Less than, shall we say,
complementary by the Russians of their allies......
Assad is in a weaker position than most think
“.......“The Syrians can’t fight,” said one commander. “I’ve seen it many times. At the drop of a hat they’ll abandon their positions and flee. ‘Go, go, Russia, go!’ they’ll yell. Where are you going, god damn it, let’s defend the position! But no. When there’s an assault, for instance, we’ll take the high ground, hand it over to the Syrians in the evening, come morning, no Syrians.”
The Russians regard the poor fighting capacity of the regime forces as connected to what they see as moral failings. “It’s a grotesque country,” said the commander to RFE/RL. “Faggotry flourishes there. They’ve all got it to a man.” The depletion of fighting-age men in regime areas has been a massive problem, and apparently drives the unwillingness to fight: “I ask one of the translators: ‘Why do your boys not want to fight?’ ‘Oh’, he says, ‘many of our boys have been killed in the war. We need some to stay alive to **** some girls so there will be children’. ‘Look, let us **** your girls’, I say, ‘and you guys go fight. It’s your country’. ‘No’, he says, ‘we need to preserve our blood’. What blood? Your gay blood?”
In another interview by the Estonian public broadcaster’s Russian-language channel, a Wagner fighter named Oleg also discusses how it was impossible to get the Syrians to fight – even when the Russians would shoot at their feet. The Russians had to undertake all assaults under Syrian friendly fire and lost staggering amounts of men thanks to regime incompetence. “God forbid one should have such allies,” he said, “because they always **** up every task. Always.” An
Izvestia interview in October with a Russian special forces officer in October paints a similar picture. “We have to instruct them to let us return from the battlefield and not open fire and kill us … Sometimes you’ll say ‘run!’ while they’re getting shot at and they can’t move—their legs have turned to rubber. Sometimes they start crying.”........
“The skill level of the Syrian army is less than nonexistent, one could say,” says another fighter. “The Russians give tanks to the Syrians, the Syrians give the tanks to ISIS, the Russians come and take the tanks back from ISIS … give them back to the Syrians again … and the cycle restarts.” Similar reports have come from Assad’s Iranian allies. Journalist Sulome Anderson quotes some Iranian-backed Hezbollah sources calling Assad’s forces “garbage people” and “sons of bitches.” One Hezbollah captain told her: “If you have 600 Syrians before a battle, when the battle starts you’ll have six.”.........