Syria 2025

 Another of Johns modern polmil matrix games, this time covering what happens in Syria after the overthrow of the Assad regime. John had sent out comprehensive briefings which included a veritable alphabet soup of the various factions involved. Fortunately I was cast as the USA, and as we were playing week long turns starting the week after the overthrow (so spanning the Inauguration) , I managed to get to play both President Biden and President Trump.

As ever with remote committee games, there isn't much eye candy I'm afraid. This is what I spent two evenings looking at. Glad I have my extra monitor. We had a lot of players for this one (eight? nine? I lost track in the chaos).

I had two mandatory objectives, which were fairly obvious. 

1. Establish a stable non sectarian government which didn't include any terrorists (particularly IS).

2. Ensure the Russians don't retain any bases in Syria

3. One of my choice, which I elected to be "No further expansion in the US ground presence"

In playing the game I also seemed to adopt three extra unofficial objectives of saving the Kurds, smashing IS all on my own and preventing another civil war breaking out. Team America, World Police. yay. That probably made my job harder than it needed to be.

The other players obviously had their own objectives, some of which harmonised with mine, some of which were in conflict. Figuring those out and trying to thwart them is one of the joys of this sort of thing.

John provided some useful maps, as well as extensive briefings on the various factions, their aims, motivations, who their foreign supporters are, who they dislike etc. as well as the global and regional powers with their fingers in the conflict.

This was the most useful map as it showed, as far as we know, the areas controlled by the various factions. As you can see, the Kurds control more of Syria than HTS do, much to the fury of Turkey. The main US base is that blue semi circle at the bottom, but there are other bases scattered around, particularly in the SDF area in the northeast. The Russian air and naval bases are in the northwest in that enclave around the coast in the HTS controlled area.

The regional map formed the basis for the game control board, which kept track of which factions were in government, who was in conflict, whether a state of Civil War existed and the current IS threat level.

This was the situation after six weeks of play (game time), just HTS and the Druze are in the government, the evil Turks having just pulled off a stunning coup by invading northern Syria and forcing the YPG (the main Kurdish faction) out of government.

I won't do a blow by blow account, but along with bashing IS (no-one else seemed remotely interested) I did support the gradual expansion of the coalition government and managed a great diplomatic coup to terminate the leases on the Russian bases. The Turks and Russians ran around like bulls in a china shop however, as Erdogan released his army on a deliberate programme of terror against the Kurds with Russian(!) air support, while the Russians flew in Spetznaz units and fortified their bases. President Trump had a very direct phone call with President Erdogan to get him to wind his neck in, and the Ukrainians took advantage of the Russian pre-occupation with Syria to resume offensive operations in the Kursk oblast.

There was so much going on it was like playing whack-a-mole. In end, and much to everyones astonishment, we did have a fairly stable coalition government in Syria (mainly thanks to the diplomatic skills of John B) and they had even managed to eject the Russians from their bases. IS was back in its box and the US was able to start reductions in troop levels, the only dark clouds on the horizon was that the Alawites refused to participate in the coalition despite repeated efforts, and the Kurds had not obtained any degree of regional autonomy via federalisataion.

That was a really good game on an incredibly complex and confusing subject, and excellent primer on modern Syria, and a good model of the exteme diffculties of decision making and policy implementation in the region. At one point I did just think of washing my hands of the whole sorry mess, but it actually turned out OK in the end, thanks to the sensible leadership of HTS. I suspect the game outcome is somewhere towards the extreme end of likely favourable outcomes, but fingers crossed.

One bright idea which noone came up with was for the US to simply buy Syria, evict the occupants, and create a 'US Riviera on the Mediterranean'. Well, perhaps that is for a future game.