The war has indeed caused substantial damage but not to terrorists. Civilians have borne the brunt of the devastation; 600 of them were killed and 120,000 of them scattered internally or externally throughout the provinces of Idlib, Hama, and Aleppo during a late-October offensive, designed only to shore up the Assad regime’s weakening frontline positions and regain lost ground. That push was then dwarfed by a late February escalation during which, by the Russia’s defense ministry’s own admission, some 900 bombs were dropped within the space of 72 hours in Aleppo, where Iranian proxies have been able to encircle the opposition’s longest-held geo-strategic terrain and cut their supply lines. Seventy thousand Syrian refugees, Turkish prime minister Ahmet Davutoglu said, consequently fled from the Aleppo countryside to the Turkish border. Wild guess, but perhaps the reason that NATO Supreme Allied Commander Philip Breedlove recently accused Russia of “weaponizing” Syria’s worsening refugee crisis is that it has made more Syrian refugees to overwhelm NATO.

Also pulverized during the last half year have been the barracks, weapons depots, and soldiers of the Free Syrian Army, including 31 factions that have been fitfully armed and supported by the Central Intelligence Agency. True, some of these groups have even taken out one or two Russian officers, using American-supplied TOW anti-tank missiles, no less. But the dirty war in Ukraine has demonstrated that Putin’s tolerance for absorbing plausibly deniable fatalities in murky foreign adventures is much higher than what U.S. spooks intend, or are authorized to inflict on his army in Syria. One doesn’t have to believe Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu’s exaggerated claim that Russia has won back 10,000 square kilometers for Damascus to know that the rebels have taken a beating from the Russians, especially in their citadel of Aleppo.

The same cannot be said for ISIS, the putative enemy of Moscow. It’s only been struck between 10 to 20 percent of the time, say U.S. officials, a fact even remarked upon in grimly hilarious fashion by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s own media department. In the November issue of its propaganda rag Dabiq, ISIS took lurid pleasure in the spectacle of the “drunken brown bear… savagely but clumsily” bombing everywhere but where ISIS had a significant presence, typically the “Sahwah allies of America.” (Sahwah means “awakening” in Arabic, as in the al-Anbar kind that defeated ISIS’s predecessor, al Qaeda in Iraq.) How strange that ISIS doesn’t seem to think Russia has been going after ISIS.