Turkish army soldiers take position as they search for explosive ordnances to dispose after Turkish army and Free Syrian Army (FSA) forces captured Mount Bursaya as part of the "Operation Olive Branch" in Afrin, Syria on February 13, 2018.
Cars and trucks weighed down by luggage clog the highways out of the besieged Idlib province. Many of the people now on the move in northwest Syria have taken flight multiple times already throughout the long war.
Entire homes have been packed away onto muck spattered vehicles, tucked away beneath the white and blue waterproof tarpaulin. Vehicles sag under people, overflowing with men, women and children perched atop trucks or hastily jammed into the backseats of cars. The rubble-strewn streets and the roads riddled with potholes are a disorganised mass of people, rubbish, mud and belongings as the nine-year war’s largest exodus unfolds.
“It's the worst ever since the crisis started,” said Alaa Aldin Al-Rifaai, an aid worker working in Idlib. “People can't find places to stay after leaving their homes due to the latest security situation. There is no place to go, no path to escape the country even by smuggling routes. The needs are far too big and charities do not have the capacity to respond.”
The olive plains and frost-bitten slopes of northwest Syria have been transformed into sprawls, an assemble of dank, hastily erected tents and windswept islets in the ice and reddish-brown mud. Families wrapped in blankets, wearing an assortment of anoraks, woolly hats and scarfs huddle to stay warm in the sodden camps sinking into the ground. Satellite images of the Syrian opposition’s last territory show how the camps have swelled as civilians - who have become refugees in their own country - flee.
Those without shelter hide away from inhospitable conditions in olive groves, under trees behind walls and rocky plateaus to stay warm in the frost. Some families resort to burning trash to stay warm and cook food. Some have fled with only the clothes on their back while others camp out in the open sitting on mattresses and carpets with makeshift tents and rugs laid out as parents try to protect their children from the weather.
The threat of malnutrition and disease is a daily threat in the sub-zero temperatures. Some families, and their children, are already freezing to death as they wait to return to homes which are being plundered, filled with new owners or destroyed by bombardment.
In record numbers, Syrian families escape, they wait, and they get away from the shadow of violence. Even in escape, the ever-present risk of being struck by Assad and Putin’s murderous air raids lingers over civilians.
Syria’s future is clouded by uncertainty, and regional power games have only intensified the conflict’s irresolution. The deterioration of an already catastrophic humanitarian crisis in the northwest as Syria, Turkey and Russia’s respective governments wrangle to contain an open war between Damascus and Ankara has typified Syria’s nine-year civil war and the string of international crises it has spawned.
Underlying tensions which have existed between Syria, Turkey, Russia, and to some extent Iran, are coming to the fore as the Assad regime advances on Idlib. Each faction is a tectonic plate, regularly grinding against each other interests in Syria. Sometimes their geopolitics are aligned, at other points, they diverge down different paths. As with tectonic plates, these actors can be either predictable or volatile. One unexpected lurch can upend the status quo, the direction of the civil war, and the international conflict.
The humanitarian catastrophe in northwest Syria has been a crisis unfolding in slow-motion since the end of operations in Eastern Ghouta in early 2018. The catalyst which has sparked the largest movement of refugees since the beginning of the war, anticipated by international analysts and media, arrived after the Syrian army stepped up its military offensive in Idlib province in December.
The resulting conflict between President Bashar Assad and rebels has placed the regime, and its allies Russia and Iran in direct conflict with President Recep Erdoğan’s Turkey whose proxies such as the Syrian National Army (NA) and National Front for Liberation (NFL) comprise a significant proportion of remaining rebel forces fighting the Assad regime in Idlib province. The presence of Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham inside Idlib province, their successes in dominating the remaining factions in conflict with the Assad regime, Iran and Russian army, and the failure of Turkey to reign in their proxies has served as a pretext for the military operations displacing hundreds of thousands of civilians.
As ever with Assad’s circle, it is a zero-sum game. The consequences of this zero-sum game ignited a direct conflict between Turkey and Syria. At worst the crisis in Idlib has threatened to spark a Russo-Turkish War, a phenomenon not witnessed since the First World War. As a member of North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), and with the second-largest military in NATO, the stakes of conflict in Idlib, and the war in Syria are being ratcheted up to dangerous levels while stoking an international crisis between the Western powers and Russia.
THE LONG WAR FOR SYRIA
The Syrian Revolution came on a wave of protests, revolutions and conflicts which swept the the Middle East and North Africa in 2010. Twenty-one countries have been impacted by civil disobedience and protests while four fell into violent civil wars (Syria, Yemen, Iraq and Libya). Countries bordering these war-zones have experienced significant violence, and each civil war has resulted in an international intervention in the conflict or regional powers using allies on the ground to fight by proxy.
From the outset, the response of Assad’s regime to the protests in Syria was bloody. Bullets, truncheons and tanks were the reply to demands for reforms in governance and to address the toxic mixture of corruption and impunity which lay at the foundations of government and the Assad circle. Misrule had seeped into Syrian society. Families were dependent on the government’s good-will and complex networks of bribery to survive. “It took the Assad regime over four decades to implant their system of corruption and bribery. It’s embedded in the blood of people in Syria. Nothing moves, no documents get signed, you can’t do anything in Syria, until you pay money to someone - that is the norm,” said Thaier Al-Hussein, a doctor from Raqqa who was forced to flee Syria. “You can’t change that system overnight. People are making a living from this status quo and have too much to lose from the regime falling.”
As protests spread across the country, thousands disappeared into Assad’s dungeons, and rebellious districts such as Baba Amr in Homs, Yarmouk, Eastern Ghouta, Madaya and East Aleppo were placed under siege by the military. Hospitals, schools, nurseries, civilian homes, markets, playgrounds, humanitarian aid, food and water supplies, and UNESCO World Heritage Sites have all been targeted by Assad’s war machine.
As fighting intensified regional and international powers have been drawn into the fray, confronting each other through local proxies and non-state actors or directly. President Assad has survived after being propped up by Iran and Russia while Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Turkey have channeled weapons and logistical support into rebel groups. Different political groups in Lebanon have either supported the rebels or fought on the side of President Assad.
To further complicate the conflict, the Western powers have been aligned with the Syrian Kurds in the war against Islamic State led by Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, and have intervened several times against Assad regime throughout the conflict, though with little affect on the civil war’s outcome. Turkey regard the Syrian Kurdish political and military groups the United States have supported as terrorists who threaten the territorial integrity of the Turkish state. What started as a protest against a dictator in 2010 has mutated into an international conflict where Syria has become a battleground for wider rivalries.
Flagrant war crimes and crimes against humanity have been committed by the Assad regime. Rebel factions have also contributed significantly to this carnage and committed war crimes, including jihadists fighting in the insurgency. However, by 2015 it was clear that 85 - 90 per cent of casualties had been caused by pro-government forces including the Syrian army, Iranian Qud Forces, Russian air-power and the assortment of paramilitaries and militias at their disposal. The consequences of Syria’s war have spawned a catastrophe with half a million estimated dead, millions more wounded and psychologically traumatised, and half of the country’s population now internally displaced or refugees.
As Syria is ravaged by civil war, the Arab Revolutions have continued unabated for a decade. Gaza, Iraq, Lebanon, Iran, Yemen, Egypt and Algeria have all seen civil disobedience, police and military crackdowns and brutal violence being meted out on protesters in 2019 and 2020. Syria remains the eye of the storm. ‘Syria is a suppurating wound that will not heal, the Syrian civil war continues to bleed lives, and draw in neighbours and allies involved in their own proxy battles,’ wrote Nesrine Malik, a columnist for The Guardian. ‘Each day seems to bring a fresh hell…a rebuke to all those who think that in the Arab world there is another way of politics that doesn’t involve strongmen.’
AN UNDECLARED WAR: THE SYRIAN-TURKISH CONFLICT
The roots of an open war between Syria and Turkey were planted by Damascus’s zero-sum game with Syria’s opposition and the development of Ankara’s long-term support for Syria’s rebellion. Initially, President Erdoğan was unwilling to back Syria’s budding opposition in 2011. In her book, Erdoğan Rising, Hannah Lucinda Smith, a journalist based in Istanbul wrote that while the president of Turkey saw immense opportunities at the outbreak of the Arab Revolutions in 2011, he was hesitant to place himself in the anti-Assad camp.
Erdogan and his wife, Emine, had holidayed with the Assads in the fashionable Turkish resort of Bodrum in 2008, three years before the revolt. Trade ties between the two countries flourished… Assad was his neighbour and professed friend.
As the Assad circle began to kill more and more activists and protesters in 2011, the Obama administration increased pressure on its European and Middle Eastern allies to sever all links with the regime. Egypt and Bahrain were facing mass protests, and the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarek had been deposed in a coup. Overnight, U.S interests in the region had been upturned, and aside from the Gulf States, Turkey remained one of the most reliable allies in a turbulent region. Eventually, Turkey abandoned Assad after several attempts by President Erdoğan and his foreign policy advisor, Ahmet Davutoglu to persuade the Syrian president to curb his crackdown.
They joined the ranks of the international community telling Assad to step aside. With authoritarian leaders across the region being forced from power, and ‘Islamist parties increasingly dominating the opposition (in Libya, Syria, Iraq and Egypt), Erdogan saw that he could grab an even bigger role for himself in the region.’ In the case of Assad, Erdogan believed the regime in Syria was finished, believing ‘the issue would be resolved in six months.’ He turned out to be wrong, and the Turkish government was perplexed to find that the U.S strategy for Syria’s revolution - fast mutating into civil war - did not exist.
At the time, U.S were withdrawing from Iraq, and President Obama made his intentions clear. “After nearly nine years, America’s war in Iraq will be over,” Obama said to a press conference. “The rest of our troops will come home by the end of the year.” Drained in blood and treasure by the disastrous Iraq War, the U.S public were sick of war in the Middle East, and the Obama administration was handing the reins over to its regional allies. Erdogan’s government was a key pillar in this shift in U.S policymaking. Regional allies such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and Jordan were expected to the lead in Syria’s brewing crisis.
The northwest of Syria, and Turkey’s southern border stretching 822 kilometres with the war-torn country, has been at the forefront of several international crises, and battles, in the Syrian Civil War. The Turkish border served as an escape route for men, women and children fleeing the country, and for activists and soldiers looking for temporary safe houses to hide from the secret police and military intelligence. Refugee camps sprung up, many of which hugged the Turkish border. Millions of Syrian refugees were in Turkey by 2012. During the fledgeling insurgency, the border served as an important supply line for insurgents in need of weapons and supplies and for foreign fighters entering the country to fill the ranks of rebel groups.
In March 2012, the first serious attempt to centralise and coordinate the arming of the rebels took place in Ankara at the Marriot Hotel, where the Qataris and Saudis were vetting the Syrian factions lined up against President Assad. Leaders of armed factions in Syria ‘were flown into Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport from southern Turkey and chauffeur-driven to a seaside resort, the Renaissance Polat, for a three-day meeting to organise a unified rebellion.’ Okab Sakr, a young Lebanese politician closely tied to the Lebanese President Saad Hariri and the Future Movement, Hezbollah’s political rival, organised the meeting which was overseen ‘by an Arabic-speaking Turk in his thirties from the MIT, Turkey’s National Intelligence Agency.’ As detailed by journalist, Rania Abouzeid in No Turning Back, Sakr’s four contacts from the Syrian opposition - Abu Hasem, Bilal Attar, Abu Fadel and Abulhassan Abazeed - would form the Istanbul Room, ‘a secret clearinghouse for distributing arms and ammunition’ into anti-Assad forces.
The FSA worked closely with MIT, the Turkish National Intelligence Agency. The Turks denied any role in arming or allowing other countries to arm Syrian rebels via Turkish territory, but that’s precisely what they did. Convoys of arms and ammunition, overseen by MIT routinely crossed the Turkish border into Atmeh in operations conducted by midnight and dawn.
Once the Assad regime lost control of the border, the process of funnelling weapons, refugees and foreign fighters to and from Syria became much simpler for MIT and Turkish forces patrolling southern Turkey. Jihadists operated in the open.
A person could walk through the formal crossings - even without a passport if it was a one way trip to Syria. Some illegal routes operated in full view of the Turkish military…foreign fighters were aided by Turkish policy that focused less on who went into Syria than who came out, and even then the policy was lax. The foreign fighters were easy to spot on domestic flights from Istanbul to southern Turkey…airports were jumping off points to different parts of Syria: Hatay was the gateway to Idlib and Latakia Provinces. Gaziantep led to Aleppo, and Sanliurfa was on the road to Raqqa.
MIT initially a facilitator for Sunni and Wahhabi powers and private sponsors keen to arm its patrons in the Syrian opposition, turned Turkey into a direct player with its own proxies. In 2015, a prosecutor and court testimonies from gendarmerie officers revealed that trucks carrying rocket parts, ammunition and semi-finished mortar shells were allegedly being accompanied by MIT officials. The weapons were destined for Hatay bordering Idlib province, which was partly controlled by Ahrar al-Sham, an Islamist group in Syria. The Turkish government denied arming Islamist rebel groups, with President Erdogan commenting that the intercepted trucks, while occupied by MIT officials, were carrying aid to Syrian Turkmen refugees in Syria. Speaking at an event in Washington, Ibrahim Kalin, Erdogan’s spokesman stated: “Turkey has never sent weapons to any group in Syria.”
Clearly, this was a lie, and years later Turkey dropped the act. This was predominantly motivated by several factors. The pressure was mounting on Turkey to shut the border with Syria as the Islamic State launched attacks across the world. After the devastating attacks in Paris in November 2015, a senior official of the Obama administration stating angrily “The game has changed. Enough is enough. The border needs to be sealed....This is an international threat, and it’s coming out of Syria and it is coming through Turkish territory.” The second objective of the operation was most likely Turkey’s primary objective: to deal with the Syrian Kurds who were forming a sub-statelet called Rojava. In August 2016, the Syrian National Army was formed during Operation Euphrates Shield, Erdogan’s first major intervention in the Syrian Civil War. As Orwa Ajjoub, an expert on Salafi-jihadism notes, the inclusion of these Islamist groups was practical.
Ankara’s decision to include local Syrian national factions in Euphrates Shield, however, was likely driven by three factors. First, most of these factions come from the middle and northern part of Syria; meaning their knowledge of the geography and relationship with local populations were valuable on the ground. Second, by assigning these factions to the front-lines of the battles against Kurdish fighters, the Turkish army’s losses in terms of troops were minimised.
The rebel groups which spearheaded the offensive, supported by Turkish tanks, included Al-Sham Legion, Al-Jabha al-Shamiya (The Levant Front), Ahrar al-Sham, Jaysh al-Tahrir, Al-Mutasim Brigade, the Salahaddin Brigade, the Hamza Division, and the Sultan Murad Division. It was a limited operation with 40 Turkish tanks and 380 soldiers taking part with the SNA which would become an umbrella for a vast array of anti-Assad fighting groups, extreme and moderate, with complex loyalties. This fighting force would take part in two major Turkish operations including Operation Olive Branch and Operation Spring of Peace in Erdogan’s war against the Kurds. This was followed by the formation of the National Front for Liberation in 2018 as the conflict in Idlib loomed. The threat this time was not the Syrian Kurds, which by now was on its knees in the build-up to Operation Spring of Peace, it was Syrian refugees.
Idlib, which hosts almost three million civilians, including internally displaced persons from different cities in the country. Should the Syrian Arab Army and Russian forces attack Idlib, Turkey will be their only destination. This is a concern that Ankara takes seriously. To secure Idlib, a new umbrella group of the non-jihadist Islamist armed factions in Idlib was formed with Turkey’s support under the name The National Liberation Front (NFL) in May 2018. The new platform included Turkey’s preferred faction, the al-Sham Legion, and another ten groups based in Idlib: The Free Army of Idlib, The First and the Second Coastal Brigades, The First Brigade, The Second Army, The Elite Army, The Victory Army, The Brigade of the Islamic Martyrs of Daria, The Brigade of Freedom, and the 23 Division.
In September 2018, an impending assault by the Assad government on Idlib (the final stronghold of the opposition after the fall of Eastern Ghouta) - supported by the Russian military who had intervened on Assad’s behalf in 2015 - was temporarily frozen after Putin and Erdogan hammered out the Sochi Agreement on 16th-17th September. The agreement decided by the leaders of Russia and Turkey at a bilateral summit in the Black Sea resort of Sochi demilitarised Idlib - including Western Aleppo and the Hama governorates - and the armies of Moscow and Ankara would enforce these zones of ‘de-escalation’.
Sochi placed political checks on the military conflict between President Assad’s government and the remaining rebel pockets by creating a demilitarised zone, 15-20km in depth. Russia reiterated within the memorandum that it would ‘take all necessary measures to ensure that military operations and attacks on Idlib (would) be avoided and the existing status quo maintained.’ Officials in the Free Syrian Army and the government welcomed the Sochi Agreement, withdrawing their heavy weapons including tanks and cannons from the zones drawn out by the Russian and Turkish officials. “The Idlib deal preserves lives of civilians and their direct targeting by the regime.” said Mustafa Sejari, a Free Syria Army (FSA) official, “It buries Assad’s dreams of imposing his full control over Syria.”
The Sochi Agreement remained precarious and there were signs it is beginning to unravel as infighting between the jihadist groups such as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, and other members of the Syrian opposition continued. On January, 29th, 2019, a dozen were killed and at-least thirty-five were wounded in Maarat al-Numan by artillery fire by the Syrian Army. This was the highest death toll in Idlib in months. A day earlier, a suicide bomber who had laced herself with explosives killed one person and wounded three more, targeting a council-run by an HTS-linked group.
Media outlets and non-governmental organisations began reporting on the deteriorating situation in the province. On the same day, Maarat al-Numan was attacked, The Times reported that the Syrian army ‘has been reinforcing itself since last summer with a view to what could be the last and biggest confrontation of the eight-year war.’ By February 2018, 40,000 civilians were displaced by armed conflict in Idlib. A further 200,000 were displaced from the city since the Sochi Agreement.
Human Rights Watch also documented the torture and arrests of activists by HTS. Medical personnel and journalists were murdered and kidnapped by HTS, gangs or Turkish-backed rebel groups. Richard Spencer described Idlib as the new Gaza, a place where corruption, terrorism and criminality are flourishing in ‘fenced and patrolled limbo land, cut off from the rest of Syria but without the means to pursue anything more than a kind of half-life.’ HTS’s exertion of control over Idlib with an estimated 10,000 - 20,000 fighters presented a problem to the Russians, as it clearly stipulates in the Sochi memorandum that Russia and Turkey had ‘reiterated their determination to combat terrorism in Syria in all forms and manifestations.’ In March, Syrian and Russian struck the heaviest air strikes in months. On 14th March 2019, the Russian Defence Ministry announced it had hit Idlib in coordination with Turkey in an effort to target weapons stores belonging to HTS. The response of the jihadist group was stubborn: “There is no solution against the Russian occupier, Assad’s forces and the Iranian militias except confrontation and confrontation only.”
Deescalation was clearly not happening. ‘The Turkish Army has deployed troops to 12 observation posts that encircle Idlib province. These posts were established between October 2017 and May 2018 under the Russia-sponsored Astana Process. Turkey was involved in both of them, but was more eager to destroy the YPG than deal with HTS in Idlib.’ Turkish patrols were lax in countering HTS, and soon they were found to actually be coordinating with them as Chatham House analysed in May 2019.
Turkey’s proxies, the SNA and NFL, weren’t as reliable, as likely to fight each other as they were the Assad regime and had differing objectives. HTS were unified, hunting down Islamic State fighters who were launching attacks on Turkey and had an influence on the ground. For HTS, Turkish patronage allowed them to dominate the opposition. For Assad and Putin, this was intolerable and strengthened narratives generated by the Russian state and the regime that terrorists ruled Idlib province with the tacit support of Turkey. Turkish forces began actively arming the SNA and NLF and by the end of 2019, in preparation for an attack and as shelling began, hundreds of thousands of refugees were on the move in Idlib.
THE FEBRUARY WAR
Assad’s forces, supported by Russian airpower pummelled the province, committing a string of war crimes, and successfully captured the town of Saraqib in February 2020, the ‘last bastion of the freedom’ in Syria. For President Assad, control over the M5 highway which connects the cities of Hama and Aleppo, and the M4 highway to Latakia and Aleppo, are strategically important. If viewed as a bargaining chip by Erdogan, the province could be leveraged not only for concessions regarding Spring of Peace but to ensure Turkish influence in any future political processes in Syria.
That same month, Crisis Group published a report warning that Assad’s offensive would not only spark a bloodbath and the worst humanitarian catastrophe of the war, it ‘would risk a serious confrontation between the regime and Russia, on one side, and Turkey, on the other.’ Several Syrian artillery attacks killed thirteen Turkish soldiers on 3rd February and 10th February. The Turkish army responded. After the first artillery attack on their observation post, 76 Syrian soldiers were allegedly killed in retaliatory Turkish attacks (although the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights put the casualties at 13). According to President Erdogan, 40 Syrian positions were hit in Idlib province.
In response to the second artillery attack, the Turkish government spokesman, Fahrettin Altun, wrote on Twitter: “Turkey retaliated against the attack to destroy all enemy targets and avenging our fallen troops.” In the space of three days, two Syrian helicopters were also brought down in western Aleppo and Saraqib by the NFL and Turkey while hundreds of tanks and armoured vehicles were dispatched to Idlib province.
On 20th February, two more soldiers were killed after an air raid on M60 Sabre tanks fighting with rebel forces against Assad’s soldiers. The tanks had been involved in an offensive to recapture Saraqib. Ahmed Rahhal, a cameraman for Sky News, identified to the media outlet that it was a Russian warplane which had killed the Turkish soldiers. “Observers said that Russian aircraft were in are in sky over Al-Nayrab and Qmenas,” Rahhal said from a safe house in Idlib. “Very soon after that, the explosion took place. The shelling was intensive and continuous and Russian drones were above us in the sky.”
The Syrian army had requested a Russian airstrike in response to a rebel offensive on Al-Nayrab, a village outside Saraqib which was being supported by Turkish artillery and fighters. The Turkish Defence Ministry declined to identify who had killed the soldiers that day but placed the blame on the Assad regime. In response, Turkey claimed that they had killed 50 regime soldiers in retaliatory strikes around Idlib. After the battle, the Turkish government began deploying TRG-300 Tiger missiles on the Syrian border. With 105 kilogram warheads, these missiles are designed to target artillery, radar sites and air defence systems.
On the morning of 27th February after fierce fighting, the NLF and SNA recaptured Saraqib. “Saraqeb has been liberated completely from Assad’s gangs,” said Mustafa, the NLF spokesperson. Russian aircraft in the skies, and Khmeimim base, were targeted by man-portable air-defense systems (MANPADs) from Turkish military outposts.
Celebrations were short-lived. News filtered through in the evening that an airstrike had hit a Turkish Army convoy at 17:00 between al-Bara and Balyun, three miles to the north of Kafr Nabl. According to Al-Masdar News, the convoy, which was comprised of a Turkish mechanised infantry battalion, was bombed while attempting to transport military and logistical equipment to its proxies. ‘The same jets (which) had launched intensive bombings of the SNA’ earlier in the day targeted the convoy with a series of strikes. ‘A first relatively light strike by Syrian SU-22s forced the convoy to stop,’ and further strikes ‘forced the soldiers to take shelter in roadside buildings’ Afterwards, Russian SU-34s struck the killing blow, ‘dropping KAB-1500L bombs.’ The roadside buildings stood no chance against bunker-buster bombs, and soldiers were buried beneath the rubble. 33 soldiers were killed, and 60 more were wounded, devastating the 400-man convoy.
The strike was intentional, not accidental. Moscow denied involvement, however, they were clear that Turkish soldiers ‘should not have been in the area’. Judging by the trajectory of events on 27th February where parts of Saraqib were captured by the NLF and the NA were under heavy bombardment from the same jets that pulverised the convoy, ‘the escalation appeared to be a deliberate, well-calculated move’ by the Russian military designed to send a message to Erdogan about the realities of who rules the air, and the consequences of escalating with Moscow.
With 33 soldiers reported dead, followed by another soldier’s death in an artillery barrage the following day, the Turkish army lashed out in the only way it could: targeting Russia’s allies. After sustaining the single biggest loss of life in their involvement in the conflict, Erdogan was under political pressure to retaliate. The Turkish army responded in full force, beginning Operation Spring Shield on 29th February with the aim of pushing pro-Assad forces back to the lines laid out in the Sochi Agreement. Assad took the flak for Russia.
The Syrian army, a skeleton filled by Iranian, Lebanese and Iraqi paramilitaries assembled by Qassem Suleimani - assassinated by the Trump administration in January - felt the force of Turkey’s response. Russian forces, who caused the majority of casualties in the air raid, did not. The Syrian army was described as “useless” by the deceased commander of the Iranian Quds forces, and the man instrumental in stabilising the Assad regime in the early days of the war. Regime forces in Idlib, re-purposed for asymmetrical warfare throughout the civil war, were shredded a mere two weeks after President Assad had claimed that his forces were “rubbing (rebel) noses in the dirt.”
Attacks by Turkish F-16s on Syria’s SU-24s, 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 Bashar Assad’s military to a halt. In response to the Syrian military’s imposition of a no-fly zone, Turkish jets swatted Syrian aircraft from the sky, a rebuke to the regime’s no-fly zone. Without Russian support, the Syrian Air Force was grounded. The downing of several Su-24MK2’s were the highest losses incurred by Assad’s air force since the civil war began.
Spring Shield blunted the Syrian army’s capabilities to continue a ground offensive briefly. Without air support, the regime could not move its forces. Hundreds of Syrian soldiers and foreign paramilitaries have been killed. According to Defense Minister Hulusi Akar, 2,200 Syrian soldiers, 103 tanks and eight helicopters were “neutralised”. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights estimated that the Syrian military had sustained 74 dead, although this number has increased since Spring Shield began. The Turkish army sustained 55 dead throughout the whole of February (60% of the deaths coming from the air attack which provoked Spring Shield) and lost several drones.
It may not be enough to stop Assad from capturing the most important points of the Idlib front line. Saraqib was recaptured by the regime and Hezbollah fighters with Russian air support, days after parts of the town were taken by the NLF (or SNA) just before the airstrike on Syrian soldiers. In the aftermath of the town’s recapture, Russian military police were deployed to Saraqib effectively signalling to Turkey that this contested town now belonged to the regime. The Turks responded, losing several more soldiers in the process.
“GAZA IN SYRIA”
A small mercy, activists and analysts argue, is that Operation Spring Shield is saving lives. “Every time a regime aircraft is destroyed, hundreds of Syrian lives are saved. There is no other way to look at it,” wrote freelance journalist, Oz Katerji. For years, the international community has looked on as the Syrian army and airforce has wrought death and havoc on the cities, towns and villages of Syria most notoriously using barrel bombs and chemical weapons to spread terror. Civilians have been massacred, and crimes against humanity have been committed with impunity by Assad’s forces. Sexual violence, torture and hunger have all been deployed to destroy Syria’s population.
After a decade of token airstrikes by the Western powers, and empty rhetoric, watching the Turkey roll back the Syrian army responsible for all these atrocities will be as satisfying to international policymakers and onlookers who have condemned Assad as it was for those who watched NATO neutralise Radko Mladic and Slobodan Milosevic’s armies in the Yugoslav Wars in 1995 and 1999. Milosevic, however, was not deposed militarily, he was removed by popular protests inside Serbia.
Similarly, the narratives swirling social media and some media outlets framing Operation Spring Shield as a humanitarian operation to save lives are not convincing, given the war crimes Turkey’s own proxies have already committed in the conflict while international onlookers have quickly forgotten the Turkish army’s use of phosphorous and the ethnic cleansing (which garnered widespread media and social media coverage in 2018 and 2019) that took place in Operation Olive Branch and Operation Spring of Peace under their watch. These operations were largely condemned by the Western powers, and sanctions, for a brief moment, were slapped on Turkey by the United States in 2019. Erdogan’s government regards the refugees as a domestic headache, less a humanitarian catastrophe.
It is frequently forgotten that while the Serbians conducted the majority of atrocities in the Yugoslav Wars, the Kosovar Albanians, the Croatians and Bosniaks committed war crimes throughout the decade-long conflict in the Balkans. Erdogan’s government has also regularly used the Syrian refugee crisis as a political weapon to blackmail the European Union and to reshape the demographics of northern Syria in Turkey’s favour. Turkey’s coordination with groups such as HTS and direct military support for the NA and NLF have also deeply engrained the Turkish military in the armed conflict.
Turkey’s mounting death toll is demonstrating the growing cost of its entrenchment in Syrian territory and occupation of parts of northern Syria. After a precarious ceasefire was put in place after discussions between Erdogan and Putin in Moscow on 5th March, Syria’s future stills remain uncertain. The political and military confrontation in Idlib is far from over.