Put simply, Putin won because Obama was wrong. Washington underestimated the jihadi threat in Syria as it did elsewhere; Moscow had seen enough elsewhere and did not underestimate the threat. Obama’s liberal-leftist worldview required that Putin’s ‘conservative’ position opposed in word and deed. Therefore, Obama and other administration officials called Putin’s intervention in Syria aggression, imperialism, mistaken, and an inevitable quagmire. At the same time, they hoped to continue the flow of weapons to various rebel groups. However, Putin’s intervention, failures in Egypt and Libya, the Benghazi debacle, and disagreements between the administration and intelligence led to exposing the futility of Obama’s Muslim Brotherhood strategy (https://gordonhahn.com/2016/03/05/the-obama-administrations-muslim-brotherhood-strategy-and-the-war-against-jihadism-parts-1-and-2/). 

From the start the Obama neolib-necon narrative that at the root of the anti-Assad uprising was simply a peaceful expression of deep Syrian democratic aspirations proved a false one–just as did during Western regime change efforts in Iraq, Egypt, Libya and Ukraine. For example, a video footage of one of the very first anti-regime protests in Banyas near the port city of Tartus on March 18, 2011, for example, shows an imam listing protest demands to wild applause and religious chants that included gender-segregated schools and a requirement that women teachers wear the niqab, both banned by the secular Baathist Assad regime (www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_3DAEdf-lY&index=22&list=W). The opposition Syria’s village of Hula issued similar demands in 2011 and complained about the regime’s ban of the books of the medieval Islamic scholar and leading Salafi and jihadi source, Ibn Taimiyya (www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2011/10/20111023102856446977.html). In sum, the nascent Syrian revolutionary movement, like almost all such movements, was a conglomeration of ideologically antithetical and politically competing tendencies, with the Islamist and jihadist elements, especially the Muslim Brotherhood emigre leadership in Turkey, having at least as good a chance of coming out on top as any other. On the background of a Muslim world in the throes of Islamist and jihadist turmoil, the odds fell more in the Islamic radicals favor.

Worse than the narrative was the policy. These competing groups, rather than being melded into an effective united opposition front, were supplied with gargantuan amounts of weapons and other forms of support from the West and Arab world early on. Thus, outside support simply helped the originally peaceful Syrian opposition movement be quickly overcome by its violent elements, as occurred in Libya and Ukraine in 2013-2014, but with little hope of securing victory without an influx of foreign jihadi fighters. British diplomats report that already in spring 2011 there were armed clashes between armed opposition elements and the Syrian security forces and army; this long before the narrative of regime-shoots-peaceful demonstrators would ever be questioned. Brits report a “fierce gun battle” in spring 2011 just inside the northeastern Lebanese border with Syria between Syrian opposition elements, on the one hand, and the Syrian army and security police, on the other hand, were supposed to be using weapons against unarmed demonstrators. At the same time, an Al Jazeera camera crew showed the Brits footage it never would air taken near the north-eastern border of Lebanon that clearly showed armed men shooting at Syrian troops (www.independent.co.uk/voices/syria-civil-war-rebellion-isis-assad-western-intervention-arms-a7921526.html). The US’s and others’ smuggling of arms into Syria from Libya and elsewhere kept the rising tide of foreign and radicalized Syrian Islamist and jihadist fighters well-armed and equipped.

Putin’s intervention turned the tide. It exposed the West’s failure to confront AQ and ISIS in Syria and Iraq under Obama’s feckless leadership and misconceived strategy focused on the Muslim Brotherhood and other ‘moderate’ forces and providing them with covert arms supplies. It exposed Arab and especially Turkish cooperation with IS, JN, AS and other jihadi groups, including the notorious ISIS oil trade through Turkey. More importantly perhaps, its shored up an increasingly embattled Syrian army with strong air and long-range conventional missile support to drive IS and other jihadi groups out of Aleppo, Homs, Deir-ez-Zor, and soon in the jihadists’ last real stronghold in Idlib province.

The US failure to deal with the Syrian crisis effectively has led to defections among its allies. New French President Emmanuel Macron acknowledged the fait accompli facing the West in Syria as a result of Putin’s diplomatic and military demarche in Syria by abandoning the West’s ‘Assad must go’ policy. He stated that in Syria France has “We have one main goal, which is to eradicate terrorism. No matter who they are, we want to build an inclusive and sustainable political solution. Against that background, I do not require Assad’s departure. This is no longer a prerequisite for France to work on that” (https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/07/13/remarks-president-trump-and-president-macron-france-joint-press). London withdrew Britain’s military trainers from Syria last week who were there to prepare “70,000 rebels” who to overthrow the Assad government (www.independent.co.uk/voices/syrian-war-ending-bashar-al-assad-won-robert-fisk-syria-middle-east-israel-british-troops-a7933966.html). The US Trump Administration subsequently joined Moscow in setting up a ceasefire in the south along the Lebanese border with the hope of extending the cooperative practice across the country. US officials no longer call for Assad’s removal from power. There can be no clearer evidence that Putin has outmaneuvered Washington and the West in Syria than that."

https://gordonhahn.com/2017/09/14/who-got-syria-wrong-and-who-got-it-right/