Nearly a million civilians, 81 per cnet of them women and children, have been displaced from their homes in 90 days in Syria’s northwestern province of Idlib, amid a brutal military campaign by Syria’s Assad regime, Russia and Iran-backed militias.
In the last two months alone, 72 hospitals and medical clinics have been destroyed or forced to close, removing more than 550 healthcare personnel from service. At least seven children have frozen to death in recent weeks. What has resulted is the greatest humanitarian crisis in Syria’s nine-year war and the most significant incidence of human suffering in modern history.
Nearly two million civilians now reside in tent camps or in open fields along the border with Turkey, a country already home to a staggering 3.7 million Syrian refugees.
For Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the crisis across his border is an existential one. Already under domestic pressure to encourage refugees to return to Syria, a huge wave of new refugees would kill his future re-election prospects.
Worse still for Turkey, a defeat in Idlib could irreversibly damage its military presence elsewhere in northern Syria, which is viewed internally as a crucially important buffer protecting the homeland from Kurdish-led terrorist threats.
For these reasons alone, Turkey and its political leadership have every interest to intervene to halt the regime advance. So far, Turkey has deployed more troops into Idlib than America has in all of Syria, along with countless tanks, armored vehicles, artillery, multiple-rocket launchers and surface-to-air missiles.
As the largest standing army in NATO, Turkey has more than enough military capability to impose severe costs on Syrian regime forces and to coerce actors into, at minimum, ceasing fire.
Yet in recent weeks, the Syrian regime has killed 15 Turkish soldiers and taken control of 13 of Turkey’s 31 military observation posts inside the greater Idlib region. Turkey’s most significant response so far has been to – directly or via its Syrian proxies – shoot down two Syrian helicopters with sophisticated surface-to-air missiles.
On Thursday morning, for the first time, Turkish troops launched a ground offensive and recaptured a strategic village recently taken by the regime, but heavy Russian airstrikes forced them to withdraw just hours later.
In other words, Turkey’s response thus far has been insufficient. But it is slowly escalating. Erdogan has issued a deadline for Syrian troops to withdraw by the end of February, so further and likely greater Turkish action is virtually guaranteed. The stakes involved for Turkey could not be higher and the next week will be crucial in determining what all of this means, for Syria, Russia, Turkey and indeed, for Europe too.