It may have nearly been forgotten – but Syria’s war is not over

In one of his cruel dissections of his colleagues, David Lloyd George once compared the great Lord Kitchener in the Great War to “one of those revolving lighthouses which radiates momentary gleams of revealing light far out into the surrounding gloom and then suddenly relapses into complete darkness”. In the Middle East, we are a little like Kitchener. We gaze aghast at an enormous explosion in Beirut, wonder at the “treacherous” new peace between Israel and a tiny Gulf monarchy, but then permit the darkness to return.

Thus, just three days ago, far off in the hot desert gloom of eastern Syria, we missed another explosion, far smaller in size than any in neighbouring Lebanon but one which cast an all too revealing light on a nearly forgotten war. The blast was beside a road scarcely fifteen miles east of the Syrian city of Deir Ezzor, and it killed a Russian major-general. His convoy was returning from what the Russian defence ministry, in a grimly brief and unhelpful report, called a “humanitarian operation”.

The bomb was an improvised explosive device – an amateur roadside booby-trap of the kind which killed so many US soldiers in Iraq and has struck many Syrian army personnel over the past nine years. The general – a “senior military adviser”, according to the Russians – was unnamed but died of his “severe wounds” after receiving medical help. Two of his colleagues were also wounded but survived.

The official Damascus news agency SANA made an equally brief reference to a Russian “martyr” in the eastern desert and to Moscow’s alliance with Syria in its war against “terrorism”. But the Syrian military have their own suspicions: that far from being an isolated attack by what is left of Isis, this may be part of an unpublicised but lethal little battle between US and Russian forces and their allies in eastern Syria.

The area of desert in which the bomb was set off is known for two features: the great city of Deir Ezzor which lies across the banks of the Euphrates, and the Syrian oil fields, most of which are now in Kurdish (or American) hands. The city was under siege by Isis until 2017, its Syrian Druze commander holding out with his army Brigade 137 for three years against constant ISIS attacks and – accidentally, the Americans said – under a series of 37 US air strikes in September 2016 which killed between 50 and 60 Syrian soldiers.

Two years ago, Russia lost Lieutenant General Valery Asapov inside the city of Deir Ezzor when a mortar round – supposedly fired by Isis – landed beside him. Asapov, the head of the Russian military advisory group in Syria, was the most senior fatality Moscow has suffered in the Syrian war. At the time, both the Russians and the Syrian military suspected that the mortar may have been fired by Kurdish fighters and that the Americans may also have been involved in targeting the general.

The Syrians themselves have made previous reference to “terrorists” laying explosives besides the M4 highway which crosses Idlib province – 250 miles northwest of Deir Ezzor – where joint Russian, Syrian and Turkish patrols travel between Aleppo and the Mediterranean. But in these cases, Isis and other Islamist groups are thought to be involved. The situation in the east is quite different.

Shortly after the Russian major general was killed this week, for example, the Syrian military reported that one of its checkpoints close to the Euphrates was approached by a US patrol in the countryside outside Hasakah, an area partly controlled by Syrian but also by Kurdish groups cooperating with Washington. The Syrian army confirmed that one of its soldiers was killed by American troops in the shooting which followed. Others were wounded.

At around the same time, rockets fell close to a US base not far from the Euphrates – on the edge of one of the Syrian oil fields which are held by American and Kurdish forces in the east of the country. Donald Trump himself declared last year that he would “secure the oilfields” in eastern Syria after originally ordering his troops to leave what he called the country of “sand and death” (not a bad description of the landscape, at least in Trumpspeak). These fields were seized by Isis when it first entered eastern Syria and operated by Turkish engineers for export to Turkey until its lorry convoys were bombed by both the Americans and Russians.

In fact, the events in eastern Syria should be seen as much in the context of the ever more fragile relationship between the Syrian government and Syrian Kurds as between Russians and Americans – although there will almost certainly be further violence involving both of them. With the Kurds now withholding oil from the rest of Syria – at the height of the Assad regime’s economic collapse – the government has now discovered that the Kurds no longer wish to sell them wheat.

Hitherto, in the Humpty-Dumpty world of eastern Syria, the Kurds – struggling between Turkish enemies, American saviours (very doubtful ones at that) and Damascus – had continued to supply the rest of Syria with wheat from the great plains around Deir Ezzor and south of Hasakah. Desperate to avoid lifting bread subsidies for more than half the population of the country, the Syrian authorities were content to pay the Kurds for the annual crop. But now the Kurds have decided to pay the farmers themselves – and keep the wheat.

This is a major crisis. Scarcely three years ago, the Syrian government was still supplying Kurdish forces with automatic rifles and anti-tank rockets to fight Isis, but they stopped the shipments when the Americans renewed their alliance with Kurdish forces along the Turkish border. In Damascus, there are rumours that the US has asked an American company to operate the Syrian oil fields – which would not only deprive the Assad government of fuel but effectively steal the oil from the sovereign territory of Syria itself, land which the Russians have insisted must all be returned to Damascus.

So the small explosion which killed a Russian major general this week may be far more important than we realise. Nato and the Russians can exercise their troops in eastern Europe as much as they wish, but the only place on earth where fully operational units from both Moscow and Washington are facing each other is in the desert of “sand and death” around the Euphrates. In other words, the Syrian war is not over.