Secretary of State John F. Kerry meets with United Arab Emirates Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed in London about the ongoing Syrian crisis. (Pool/Reuters)
LONDON — Defense chiefs from the United States and Russia held their first direct talks in more than a year Friday, reflecting Washington’s mounting anxiety about Russian military escalation in Syria and how it might affect the fight against the Islamic State.
The 50-minute phone call between Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter and Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu caps weeks of concern about Moscow’s moves to make its military support to Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad both more robust and more visible. In recent weeks, Moscow has sent artillery, tanks and a small number of fighter jets to a coastal base, substantially increasing aid to a key Kremlin ally on the Mediterranean.
The two officials “agreed to further discuss mechanisms for deconfliction in Syria and the counter-ISIL campaign,” Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook said, using an acronym for the Islamic State.
The conversation marked the first time Carter has spoken with Shoigu since the U.S. defense chief took office in February, and the first call between any U.S. defense secretary and the Russian minister since August 2014. It comes 18 months after the United States halted military engagement with Russia, including exercises and bilateral meetings, due to Russia’s activities in Ukraine.
After Moscow proposed the conversations this week, the White House indicated its openness to “tactical, practical discussions” over how to combat Islamic State militants in Syria.
It’s still unclear whether the two countries could engage in any direct military cooperation against the group, which U.S. and allied nations are battling across parts of Syria and Iraq.
“We have two big jobs in Syria: One is to broker a diplomatic settlement, and the other is to defeat the Islamic State,” said Julianne Smith, a former White House official who is now a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. “Both of those take us to Russia.”
“The administration has no choice but to engage with the Russians at this point, however unsavory that might feel,” she added.
But the unusual talks probably don’t indicate a near-term shift in the administration’s stance on the other issues that have pitted it against Moscow: the war against separatists in Ukraine and the future of the Assad regime. Earlier Friday, Secretary of State John F. Kerry, in London on the first stop of a swing through Europe, said the United States continues to believe Assad must relinquish power.
While Russia says its military escalation aims to help the Syrian army battle the Islamic State, administration officials fear that the recent deployment of Russian troops, tanks, aircraft and artillery is meant to bolster Assad’s increasingly fragile position.
Kerry told reporters that military talks with Russia would “help to define some of the different options that are available to us as we consider next steps in Syria.”
“Obviously, our focus remains on destroying ISIL,” Kerry added, “and also on a political settlement with respect to Syria, which we believe cannot be achieved with the long-term presence of Assad. We are looking for ways in which to try and find a common ground.”
[Obama: Assad opening door for Russian forces]
In Moscow, Russian officials raised the prospect of sending troops into combat in Syria if Assad wants them.
“If there is a request, it will be discussed as part of bilateral contacts,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters Friday. “Of course it will be discussed and considered.”
Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem said Thursday that up until now, “there’s no joint fight on the ground with Russian forces, but if we sense the need for it, we will consider and ask,” the official Syrian Arab News Agency reported.
Syria’s civil war threatens Moscow’s foreign policy interests, notably the future of a Russian naval facility at the Syrian port of Tartus.
Increasingly, it also poses domestic concerns.
In an interview with Britain’s Channel 4, Kerry said the Russians are increasingly concerned about the rising number of fighters from their region fighting alongside Islamic State in Syria — 2,000 from Chechnya alone.
He said the U.S.-Russian dialogue so far has been about de-confliction, a term that refers to making sure U.S. and Russian military efforts don’t interfere with each other. But he held out the possibility that it could expand.
“It is possible now that there may yet be a meeting or some other follow-up on it,” Kerry said. “We will stay very closely in communication because that’s very important. We share the same goal. We share the goal of ridding the region of ISIL.”
But Kerry also voiced wariness about Russia’s support for Assad.
“Well, they allege that they also share the goal of a political transition that leads to a stable, whole, united, secular Syria,” he said. “The question always remains: Where is Assad’s place and role within that, and that’s what we need to have more conversation on.”
According to a top official of Russia’s Federal Security Service, about 2,400 Russian citizens have joined the group, the official RIA Novosti news agency reported.
On Friday, the Kremlin said that Russian President Vladimir Putin will meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu next week in Moscow for talks that will cover the “Middle East peace process and war with the global terrorist threat.”
Putin has called for a coalition with the West to fight terrorism in the Middle East, an initiative that analysts say could pluck Russia from global isolation, the result of the crisis in Ukraine between Moscow-backed rebels and the Western-supported government in Kiev.
Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, said that Russia’s actions in Syria are “not just a token initiative.” A Russian intervention in the Syrian war could also lead to an accidental clash between Russia and the United States, he said, but the Russian government may treat even that as a chance to reopen dialogue with the West.
“Russia’s strategy is to bolster Bashar al-Assad’s army right now, to keep the strongholds that it has now, particularly Damascus,” he said in a telephone interview.
“Failing that, Plan B is to help the Alawites hold the strongholds in western Syria, that’s where the Russian military aid is coming. That’s where the Russian military presence is today and will be tomorrow,” he added, referring to Assad’s minority sect.
Vladimir Frolov, a Moscow-based political analyst, said that Russia would face daunting logistical hurdles to bring a large ground force to Syria, but that Russia could deploy warplanes. Whether Putin would make further moves into Syria would depend heavily on the result of talks with the United States, he said.
[Syrian refugees now find barricades and troops in Europe]
Carter’s call also appeared to highlight differences in top U.S. officials’ approaches to the Syria crisis.
Ever since Moscow floated the proposal for the military-to-military dialogue, Kerry appeared frustrated at Carter's unwillingness to jump at the chance to become involved. As recently as Tuesday, Carter's spokesman said that since Kerry was already talking with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, there was little point in Carter opening another channel of communication.
The next day, Kerry said he thought that "meaningful" involvement from Russia could lead to a political solution and help defuse tensions. On Thursday, Kerry went to the Pentagon for a private meeting with Carter.
Kerry also had lunch Friday with Israeli opposition leader Isaac Herzog, a co-founder of the center-left Zionist Union and the chief rival of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
According to a senior State Department official who spoke anonymously under the agency’s ground rules, the two men discussed the need to work toward a two-state solution to resolve the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. With the Iran agreement now secured, Kerry has said he wants to see whether it is possible to revive peace talks, which he pursued intensively for nine months before talks collapsed in 2014.
Ryan reported from Washington. Thomas Gibbons-Neff and William Branigin in Washington contributed to this report.
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