Foreign involvement in the Syrian civil war

[13] In December 2013, Russia was reported to have stepped up its military support for the Syrian government by supplying new armored vehicles, surveillance equipment, radars, electronic warfare systems, spare parts for helicopters, and various weapons including guided bombs for planes.

[14] On 30 September 2015, with permission of the upper house of the Russian Parliament, Russia started a direct military intervention in Syria consisting of air strikes against ISIL, the Al-Nusra Front, and other perceived enemies of the Syrian government.

"[28] At the end of December 2015, senior US officials privately admitted that Russia had achieved its central goal of stabilising the Assad government and, with the costs and casualties relatively low, was in a position to sustain the operation at this level for years to come.

[79] For several initial months of the Syrian uprising that began in March 2011, the US administration headed by Barack Obama, despite pressure from some political groups, refrained from outright calls for Bashar al-Assad′s ouster, a move then opposed by key regional US allies such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia.

"[80] Under the administration's division of labor, the State Department is in charge of supplying nonlethal aid (includes food rations and pickup trucks, not tanks and bullets), while the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) runs a covert program to arm and train the Syrian rebels.

[88] In April 2013, also in Jordan, the United States had set up a $70 million program in the country "that is training the kingdom's special forces to identify and secure chemical-weapons sites across Syria should the regime fall and the wrong rebels look like getting their hands on them.

[99] In December 2013, the US government temporarily suspended the shipments of non-lethal military aid, including food rations, medical kits and pickup trucks after warehouses of equipment were seized by the Islamic Front.

[84] In April 2014, videos appeared online that showed rebels in Syria using U.S.-made anti-tank rockets (BGM-71 TOW), the first significant American armaments in the country's conflict; analysts suggested they might have been provided by states such as Saudi Arabia, a US ally, with Washington's acquiescence.

In early October 2015, shortly after the start of the Russian military intervention in Syria, Barack Obama was reported to have authorised the resupply — against ISIL — of 25,000 Syrian Kurds and 5,000 of the armed-Syrian opposition, emphasising that the US would continue this support now that Russia had joined the conflict.

"[129] In August 2016, the BBC published photographs taken in June that year[130] that it said showed British special forces soldiers apparently guarding the perimeter of the New Syrian Army's base at al-Tanf (Al Waleed) in Syria's Homs province on the Syria-Iraq border that had been previously seized by ISIL militants in May 2015.

[135] In August 2013, when the Assad government was accused of using chemical weapons in the Ghouta area near Damascus, Paris called for military intervention[136] but was isolated after the US president, Barack Obama, refused to act despite the breach of what he had earlier declared was a “red line”.

[119] On 19 September 2013, French President François Hollande during a press conference in Bamako suggested that France was ready to begin supplying lethal aid to the Free Syrian Army in a "controlled framework".

[139] In mid-November 2015, in the wake of the 13 November Paris terror attacks, France, citing self-defence under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter,[140] significantly intensified its air strikes in Syria,[138] closely coordinating with the US military.

[158] In October 2014, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden stated that Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates had "poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Al-Assad, except that the people who were being supplied were al-Nusra, and al Qaeda, and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world.

At the end of July 2015, American and Turkish media outlets reported that the US government and Turkey had agreed on the outlines of a de facto "safe zone" along the Turkey-Syria border under the terms of a deal that was purported to increase the scope and pace of the U.S.-led air missions against the ISIL in northern Syria; the plan provided for driving ISIL, the al-Nusra Front, and other radical groups out of a 68-mile-long area west of the Euphrates River and reaching into the province of Aleppo that would then come under the control of the Syrian opposition.

On 29 June 2015, Turkey′s National Security Council made a decision and released a statement that said that Turkey would consider any incursion west of the Euphrates in northern Syria along the Turkish border (the area between Jarablus in the east and the Azaz–Mare' region in the west) by Kurdish YPG militia, backed by the Democratic Union Party (PYD), as well as any attack north of Idlib by Syrian government forces to be a violation of the “red line.”[166] (The PYD is deemed by Turkey to be the Syrian affiliate of PKK, but it is actively aided by the U.S.[166]) At the end of October 2015, Turkish prime minister Ahmet Davutoğlu claimed that Turkey had struck Kurdish YPG militia fighters in Syria twice for the alleged breach of the "red line"; the YPG′s statements said that the Turkish army had twice attacked its positions near the border towns of Tell Abyad and Kobanî.

"[169][170] Russia′s foreign minister Sergey Lavrov claimed that the Turkish plan to create a buffer zone in the area where Syrian Turkmen lived in northern Syria stemmed from Ankara's wish "to protect local terrorist infrastructure.

[175] On 2 December 2015, Russia′s military officials presented what they referred to as "only part of the available facts" that proved that Turkey′s president Recep Erdogan and his family were personally involved in a multimillion-dollar oil smuggling operation that funded ISIL terrorists.

In response, the terrorists, Sajida al-Rishawi and Ziad al-Karbouli, were executed[200] and Jordan took the lead on anti-ISIL bombing raids, claiming nearly a thousand militants were killed by air strikes in a week.

[206] In mid-December 2015, in the wake of the two rounds of the Vienna talks, Saudi Arabia hosted a conference of Syria's political and armed opposition factions that was intended to come to an agreement on a common position from which to negotiate with the government of Bashar al-Assad.

[208] The meeting decided to set up a "Higher Negotiations Authority" to direct the opposition's participation in the proposed talks with the regime early in 2016; that leadership body is to remain based in Riyadh, giving the Saudis a ready handle on it.

[212][213] According to Jutarnji list, a Croatian daily newspaper, there were an unusually high number of sightings of Ilyushin 76 aircraft owned by Jordan International Air Cargo at Pleso Airport in Zagreb, Croatia on 14 and 23 December 2012; 6 January; and 18 February 2013.

[216] The Swiss decision came shortly after the UN human rights chief, Navi Pillay, called for an urgent stop to arms transfers to government and opposition forces so as to avoid "further militarisation" of the conflict.

[217] The director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy had previously argued that, while "uncontrolled militarization will turn the Syrian uprising into a wider conflict that could draw in jihadis and other extremists from across the Muslim World", militarisation was inevitable, and so the US should help facilitate and guide it.

[218] Marc Lynch argued the opposite in February 2012, as the provision of weapons from Saudi Arabia and Qatar was being mooted: "It is unlikely that arms from the outside would come close to evening the balance of power, and would only invite escalations from Syrian regime forces".

[229] In late November 2017, the US government made it known that they intended to use the presence of US troops in northern Syria, deployed there in support of the Kurdish-dominated SDF, to pressure president Assad to make concessions at the talks in Geneva.

[230] This intent was in mid-January 2018 clearly broadcast by Rex Tillerson, who said the Trump administration would maintain an open-ended military presence in Syria to counter Iran′s influence and oust Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.

[231][232] However, in April 2018 the Saudi foreign minister, Adel al-Jubeir, said that they were in discussions with the US on finding replacement forces for the about 2,000 US troops in Syria supporting the fight against ISIL, to address the Trump administration's desire to withdraw them.

[242] In May 2012, Syria's U.N. envoy Bashar Ja'afari declared that dozens of foreign fighters from Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Britain, France and elsewhere had been captured or killed, and urged Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey to stop "their sponsorship of the armed rebellion".

[247] In July 2016, the British press cited "experts" as believing that ISIL fielded at least three exclusively Russian-speaking "Caucasian" (often led by Chechens) battalions of about 150 men each, the rank and file of those having been drawn from Russia's North Caucasus and other parts of the former Soviet Union.