assiri said that Riyadh was "ready" to join the US-led anti-Islamic State coalition in Syria, according to Saudi news agency Al Arabiya. He noted, however, that the coalition — which has largely targeted the militants with airstrikes — has not given its final approval on the Saudis' decision to send ground troops.

ISIS also goes by the names the Islamic State and Daesh.

"We are representing Saudi's [decision] only" in sending troops, Assiri said.

Assiri signaled for the first time last week that Saudi Arabia would be ready to send ground troops into Syria if its coalition allies — including the US, Turkey, and the UK — asked them to.

"The kingdom is ready to participate in any ground operations that the coalition (against ISIS) may agree to carry out in Syria," Assiri told Al Arabiya TV news last Thursday. The Guardian later reported that the Saudis may be prepared to deploy thousands of ground troops into Syria.

Some experts, however, were immediately skeptical over how much the Saudis would really be willing to contribute to the fight.

"The Americans are pushing the Gulf states hard. But to be clear, if it happens at all, it's going to be like support for bombing — essentially symbolic," said geopolitical expert Ian Bremmer, president of the world's largest political-risk consultancy, Eurasia Group.

Bremmer told Business Insider on Thursday:

The Saudis won't send significant numbers — they already stretched with an uphill and losing struggle in Yemen — and they won't want to be on the front lines, as Saudi troops in Syria would be fighting and killing other Sunnis (and indeed other Saudi Sunnis). That would be unprecedented, and enormously unpopular.

Even so, Saudi Arabia's growing international isolation — and the rising regional influence of its biggest rival, Iran — has led the kingdom to "double down" on protecting its interests, according to an analysis of the world's top 2016 risks released by Eurasia Group last month.

That includes the kingdom's interests in Syria, where Saudi-backed rebel groups are currently battling Iran-backed Shiite militias and Hezbollah forces loyal to the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Saudi Arabia is locked in two other proxy wars with Iran in Yemen and Bahrain.

Saudi Arabia's relations with Iran hit a new low in January after the Saudis executed a prominent Shiite cleric, Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, leading Iranian protesters to ransack and set fire to the Saudi embassy in Tehran. The kingdom cut off all diplomatic ties with Iran shortly thereafter.

Washington's response to the spat between Saudi Arabia — a longtime US ally — and Iran, with which the Obama administration recently secured a historic nuclear deal, was not as supportive of the Saudis as the kingdom would have hoped.

Indeed, as the Saudis continue to balk at the US's decision to lift nuclear-related sanctions on Iran, Washington has shown few, if any, signs that it intends to prevent Syria from becoming a Russian-Iranian sphere of influence.

As such, just as Russia intervened in Syria under the guise of fighting ISIS to project its own power in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia may use the fight against the group as an excuse to enter Syria's battlefield — and take the task of containing Iran's expanding influence in the region into its own hands.

"Everybody is looking for the Americans to step up," Bremmer said. "And the US isn't going to do a fraction of what the Russians are prepared for militarily. So this is set to get worse."

Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, for his part, reportedly warned that foreign intervention in Syria could spark "a new world war."

Meanwhile, in his interview with Al Arabiya last week, Assiri jabbed at Russia and Iran's apparent lack of commitment to fighting ISIS on the ground in Syria.

"Increasingly, it seems that none of the forces on the ground in Syria (besides rebel groups) is willing to fight ISIS," Assiri said.

He added: "The Assad regime, Iran, Russia, and Hezbollah are preoccupied with fighting Bashar al-Assad's opposition with one ostensible goal: to keep Bashar al-Assad in power, irrespective of the cost in innocent Syrian lives."

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NOW WATCH: An AT&T spokesperson and former refugee is now helping Syrian refugees in Greece

Extortion and profiteering by regional Syrian officials have created untenable conditions for thousands of Syrians living under siege.

As civilians attempt to escape the high prices of basic goods in besieged cities, officials double down by demanding fees, tolls, and bribes as a condition for exit, according to a new report by Buzzfeed News.

Deir Ezzor is technically controlled by Syrian government forces, but it has been under siege by the Islamic State for over a year.

One family told Buzzfeed that, to escape the city, they had to pay a fee of about $1,300 per person to Syrian commanders at one checkpoint, and then repeat the process at the next.

“You have to claim that your relative is dying,” Sara Khaled told Buzzfeed, “... so they feel sorry for you and give you permission to leave. But none of this is free.”

The price to flee the city has more than doubled from roughly $2,000 to over $4,500 per person since last summer, according to the report. Citizens of Deir Ezzor claim that the same officials who charge the exit fees are also raising prices for basic goods internally, spurring people to flee.

Reports that the Islamic State has been stealing aid intended for Syrians may not come as a surprise, but residents of Deir Ezzor claim that the military and government have also been stealing airdropped aid shipments and then selling them at a markup. These claims corroborate similar claims accounts by the Associated Press in January.

Prices for non-aid items have also risen dramatically as vendors in the regime-controlled areas are forced to pay bribes to bring in goods. As a result, many goods are cheaper in ISIS-controlled sections of Deir Ezzor: a pound of sugar costs 50 cents under ISIS rule compared to $10 under besieged regime control.

Incredibly, an escaped citizen of Deir Ezzor’s regime-controlled section told the Associated Press that his father had suggested life would be better under ISIS.

“My beard is long now, and my stomach is empty. Let [the militants] in if it is going to let food into the city,” the man said, quoting his father, whom he had to leave behind.

Still, life under ISIS comes with its own brand of extortion. Coalition forces have been aggressively targeting ISIS’ oil in order to cut off the major revenue source, possibly contributing to increased taxation efforts.

Militants work to create a semblance of legitimate statehood, protection, and civil service in order to justify taxation, but the taxes are also backed by the threat of brutality. “If I do not [pay],” an ice cream truck driver operating in Iraq told The New York Times, “they either arrest me or burn my truck.

The Syrian government has recently, at the request of the UN, begun allowing aid into the besieged town of Madaya. But humanitarian organizations arrived there to find conditions demanding much more than they could offer.

The amount of items that have arrived on these trucks are too little and will not be enough to last long,” a local committee leader in Madaya told Al Jazeera. “This is a joke.” As of early February, residents of Madaya have once again resorted to starvation tactics: eating grass and rationing what little aid remains.

Now, the crisis threatens to extend to the embattled city of Aleppo, which is being encircled by pro-regime forces backed by Russian airstrikes. Earlier this week, the UN warned that 300,000 people in Aleppo may be at risk of losing access to humanitarian aid.

Read the full report at Buzzfeed >>

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NOW WATCH: Russia's military is more advanced than people thought

Russia is ready to sell civil airliners to Iraq and keep providing it with military aid to fight Islamic State, Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said on Thursday, accompanied on a trip to Baghdad by the biggest Russian delegation in years.

The mission by nearly 100 government and business officials was part of a drive by Moscow to strengthen commercial and security ties with Iraq, potentially eroding U.S. influence in one of the world's most critical regions.

Iraqi Foreign Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari said discussions had revolved around providing military assistance to defeat Islamic State militants, also known as Daesh, who seized a third of Iraq in 2014 and want to redraw the map of the Middle East.

"We need international support from multiple sources, be it from within the international coalition or outside of it," he said, referring to the U.S.-led coalition which has launched thousands of airstrikes and provided training and advice to Iraq's military.

"We need support, training and intelligence-sharing," he told reporters. "Intelligence plays an important role in the war on Daesh, and we've been coordinating for a while now with the Russian side to place this information in the hands of Iraqis."

Russia has invested millions of dollars in Iraq's energy sector and last year opened a command center in Baghdad under an intelligence-sharing agreement with Iraq, Iran and Syria aimed at combating Islamic State.

Rogozin said he had met with his country's envoy to the command center, thought to be a one-star general. He said through a translator that Moscow would continue providing Iraq with military equipment which had helped "raise the combat readiness of the Iraqi armed forces", but provided few details.

He told Russian news agency TASS he hoped military aid would help Iraq retake the northern city of Mosul and other areas held by Islamic State.

Frustrated with the pace and depth of the U.S.-led military campaign against the militants, Iraqi officials have said they would lean heavily on Russia in the struggle to defeat the Sunni Muslim jihadists. The command center has shared intelligence for air strikes in Iraq and neighboring Syria.

Four months of Russian air strikes in Syria have tipped momentum toward President Bashar al-Assad in that country's five-year-old civil war, undermining U.S.-backed efforts to revive peace talks.

The officials signed a wide-ranging memorandum of understanding that included measures to more than double bilateral trade and boost Iraq's electricity production, which only meets around 60 percent of its peak demand during the hot summer months.

Trade last year was nearly $2 billion, mostly made up of Russian exports, according to TASS. Rogozin said Russia could provide Sukhoi Superjet airliners for Iraq's civil aviation.

He proposed holding the next meeting in Mosul, which Iraq's government has vowed to recapture from Islamic State this year.

"Economic cooperation must coincide with settling security matters," said Rogozin. "The faster you liberate this city, the sooner we can get (back) to Iraq."

(Writing by Stephen Kalin; Editing by Mark Trevelyan)

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The US military released a new video on Wednesday, showing the US-led coalition against ISIS (aka Islamic state, ISIL, Daesh) carrying out an airstrike on an ISIS fighting position.

The video is just one of three that was released from February 2, when the coalition went on 31 raids against ISIS targets across Iraq and Syria. 

Other videos released that same day show coalition warplanes bombing ISIS oil and gas infrastructure.

"The destruction of Daesh targets in Syria and Iraq further limits the group's ability to project terror and conduct operations," the Combine Joint Task Forcesaid of the raid. 

The footage below shows just one of more than 9,000 air strikes the coalition has carried out since beginning the operation in October of 2014.

SEE ALSO: Watch US-led airstrikes obliterate an ISIS oil and gas plant

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