In this image captured from video, smoke rises after air strikes, purportedly by Russian jets, in Talbisah in western Syria on Wednesday.Homs Media Centre/The Associated Press
It is somewhat telling that one of the first images of the Russian bombardment of Syria had nothing to do with Syria.
Shortly after Russian planes began bombing the war-battered country, several Middle Eastern commentators and activists (some of them directly or indirectly affiliated with the Islamic State) began circulating a picture of Russian priests "blessing" a fighter jet on the runway.
"Orthodox priests bless a Russian plane before the holy war in Syria," one widely followed Islamist wrote.
In fact, the picture is a year old, taken during Russia's Crimean engagement. But its propaganda value quickly proved too good to pass up – used by supporters of the Islamic State as proof that Russia's bombing constitutes not only an attempt to keep the current Syrian regime in power, but the beginning of a new Crusade.
Besides hard-line supporters of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad – for whom Russia is the single most important international benefactor – it's difficult to find many observers within Syria or the Middle East who see Russia's new military involvement as a positive development. For Islamists, liberals and myriad Syrian opposition figures, Russian air strikes appear as proof that the current war, bloody as it has been, will soon enter an even more intractable phase.
"Russia's increased military involvement in Syria will result in prolonging Syria's civil war, additional difficulties in the already faltering war against ISIL, bringing the non-ISIL opposition closer to ISIL and a substantial increase in regional tension," noted prominent Syrian activist and researcher Samir Altaqi, who runs the Orient Research Centre, using another term for Islamic State.
"Russia, a harsh [critic] of U.S. interventionist policy in the Middle East, is now implementing its own interventionist policy."
Russia has framed its air strikes as being aimed directly at the Islamic State. However, it didn't take long for members of various opposition factions – some of them considered moderate and supported by the United States – to claim that Russia was targeting them, not the terrorist organization.
Shortly after the Russian air strikes began, residents and reporters throughout Syria claimed the strikes were taking place in parts of the country that had essentially no Islamic State presence. Images of injured children and ruined buildings began to emerge from the northwestern Syrian town of Talbisah – which appears to have suffered some of the heaviest damage so far. However, Talbisah, located in the Homs Governorate, is an area where rebel groups opposed to both the Islamic State and the Assad regime hold considerable sway.
Indeed, according to the Institute for the Study of War, not a single Russian air strike has hit any known Islamic State territory – the nearest such territory is more than 50 kilometres away from any Russian bombardment site.
"All of the areas hit by Russian air strikes today were free of ISIL," said Khaled Khoja, president of the Syrian National Coalition. Mr. Khoja also claimed the strikes killed 36 civilians.
The Russian government has so far dismissed any criticism of its bombing as propaganda. But the military incursion appears to have achieved a rare feat – in opposing it, both Syria's most radical and most moderate groups find common ground.
For Syria's rebel and opposition groups, the Russian bombings are evidence of Moscow's concern only with propping up Mr. al-Assad, rather than fighting the Islamic State. And for the Islamic State, the bombings play into an alluring narrative – one in which the terrorist group finds itself at war with an infidel empire, with the future of the caliphate at stake.
It is, in many ways, a familiar narrative – one used by a previous generation of mujahedeen against the same foreign invader, some 30 years ago.
"The assumption that ISIL and the non-ISILwill fight each other … may prove self-deceptive," Mr. Altaqi noted. "Lessons of … the Russian occupation of Afghanistan seem to have been forgotten."