Top, AFP/Getty Images; bottom, AP Photo/Sergei Chirikov, Pool Top, Syrian President Hafez al-Assad and Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev, 1980; bottom, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Russian President Vladimir Putin, 2005 Russia’s entry into the Syrian conflict has fundamentally changed the dynamic of the four-and-a-half-year-old war there. With a bombing campaign that now includes launching cruise missiles into Syria from Russian warships in the Caspian Sea, the Kremlin is gambling that it can preserve the weakened Assad regime. The move brings Russia into a costly and intractable civil war, raises the threat of terrorism by Islamist groups in Russia, and puts …read more
Source: Iranian.com
