Confronted with a Syrian-Russian attack on Thursday that killed dozens of Turkish soldiers, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is likely to launch a counteroffensive in Syria’s contested Idlib governorate this weekend. This is likely to end the burgeoning Russia-Turkey alliance and lead to increased bloodletting.
Erdogan is holding an emergency summit Thursday evening following the attack on a Turkish army position in Idlib. But it doesn’t matter whether Russian or Syrian pilots, or pilots from both nations, flew the mission that killed the Turkish soldiers. Bashar Assad follows Russian orders as to whether and which Turkish forces he is allowed to attack. Russia also provides critical targeting intelligence and logistics support to identify Turkish forces it wants to attack.
Still, Erdogan is the one to blame here. In the delusional belief that he could forge a true strategic partnership with Putin, he spent the last three years sucking up to the Russian president. The result has been a significantly damaged Turkish relationship with the United States and its NATO allies, and Russia has taken full advantage to undermine Turkish interests in Syria. Very predictably, Putin has systematically shredded his cease-fire commitments to Erdogan and turned a brutal bloodletting campaign loose against Idlib’s population. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of hospitals and schools have been targeted in a Russian-Syrian-Iranian effort to massacre civilians and force the surrender of rebel formations in Idlib.
Judged against his own carefully shaped autobiography as a grand Kemal Ataturk-style leader of Turks and Sunni Muslims in the Middle East, Erdogan looks weak at a time where he can ill afford it.
Now backed into a corner, Erdogan knows that he cannot allow this assault on his presidency and nation to go unmet. This means Putin is also taking a big gamble.
Erdogan’s government is suddenly seeking to reconstruct its relationship with the U.S. Evincing as much, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and his Turkish counterpart spoke by phone on Thursday. The Trump administration rightly hopes that this is an opportunity to undo the last few years and rebuild a long-standing strategic alliance. The U.S. is also rightly pushing back against Russian escalations against its forces in eastern Syria.
Putin will next try to scare Erdogan into submission. But in return for Turkey’s commitment to abandon its purchase of the Russian S-400 missile system, the U.S. should support a NATO deployment of Patriot air defense systems to the Turkish-Syrian border and support Erdogan with intelligence in Idlib. The U.S. should also push the European Union to adopt sanctions that will bury Assad’s economy.
Ultimately, what Russia, Assad, and Iran are doing to the people of Idlib is a moral outrage. To support our erstwhile Turkish ally and mitigate humanitarian suffering and associated refugee flows, we have an interest in helping Turkey put the Russians on their back foot.
