Responding to Vladimir Putin and Bashar Assad’s escalating slaughter of Syrian civilians, Turkey is surging more forces into northern Syria’s Idlib governate. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is trying to send Putin a message: Stop your offensive.
Syrian regime forces launched attacks on Turkish positions in Idlib this week, killing a number of soldiers. Turkey has retaliated in kind. And Turkey has pushed back hard against Russian denials that Moscow was given a deconfliction notice by Ankara of its deployment locations. That deconfliction channel is designed to prevent Syrian forces from attacking Turkish forces. The Russians are lying here, and Turkey knows it. The tension between Russia and Turkey is unlikely to lead to a direct exchange of fire, but it might.
The central issue is that for all sides, the question of Idlib is a critical one. And front and center is the Assad-Putin-Iran axis’s repeated breach of ceasefires negotiated with Turkey and Syrian rebels. Supporting a northern ground offensive up the M-5 highway to Aleppo (a crucial highway that I’ve been writing about since 2015), the Russian and Syrian air forces are now pounding Idlib’s civilian infrastructure with even greater gusto than normal (normal being the bombing of pediatric hospitals). In the axis’s sustaining attacks on hospitals and other civilian facilities, Putin is trying to slaughter so many civilians that their rebel family members surrender themselves into Assad’s gulag death camps. Putin knows that Idlib is the last holdout against Assad’s final victory.
But Turkey is responding. With Assad forces approaching Idlib City from the east, Turkey is surging hundreds more troops and equipment into the Idlib governate from its border on the northwest periphery. Turkish artillery strikes along the M-4 highway separating Syrian axis forces from Idlib City suggest that Erodgan is trying to deter the axis from taking the city.
What happens next is not clear. Putin restrained Erdogan last August by bombing his forces, but the Turkish leader cannot easily allow Idlib’s annihilation. It undercut his increasingly tenuous domestic political base. Erdogan has carefully constructed a narrative of himself as the preeminent global political leader and protector of Sunni Muslims. If he lets Assad and Putin slaughter those civilians in Syria, it will slaughter his own identity narrative.
America should not be an idle witness.
President Trump has generally shown strong leadership on Syria, far more so than his predecessor. But just as they need his leadership most, Trump appears to have forgotten about the Syrian people. What’s happening in Idlib is a moral and humanitarian disgrace, one that risks tens of thousands of lives and fuels migration flows into Europe. Congress introduced new sanctions on Assad late last year, but more can and should be done. Syria’s vulnerable economy is ripe for targeting. In addition, supporting Turkey would encourage Erdogan to recenter his foreign policy away from Putin and back into the NATO family.
Even beyond humanitarian concerns, there’s a security context that should motivate Trump’s action. Because Idlib’s annihilation will send legions of new recruits into the hands of the Islamic State. The death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi was a major blow to ISIS, but the group has endurance legs. As U.S. Special Representative for Syria Jim Jeffrey noted last week, “we are seeing ISIS come back as an insurgency, as a terrorist operation, with some 14- to 18,000 terrorists between Syria and Iraq.”
Moreover, with Assad’s economy in free fall and Putin desperate to reenter the international community, Trump has significant leverage to alter both leaders’ opinions. He should do so.
