Rebuking the "no-fly" zone myth over syria

by Andrew Korybko

With much speculation – not to say hysteria – currently in the alt media that Russia has mishandled the situation in Syria, that the US is pushing to shoot down a Russian jet because they “know” Russia will not respond, or that Turkey is playing both sides to its own advantage, Korybko offers, in this brief piece, a different perspective that may not be receiving enough attention right now.

Time will tell which perspective has the most validity of course, but many of the pundits who excoriated Russia’s refusal to engage militarily in Ukraine as an abject weakness and failure are now describing the situation in Syria in similar language. They were proved entirely wrong in the first instance, so they may well proved wrong again here.

There is no formal “no fly” zone in Syria because that requires:

• a) “grounding” the targeted air force by bombing their on-the-ground positions (hangers) like they did Libya and Iraq;
• b) exercising continual air dominance over the targeted area with regular patrols;
• c) and proceeding to destroy all “enemy” ground units in the zone of operations, none of which has occurred because:
• 1) the Russian Aerospace Forces still have full dominance over the skies;
• 2) neither the Russian nor Syrian air force units on the ground in Syria have been targeted;
• 3) and the SAA is still in Hasakah and Deir Ez Zor.

The so-called “no-fly” zone would also infer that both Damascus and Moscow have ceded this portion of the country to the US, which also hasn’t happened in the manner that Iraq did with the northern Kurdish region in the past.
Yes, there are sensitive de-escalatory steps being taken, but no, I don’t believe that there is any “no-fly” zone in place such as the ones previously imposed over Bosnia, Northern Iraq, and Libya.

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