What Has Russia Gained After Five Years Of Fighting In Syria?

© Instagram / syrianpresidency 

Al Jazeera: What has Russia gained from five years of fighting in Syria? 

Moscow managed to preserve the Syrian regime but it has failed to achieve all its goals in Syria. 

On September 30, 2015, the Russian Federation formally entered the Syrian civil war as President Bashar al-Assad’s rule was increasingly under threat. 

Since 2011, intense fighting and mass desertion had weakened the Syrian Arab Army. Even the support of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the deployment of Iranian militias and Russian mercenaries, and regular shipments of Russian weaponry had not been enough to stop the advance of the opposition and radical armed groups. 

In March 2015, the Syrian government lost a second provincial capital, Idlib, when Jeish al-Fattah, a loose coalition of various armed groups, led a successful offensive on the city in the country’s northwest. 

The provincial capital of Raqqa, with its strategic oil and water resources, had been captured the previous year and had become the main stronghold of the rising Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). 

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WNU Editor: Aside from a naval and air base in a country that is now nothing more but a failed state. Nothing.

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