The worst may be yet to come for Syria and the region

Since the military influence of Syrian leader Bashar Assad and his regime in the country has sharply eroded in 2015, Russia has decided to join the war. Starting after the fall of northern towns such as Jisr al-Shughour, Assad's forces had to face many setbacks against opposition fighters. The Assad regime still controls most of Damascus and most of the western part of the country, but at the end of the summer he announced that his army had been struggling to maintain control amid a lack of manpower and his troops in northwestern Syria have been pulling back to a defensive line around his Alawite homeland.

Russia has been motivated by Assad's biggest ally, Iran, which has been playing a critical role for the Assad regime since the start of the conflict in 2011. "The Iranians told the Russians bluntly, if you don't intervene, Bashar Assad will fall, and we are not in a position to keep propping him up," a Damascus-based diplomat said, according to The Guardian. Following the start of Russian airstrikes targeting mostly non-Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) areas in northern Syria held by opposition groups like Jays al-Fateh (the Army of Conquest) or the Free Syrian Army (FSA), Assad told the Iranian Khabar TV network: "The alliance between Russia, Syria, Iraq and Iran must succeed or else the whole region will be destroyed. The chances of success for this coalition are great."

The active presence of Russian military forces in Syria is undoubtedly a major turning point, which is not only a game changer in Syria, but also a new form of coercion going far beyond the situation in the country. As an indication of that, a Russian warplane violated Turkish airspace on Saturday and another on Sunday, prompting Ankara to summon the Russian ambassador. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said yesterday that Russia's violation of Turkish airspace did not look like an accident, as Russia claimed, while both NATO and the U.S. denounced the two violations as unacceptable.

I cannot help but think how they did not see it coming. Last month, satellite imagery confirmed that an enormous amount of Russian tanks, armored personnel carriers, helicopters and other military equipment had been carried to an airbase in Syria's Latakia province on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, indicating that something big was about to happen. However, the West, and especially the U.S. administration, chose to remain silent and seemed bewildered. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Sept. 22 that the Russian equipment that arrived in Syria was there to protect Russian forces, and added: "We don't yet have clarity with respect to the Russian effort." After his meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Sept. 27, the State Department stated: "Again, we're just at the beginning of trying to understand what the Russians' intentions are in Syria and Iraq, and trying to see if there are mutually beneficial ways forward here." But understanding the Kremlin's intentions was not really very hard at all.

While the number of Russian warplanes has been increasing in the skies over Syria, the Pentagon said last week that the Patriot anti-ballistic missile systems deployed in Turkey since 2013 to guard against possible air and missile threats from Syria would be removed in October as planned, despite the ongoing crisis across the border. The U.S. and Germany decided to withdraw their patriot missiles in August, explaining their actions by saying the structure of threats to Turkey from Syria changed and the Assad regime was no longer a threat to Turkey. The Syrian army shot down a Turkish RF-4 jet in June, violating Turkish airspace in June 2012, and killed five Turkish civilians in artillery fire in October that year in intense regime attacks against opposition forces in northern Syria. In response to Turkey's request, NATO launched the Active Fence mission for Turkey's air and ballistic missile defense. The U.S. and German patriot batteries in question were part of this mission. These systems have never been used since there had never been a direct air threat from Syria, but they have played an important deterrent role.

But now, after the game in Syria has changed once again and turned its face to northern Syria one more time, it is a mystery what NATO will do next. NATO can still use a Spanish missile battery that has been deployed in Adana in the south of Turkey close to the Syrian border, but Russia's growing presence after other NATO countries' decision of withdrawing the patriot missiles with the thought of the Assad regime's being no longer a threat to Turkey shows that NATO, wittingly or unwittingly, continues to misread the situation in the region.According to some, the situation in Syria would have to get worse before it gets better. I think the worst is yet to come.