DECRYPTION – The fall of the Syrian dictator, without Moscow being able or willing to intervene, raises doubts about the reliability of the Russian friend within the Sahelian juntas.
The brutal fall of Bashar al-Assad and his regime on December 8 resonated well beyond the Middle East. In Africa, the end of this old dictatorship has caused concern in several capitals which have placed themselves in Moscow’s orbit. The consequences of this upheaval are still difficult to measure. In any case, this raises questions that the Russian authorities will have to answer or risk seeing their African aura seriously fade.
The first are logistical. The future of Russian military assets in Syria, the Tartous maritime base on the Mediterranean and the Hmeimim airport, is far from assured. If Moscow still seems to think it can save these sites, the violence exercised by the Russians against Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTC), the new master of Syria, makes the hypothesis uncertain. However, the Russian army, deployed in Syria since 2015, used its two bases as logistical sites for its operations, first in North Africa then…
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