I'm pleased we enforced the new Deconfliction Line (DCL, as I term it) by helping local Syrian forces smash an attacking battalion that was largely composed of Russian mercenaries.
One, this may not have been a Russian operation but a mercenary company operation for Assad.
There is speculation that Russia may even have let the unit get smashed as a warning to Assad and Iran not to go beyond Russian interests. This fits my belief that Russia only cares about core western Syria where Russia's bases are.
I will add my question of whether Assad chose Russian mercenaries for the job in an effort to drag Russia into the eastern front.
But I've noticed a bit of conservative attitude that the Russian mercenaries are somehow less than legitimate, with one author saying they should be treated like terrorists to discourage the use of them.
That sounds just a little too much like "screw them" as one leftist writer said of American mercenaries killed and strung up on a bridge in Fallujah in 2004 wrote.
But we call our mercenaries "contractors." But it is the same thing.
In the volunteer military era America has used mercenaries more and more for support jobs like outer layer base security, transportation, training, maintenance, and even some missions that require ground combat.
Sure, mostly we use them to free up American troops for combat missions rather than replacing American combat troops. But that isn't iron clad.
Mind you, in Syria the Russians use them for combat roles because the Syrian military isn't up to the task:
Syrian forces reportedly proved ineffective even with the help of Russian advisors and special forces. Kremlin-linked contractors allowed Moscow to run a covert land operation while denying it had boots on the ground.
“The big battles, the intense battles with casualties, that's all Russian mercenaries,” said Ruslan Leviev of the Conflict Intelligence Team, a research group who track Russian military activity abroad.
That overstates their role given the relatively low level of casualties and because Iran's Shia foreign legion is a major source of offensive cannon fodder (Hezbollah seems war weary but they are still there, although I'm not sure they are still shock troops).
But I have noted that the Syrian army can't really carry out infantry combat because of losses. They came to rely on Iranian-supplied irregular forces for shock troops and the Russians discovered that, too.
I already noted that liberals who once hated mercenaries learned to ignore them in 2009.
I hope that conservatives don't learn to hate them just because our foes use them, too.
As long as they fight strictly according to regulations, they should not be sentenced to death. I don't see anything to indicate the Russians fought contrary to the laws of war.
I'm glad we decisively defeated them. But they were not terrorists, from what I've read.
Use of mercenaries is kind of a common thing in this era, recall.
And yes, as the article notes, the war is hardly over after ISIL has been largely defeated.
