At first blush, the coronavirus pandemic seems likely to corroborate the argument for deeper international cooperation to confront shared global challenges. But crises tend to intensify and accelerate preexisting trends – in this case, the rise of anti-globalist nativism.
There is certainly no shortage of writings on Turkey today regarding that country’s “drift” away from its Western orientation. Some who espouse this argument frame the consequences in terms of Turkey’s increased ties to China.[1] While Turkey itself has launched an “Asia Anew” policy,[2] the outsized focus on this and other alleged signs of Turkey’s “drift from the West” distracts from the very palpable effects of its adventurism in the Middle East, North Africa, and Eastern Mediterranean. Turkey’s increasingly reckless foreign policy is on full display — from weaponizing refugees to extort the European Union to exporting mercenary Jihadist fighters to Libya.[3] These are hardly the actions of a responsible regional power, much less a key member of the NATO alliance.
In early March, the already-tense atmosphere in Damascus’s central hospital grew darker and fear more pervasive. Rumors were circulating that hospitals were facing huge numbers of COVID-19 cases and patients infected by the virus were being liquidated.
Bottom Line Up Front:
The April agreement among major oil producers to reduce global oil production has failed to stabilize world oil prices.
Market stability will depend heavily on the abatement of the COVID-19 pandemic.
On Wednesday, Turkish and Russian forces conducted their fourth joint patrol of the Latakia-Aleppo international “M4” highway, following a confrontation two days earlier which saw Turkish military police shoot tear gas at crowds of Syrian civilians and fighters who gathered to protest the patrols in what they called a “sit-in for dignity.”
The Middle East is facing an unexpected turning point. The region will not look the same after COVID-19 as it did before it. Prior to the outbreak, the Middle East had managed to normalize the geostrategic implications of the Arab Spring. Tunisia transitioned to a fully functioning democracy, Egypt ended up with a strongman, Syria became a catastrophe, Jordan and Morocco enacted some reforms, while Algeria and Sudan are still struggling with transitions and Lebanon stands on the brink of economic collapse.
Clashes between rival Libyan forces for control of the capital escalated Wednesday as militias allied with the U.N.-supported government launched an offensive against a military base held by their rivals, officials said.
On the morning of February 22, the corpse of a young Syrian man, Said Obeid, was found alongside two dead Libyan men on the outskirts of the city of Tarhuna, which is under the control of Libyan National Army (LNA), led by General Khalifa Haftar.
During the most recent military escalation by Syrian government forces and their allied militias in northwest Syria, which led to the displacement of more than one million people, media outlets—mostly opposition-leaning—reported that the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) fought alongside the Syrian government forces. The SDF, however, has denied these claims.
Although the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) reported that 151 Turkey-backed militants – fighting in the ranks of Tripoli-based Government of National Accord (GNA) have been killed since the beginning of this year, the LNA announced Thursday that the number of Syrian mercenaries who fell over the previous 72 hours is 103.