Losing the Syrian war

Syria is a tinderbox of multiple confrontations, each with the potential to overrun the country’s borders just as millions of refugees have already done. Sparks flew in the north-western Idlib region late last month when a Syrian government airstrike killed 36 Turkish soldiers, the deadliest attack on Turkey’s troops in over two decades. Ankara retaliated with drone and artillery strikes, killing over a hundred soldiers and allied militiamen, destroying military assets and downing two Syrian fighter jets.

With Russia propping up the Syrian government of Bashar Al-Assad, and Turkey backing opposition forces, the escalation risked drawing the two into direct conflict — the threat real enough to bring Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdoğan face to face in Moscow.

A six-hour summit at the Kremlin achieved a ceasefire, which began at a minute past midnight last Friday morning. A security corridor was established, and joint Russian-Turkish patrols commenced on March 15. Assad was not a party to the talks.

“We do not always agree with our Turkish partners in our assessments of what is happening in Syria, but each time at critical moments, relying on the achieved high level of bilateral relations, we have thus far managed to find common ground on the disputed issues that have arisen, and come to acceptable solutions,” Putin said with Erdoğan at his side.

In the Sochi accord between Russia and Turkey regarding Idlib in September 2018, the nations agreed to demilitarise Idlib, seeking to expel hardline jihadists (as opposed to moderate rebels), while also forcing mainstream military to remove heavy weapons, such as tanks, mortars and artillery.

The deal held to an extent until last December, when the Syrian government launched a new offensive, with both Assad and Russia claiming that Ankara had failed to separate the moderate rebels from the jihadists, and that the latter remained in the region. Nearly a million civilians fled instead, adding to the 3.6 million already in Turkey.

The sides have traded assaults in 2020, with those killed including four members of the Russian Special Forces. Along with a further troop build-up in Idlib, Erdoğan also antagonised Putin with a visit to Ukraine and a pledge of $200 million in military aid. February’s escalation was to follow.

For now, there is quiet — a chance to provide humanitarian aid to those on the ground, to ease a refugee crisis that has circled the globe, and perhaps to find a lasting solution to the conflict.

Turkey has been involved in Syria, to varying degrees, since the outbreak of the civil war in 2011, both providing support and training to the opposition and the Free Syrian Army and also with direct military action and occupation of parts of the north.

Until mid-2018, the Syrian government had been fighting on multiple fronts, but with Isis effectively defeated to the east by the efforts of its army and the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces in 2017, and the rebels defeated in the southwest the following year, Assad could turn his attention to Idlib — where tens of thousands of rebels had been transported, and several jihadist factions remained.

It is the last opposition stronghold in Syria. Capturing it would allow Damascus to claim victory and end a nine-year civil war that has killed more than 400,000 people, mostly civilians. In addition to Russian troops, Assad is backed on the ground by Hezbollah, and Iranian-trained Afghan and Pakistani soldiers. Reinforcements are en route.

Turkey has several reasons for pursuing control in Idlib. Assad’s advances have forced millions of refugees across the border. Erdoğan has sought to use this tragic flood of humanity to pressure Europe into lifting a 2016 commitment to halt the flow of migrants. The president is also determined to end autonomous Kurdish rule in northern Syria, which he believes supports the Kurds in south-eastern Turkey and would embolden them to seek similar freedoms. Finally, if Assad’s regime could be toppled and an Islamist government established in Syria, this would extend Erdoğan’s political influence in the Middle East.

But Russia won’t let that happen.

Syria was an ally of the Soviet Union, and Russia maintains both naval and air bases in the country as one of its last remaining outposts. Importantly, Syria has given Russia a foothold in the Middle East.

Putin has invested heavily in Assad’s success and needs him to recapture Idlib, even if this requires direct conflict with Turkey, though, as demonstrated again in Moscow, both sides will strive to avoid it. Russia would ultimately prefer Turkey as an ally, helping achieve his goal of dividing Nato, but, since Putin intervened in fighting five years ago, they have been on opposite sides of the conflict.

If the talks could have a loser, it was the absent Assad, who now seems entirely dependent on Russia for survival. For both the government and the people, whoever ends up winning this conflict, Syria will lose.

According to the United Nations humanitarian office, five million Syrians have escaped the conflict, six million others are internally displaced, and over 13 million are in need of assistance.

“How would you even start to put this country back together,” Ardil Mohammed, in hiding with his family near the border, said in the Guardian. “Everyone around me comes from somewhere else. No one has a home anymore.”

After a two-day visit, the World Food Program Executive Director David Beasley echoed the sentiment: “Children across Syria are enduring the impact of a merciless war and will continue to suffer long after the guns have gone silent. Schools and hospitals have been bombed, families have been torn apart and young lives have been lost.”