Is there truth in the conspiracy theories about who killed Russian Lieutenant General Valery Asapov in Syria?

(The Independent)- The Russian air force arrived in Syria two years ago this week to save President Bashar al-Assad and his army. They succeeded. The Syrian army held out, albeit at the cost of (then) 56,000 of its soldiers.

“We’re not going to have another Afghanistan here,” the Russians told everyone they met in Damascus. But of course, soon they would have forward air observers on the ground to vector their Sukhois onto their targets, de-mining specialists to pull the forests of Isis bombs out of the soil, military police officers to oversee the passage of Islamist fighters out of Syria’s great western cities. And generals to advise – and, last week, to be killed – in Syria.

The death of Lieutenant General Valery Asapov in the suburbs of Deir Ezzor as he assisted Syrian commanders in their recapture of the city – surrounded by Isis for three years, its civilian population and at least 10,000 Syrian troops resupplied by helicopter – was given little attention in the Western media. The Kurdish assault on Raqqa, with a smattering of Arabs to smother the Kurdish face of the pseudo-“Syrian Democratic Forces” militia and with the help of American air attacks, took first place in the Western Middle East news agenda. But the Russian Defence Ministry took the death of their highest-ranking officer in Syria – along with two Russian colonels – very seriously indeed. They were right. General Asapov was commander of the Russian 5th army in the Far East Russian city of Ussiriysk, not far from Vladivostok.

And how did he die? According to the Russians, he was killed under shellfire from Isis forces outside Deir Ezzor, a remarkable piece of targeting – if, indeed, Isis were working on the trajectories – for a group which usually wastes artillery shells by the hundred in order to hit their enemies. Did they know that he was visiting this particular military position? And if so, who taught them to fire so accurately? Or was this a chance success for a defeated Islamist army?

The Russian air force arrived in Syria two years ago this week to save President Bashar al-Assad and his army. They succeeded. The Syrian army held out, albeit at the cost of (then) 56,000 of its soldiers. “We’re not going to have another Afghanistan here,” the Russians told everyone they met in Damascus. But of course, soon they would have forward air observers on the ground to vector their Sukhois onto their targets, de-mining specialists to pull the forests of Isis bombs out of the soil, military police officers to oversee the passage of Islamist fighters out of Syria’s great western cities. And generals to advise – and, last week, to be killed – in Syria.

The recapture of the crossroads town of Qaryatain, south of Homs, last week did, however, have an Afghan flavour about it. Any Russian soldiers who have read the history of their “limited intervention” of 1979 – Brezhnev’s description of their invasion – know very well how easy it was to capture a town and then lose it to the enemy again the moment they press on to the next city. And here we might return to a man I’ve never been very fond of, but whose wisdom on Iraq in the 1920s – and by extension Iraq and Syria today – is still read by military men of all sides in the Middle East.

In a 1929 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, TE Lawrence wrote of Turkish forces fighting his own Arab Revolt in the 1914-18 war. He might have been writing of Isis as it attacks the Syrians and Russians today. He asked of the insurgents, some of whom he led, “…suppose they were an influence, a thing invulnerable, intangible, without front or back, drifting about like a gas? Armies were like plants, immobile as a whole, firm-rooted, nourished through long stems to the head. [The Arabs] might be a vapour.” Lawrence even wrote that “the printing press is the greatest weapon in the armoury of the modern [guerrilla] commander”. Today – still, despite its defeats and its false claims – the internet is the greatest weapon in the armoury of Isis.

The Russians have read all this. So have the Syrians. And so, presumably, have Isis. They didn’t need Lawrence to inspire them – they have Saudi Wahhabism to do that – although it is true that a British aircraft dropped a propaganda sheet over Riyadh during the First World War, warning pro-Turkish Arabs that they would be “liquidated” if they did not support the “Islamic Caliphate” which, so the British claimed at the time, represented the Arabs in revolt against the Ottoman empire. It is trite to state that history repeats itself in the Middle East – it does this everywhere, even in Germany and Catalonia – but those “vapours” have not gone away. Nor will they, even if Assad’s military victory is complete and Iraq’s army can control its western provinces. For by then, we’ll be dealing with Kurdistan yet again, rewriting its own history of betrayal. Russia is likely to avoid that particular war. For now.