Image via @SyriaCivilDef
Nine years into the civil war, Syria experienced its most serious upheaval of the entire war in the Idlib province. In December 2019, the regime stepped up its offensive on the last territories occupied by Turkish-sponsored rebels, displacing nearly one million people in three months of violence.
Drawing on heavy support from Russian forces and Hezbollah soldiers, the Assad regime secured one of the most important strategic points of the war, the M5 highway, better known as the Aleppo-Damascus highway. Khan Sheikhoun was the first major breakthrough, followed by Maaret al-Numan and Saraqeb as heavy fighting escalated between the Turkish, Syrian and Russian military and their paramilitary proxies.
After a Russian airstrike decimated an armoured column of the Turkish military, killing 33 and wounding over 60 soldiers, the Russian and Turkish presidents, Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, agreed to a ceasefire agreement in northwest Syria. The ceasefire agreement came after the Turkish government launched Operation Spring Shield in response to the death of its soldiers in the airstrike. The retaliatory offensive by Turkish aircraft and drones on Syria’s warplanes, and the relentless bombardment of Syrian military airbases, air-defence systems, factories, artillery, logistical equipment and supply lines by artillery and drones strikes across Idlib, Aleppo, Hama and Latakia brought President Assad’s army to a halt.
Eight months since the ceasefire came into effect, the world has changed irrevocably. The Covid-19 pandemic has swept the world, killing over one million people, including at least 50,000 in the Middle East. For Syrian men, women and children in refugee camps across the region and inside the country, the Covid-19 epidemic is one more challenge in a string of crises that internally placed persons and refugees face including the threat of malnutrition, biting U.S sanctions, water-borne diseases, and exposure to sub-zero temperatures.
In Idlib province, coined as “Gaza in Syria” by David Miliband, the CEO of the International Rescue Committee, there are signs that the ceasefire is unravelling after being suspended by the global spread of Covid-19. In June, August and September, over 50 Russian air raids and drone strikes were conducted throughout the besieged enclave. The series of airstrikes in September was the heaviest since the ceasefire came into effect, and joint patrols between Turkish and Russian forces began and in response to attacks on Assad’s forces and Russia’s airbase at Hmeymim.
According to rebel sources, Assad’s special forces have been conducting operations in Idlib while conventional forces stepped up shelling of Turkish observation posts dotted along the ceasefire line. In the past, this has drawn retaliation from the Turkish military. According to the Institute for the Study of War, the intensification of military activity by the Syrian Army and Russians could be a sign of an inbound offensive.
To stave off an offensive, the biggest rival of the Assad regime, Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham has been conducting operations against Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and is attempting to present itself as a moderate force in the province. According to Salafi-jihadist analyst, Orwa Ajjoub, anti-ISIS operations have run parallel to HTS’s attempts to eliminate the presence of Al-Qa’ida in Syria, represented predominantly by its affiliate Hurras Al-Din (HAD), and groups such as ‘So Be Steadfast’, Liwa al-Muqatileen al-Ansar and Tansiqyet al-Jihad. ‘In doing (these operations),’ the analyst notes for the Middle East Institute, ‘HTS has killed two birds with one stone: demarcating new redlines for its rivals and demonstrating its usefulness to its Turkish “partner” and the international community in their war on terrorism.’
By presenting itself as a moderate force and adopting ideological flexibility, the group has been able to survive under the leadership of Abu Mohammad Al-Jolani in juxtaposition to his former counter-part Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi who was killed in 2019 by U.S Special Forces in Idlib province (perhaps the biggest scalp in the anti-ISIS operations thus far in Idlib).
In exchange for stamping out the influence of its more extremist cells and rivals such as ISIS, HAD and SBS and offering support in operations against Kurdish forces, HTS has become a useful asset in stabilising the region for Turkey and Russia. The result, as noted by the jihadist analyst, Hassan Hassan, could strengthen the group in the long-term. ‘The new jihadists will not focus on exporting violence to the West,’ he wrote in an article for The Atlantic. ‘Instead they will focus instead on infiltrating local communities and building influence. The future extremist landscape could be dominated by Hezbollah-like Sunni jihadist groups, ones that have the determination to fight a long war, but are grounded in local struggles.’
Whether Turkey and its proxy HTS can keep control of the Salafi-jihadist extremists who regard the Assad regime, Russians and Turkish forces as ‘infidels’ and ISIS - who remains a force to reckoned with in other provinces in Syria and neighbouring Iraq - is still subject to debate. Different groups continue to pepper Turkish and Russian joint-patrols with hit-and-run attacks around Idlib and harass Assad’s forces along the ceasefire line in an effort to undermine the Sochi Agreement. On 22nd September, Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, stated that joint-patrols would be suspended until these attacks on Russian soldiers were halted by Turkey who holds the most influence over HTS and its splinter groups.
If the attacks by these hardline groups opposed to the Sochi Agreement intensify, it provides Assad and Putin with the justifications to step up its military activities in Idlib. With Turkey bogged down in military conflicts in Libya and Nagorno-Karabakh region, and using its Syrian fighters from the ‘Syrian National Army’ - an umbrella for groups such as Sultan Murad, Suleiman Shah and Al Hamza - to implement its foreign policy in these new conflicts, Erdoğan will have little appetite for another round of war with Putin and Assad in Syria.
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, over 16,500 pro-Turkish Syrian paramilitary fighters are in Libya while in Azerbaijan an estimated 1,000 Syrian paramilitary fighters were reported by The Guardian to have been deployed in the war against the Armenians in the Caucasus. The resumption of full-blown civil war in north-east Syria would intensify the rivalry with Russia in all three theatres of war with both powers supporting opposing forces in the Libyan and Syrian conflicts.
With the second civil war in Libya escalating and old-wounds in the Nagorno-Karabakh region exploding into open war again between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and the involvement of Syrian paramilitaries in both conflicts, Russia and Turkey could find themselves at odds once more in Syria. As NPR noted in a news report on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, Moscow has monitored Turkish moves in the Caucasus with growing alarm describing the movement of Syrian paramilitaries to the war-zone as “extremely dangerous”, particularly as Russia has a military pact with Armenia and Turkey have close military, diplomatic and religious ties with Azerbaijan.
While Putin and Erdoğan should be able to contain these differences between Turkey and Russia directly in Libya and Nagorno-Karabakh, exporting rivalries contained to Syria’s civil war abroad could have deadly consequences in Idlib.
With the city and its sprawling displacement camps already ravaged by Covid-19, malnutrition rife and three-quarters of the three million civilians in the province in need of humanitarian assistance, an escalation in the conflict between the Assad regime, Putin and the Turkish military would be a disaster for the wider Middle East and fan international crises in North Africa and the Caucasus. The threat of the ongoing skirmishes in Idlib exploding into all-out war again remains very real and with Syria on the brink of starvation already, renewed conflict will heap further misery on the destroyed country.