Turkey has been on the brink of all-out war with Russia in North West Syria for the best part of a week now in the latest desperate rounds of the battle for Idlib, which the military dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad wants to take back for good.
He has wanted that for almost as long as Syria has been gripped by fratricidal war, which began eight years ago this month. It’s sensitive as it lies close to the heartlands of his Alawite clan.
World opinion and media has wearied of this dreadful fight, which is as bad as ever with hospitals bombed, children maimed and another one million Syrian refugees in flight since the end of last year.
Putin, Erdogan and Assad, who must be high in the league of global egotists, are not likely to get their way soon. Assad won’t be able to grab Idlib to any shape of lasting gain. Both Russia and Turkey now seem overcommitted. Thursday’s talks in Moscow between Putin and Erdogan are unlikely to have a lasting positive result.
A temporary ceasefire is the best that can be hoped for. At least it should allow some flow of food and medical aid into the enclave, where some two million are now trapped, plus some 30,000 militant opponents of Assad of varying hues, including al Qaeda affiliates.
Last week some 34 Turkish soldiers were killed by Syrian regime forces. How much Russian forces were involved is not clear – though the Assad levies cannot do much these days without Russia’s command and control and management of airpower.
Erdogan ordered 7,000 Turkish forces to support the scattered Turkish observation posts in the enclave. Operation Spring Shield has brought a rising tempo of exchanges, with dozens of rockets fired in a single salvo at Turkish forces at the beginning of this week. Damascus regime forces say they have recaptured the strategic town of Saraqeb from Turkish forces. Turkey then claimed to have shot down a third Syrian fighter plane.
With a million refugees now camped on the Idlib border with Turkey, in addition to the 3.7 million from Syria inside the country, Erdogan has said he won’t stand in the way of refugees trying to get out to Europe.
So far Greece has borne the brunt – with islands like Lesbos now receiving a new group of refugees, many of them not from Syria, but from Pakistan, Afghanistan and even Somalia.
The EU has done little more than give a diplomatic shrug of the shoulders. The new president of the commission, Ursula Von der Leyen, has expressed words of sympathy and pledged solidarity but little more. Colleagues have bluntly told Greece to build up the barriers and keep the wanderers and fugitives out. Once again the notion of globalised governance and law is fraying. Europe ignores the southern migration-refugee problem at its peril. More are on the way from Africa especially. The Balkans, Serbia and Bosnia especially, are now becoming a sort of human municipal dump of the stateless, a breeding ground for organised and disorganised crime.
This contrasts with the decline of the indigenous populations of the region in the past two decades – with the Romanian population going down by nearly a fifth, matched by stresses in Bulgaria as well as the western Balkans. Croatian nationalists seem themselves as the bastion of holy civilized Europe, as their borderlands became at the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699.
But back to Turkey and the present. This is the fourth major incursion into Syria ordered by Recep Tayyip Erdogan in four years. Last October he ordered Operation Peace Spring against the Kurdish YPG militias in their borderland statelet of Rojava – after a notorious phone call to Donald Trump to ensure American and allied special forces got out of the way.
Not that the offensive got very far. It took but a month for a ceasefire to be brokered and it is now a stalemate.
Turkey on paper has the second largest Nato army, a standing force of around 250,000 which is heavily reliant on conscripts. The forces sent to Rojava and Idlib are not as well trained as advertised. In Rojava they relied on local Arab Islamist militias. In Idlib some 33 soldiers seem to have been caught in the open when they were hit in a few minutes – and the Operation Spring Shield was launched.
The Turkish forces have won advantage in their use of swarmed drone attacks – which appear to have caught the Russians as much as the Syrian regime forces off guard.
Russia, too, appears to be overcommitted. It has to run most of the military effort of the Assad regime – whose long term prospects are still poor. The other main allies, Iran and the Shia-based militias promoted by Iran and the Shiite-based government in Baghdad, are weakening. Iran can no longer pay its clients and proxies like the Popular Mobilisation Brigades and Lebanese Hezbollah as it once did. Sanctions mean a drought in foreign currency – access to dollars particularly – and prevent funds from getting through for pensions and commanders’ salaries which have to be laundered through the pro-Iranian parties in Baghdad.
According to one of the shrewdest observers of Russian geopolitics, the former Portuguese diplomat and now think tank guru Bruno Macaes, the aim of the Moscow talks is simply to ensure that Assad wins back Idlib, Turkey withdraws with guarantees, and Russian reaps the reward of Syrian reconstruction.
For once I disagree with the Portuguese sage. Russia and Assad don’t have the means to effect peace across the desert warscape of Syria. Moscow doesn’t want to put forces on the ground, beyond a handful of Wagner Group mercenaries.
Nor does Assad’s savage ethnic re-engineering of Syria in order to reduce the weight and influence of the mainstream Sunni Arab communities, stand much of a prayer either. He doesn’t have the brute force, the numbers on the ground, to do it. The hostile forces, from al Qaeda, al-Nusrah front, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, ISIS even, continue to mutate, evolve and innovate. They are not likely to go away altogether.
As for reconstruction? Roughly 70% of the fabric and infrastructure of urban Syria is wrecked. The repair bill is thought to be USD $ 250 billion at a minimum, with over $1 Trillion a more realistic figure. No one, but no one, is prepared to contemplate such a bill – not Europe, Russia, the IMF or World Bank, and not even China in the grip of Coronavirus.
Besides, there is another smaller but no less significant, standoff between Russia and Turkey in Libya – now threatening to become not so much another Syria, but another Somalia. Russia backs the increasingly Islamist General Haftar Khalifa, lord of Benghazi and the bulk of oil revenues. Turkey wants military support for the UN sponsored Government of National Accord, the GNA, of Fayaz al-Sarraj, who rules a few thousand square metres of the capital Tripoli, not much more.
Putin got the two leaders to Moscow in January. But they didn’t talk, and didn’t meet, though there were mutterings about ceasefires. The fires haven’t ceased and Libya is another bad mess on the shores of the Mediterranean.
Moscow’s concern that it may be losing traction in the Eastern Mediterranean is underlined by the steady reinforcement of its naval forces in the region and the sea and air bases in and around Tartus and Latakia. It has sent four warships from the Black Sea through the Bosphorus – possibly in breach of the civil navigation agreements of the Treaty of Montreux of 1936, guaranteeing the neutrality of the waterway.
Putin should be worried – because the great disrupter risks being disrupted by his own disruption stratagems. He doesn’t have enough forces and economic power to cover all the bases from the Baltic to the Caucasus, the Middle East and increasingly in Africa.
His position isn’t as difficult as that of Erdogan. With sliding popularity and a worsening economy at home, and too many alarums and excursions abroad and on his borders, he looks to be in a personal and political end game.