So far this has only been picked up by the Telegraph, but there are indications Russia is beginning to evacuate its naval base in Syria at Tartus:
Earlier on Tuesday, Russian navy ships were spotted leaving the Kremlin’s crucial seaport in the Mediterranean as the civil war threatens to engulf it.
Naval analyst H I Sutton said Russia’s Tartus naval base in Syria was now under threat from rebel attack as the fast-moving front line closed in.
“The dramatic shift in the front lines in Syria now puts the base at risk. There are indications that Russia may be evacuating its naval vessels,” he said.
The Tartus naval base is important for Russia because it is its only Mediterranean “replenishment and repair point”. It has also been used as the dropping-off point for Russian special forces to enter the Syrian conflict.
So important is Tartus to the Russian navy that in 2017, Putin ordered its expansion.
But Mr Sutton said two of Russia’s five naval ships had now left the port. Russia also has a submarine based at Tartus. This “is the first visible sign that Russia is moving valuable assets out of the country,” he said.
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Set up as a Soviet naval base in 1971, Tartus was bulked up in 2012, being turned into Russia’s main overseas naval base.
Since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, it has taken on increased significance after Putin ordered his naval forces to adopt an aggressive posture to deter any Nato forces from using the Mediterranean Sea to interfere with his war.
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As well as pulling its ships out of the Tartus naval base, Russian forces have reportedly withdrawn from two other bases near Aleppo, which rebel forces captured on Friday. One of them is the Hama Air Base, which is seen as a lynchpin site.
Putin has also sacked the general commanding Russian forces in Syria.
And at the same time, it looks like the Kurdish-led SDF is reentering the renewed Syrian civil war, attacking Assad loyalist forces on the east bank of the Euphrates and elsewhere in SW Syria (also from the Telegraph:
US jets attack Iranian militias in Syria
American aircraft reportedly attacked Iranian-backed fighters in Syria as a renewed civil war threatened to engulf the country.
Aircraft – including what appeared to be an American A-10 Warthog ground attack jet – were filmed conducting low-level strikes in the eastern province of Deir Ezzor on Tuesday.
The US said the operation was carried out in self defence against threats posed to coalition forces in the region, adding that the strike was not connected to the growing conflict spreading across the north-west of the country.
It came as the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), an American-backed group that allied with Western governments to defeat Islamic State in 2019, said it had captured a number of villages from Syrian government forces on the Eastern bank of the Euphrates.
The development underlines the multiple conflicts reignited by last week’s surprise rebel offensive in the north-west of the country.
Iran is trying to rush militia men from neighbouring Iraq to help its ally, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, push back the Islamist-led rebel alliance in the north-west of Syria.
The villages in the south-east attacked by the SDF’s Arab-dominated Deir Ezzor military council have been used by regime and Iranian-backed militias to attack the SDF and nearby US bases, said Charles Lister, director of the Syria programme at the Middle East Institute, a Washington-based think tank.
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The [Turkish supported] SNA also clashed with the SDF, which controls a mostly Kurdish-inhabited swathe of territory in the north of the country, prompting allegations that Turkey was using the chaos as an opportunity to settle scores with the group.
Note that while the SNA is supporting the HTS offensive against Assad in NW Syria, they also have their own agenda when it comes to the Kurds in NE Syria. Things are starting to get really complicated in that part of the world.
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Major update from ISW by way of RBC Ukraine:
Russia has no intention of providing reinforcement to Assad's regime in Syria - ISW
Russia is evacuating its naval forces from its base in the Syrian city of Tartus. This may indicate that Moscow does not plan to send significant reinforcements to support the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad soon, reports the US Institute for the Study of War (ISW).
An OSINT analysis by MT Anderson of satellite images from November 30 and December 1 confirmed that the Russian base in Tartus hosted the frigates Admiral Golovko and Admiral Grigorovich, the submarine Novorossiysk, and the oil tankers Elnya and Vyazma.
However, satellite images from December 3 showed that Russia had withdrawn three frigates, the submarine, and two unnamed auxiliary vessels (likely Elnya and Vyazma) - effectively removing all the vessels stationed at Tartus.
The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) believes that Russia cannot relocate these ships to its ports in the Black Sea, as Türkiye adheres to the Montreux Convention, which prohibits Russian military vessels from passing through the Bosporus and Dardanelles straits. Given this, the Institute suggests that Moscow is likely to relocate the ships to its bases in the northwest of Russia and the Kaliningrad region.
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"The Russian evacuation of Tartus and the reported deployment of Africa Corps forces to Syria suggest that Russia is worried that Syrian opposition forces may advance southward to Hama (roughly 80 kilometers northeast of Tartus) and threaten the Tartus base but that the Russian military command will not deploy significant reinforcements to Syria in the near term to prevent such advances," the ISW report states.
