The Idlib offensive, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s attempt to wipe out one of the last opposition bastions to his rule, began in April and is going on with minor interruption.
The unacknowledged Israeli Sept. 9 airstrike against Iranian proxies on the eastern border and Turkey’s renewed push to create a buffer zone along its border east of the Euphrates River are the latest Syrian developments discussed by the Arab media.
None of these actions come as surprise, as they fit into the long established overlapping strategic patterns: Russia’s plan of reinstating the authority of the Assad regime over the whole of Syria and eliminating every spot of the armed opposition; the Turkish desire to secure its southern borders; and the Israeli — Iranian proxy war that has now expanded as a far as both sides of the Syrian — Iraqi border.
Civilian casualties of the renewed Idlib offensive and the deliberately destroyed civilian infrastructure — tactics systematically used by Russian and regime forces in the opposition-held areas — have become so habitual that it is no longer a good subject of prime-time news coverage nor for a serious international diplomatic discussion. The banality of evil has triumphed.
After Arab sponsors of the Syrian revolution largely retreated, Turkey remains the sole serious opponent of Assad that still has not left the stage. It is also a country hosting the largest number of refugees (nearly 3.7 million, according to the United Nations) and the major opposition assets — now appears to be the last remaining source of hope for both the opposition and the whole embattled Sunni majority.
Turkey’s role as the protector of Idlib, however, has fallen far short of expectations.
Initially, it may have appeared that the September 2018 Astana agreement meant a de facto partition of western Syria between Russia (operating under the Syrian flag) and Turkey, with the U.S.-backed mainly Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces controlling most of the east.
Much as the Syrian opposition both home and abroad had hoped that Idlib would prefigure their aspired Assad-free new Syria, it now appears that Turkey could hardly make it, as its main strategic priority lies outside of the besieged province.
Turks have now renewed their military diplomatic campaign pressuring the U.S. to concede to the establishment of a buffer zone to the east of Euphrates in order to secure Turkish southern borders from battle-hardened and well-equipped current US allies, the YPG-led Syrian Democratic Forces, whom the Turkish government sees as an extension of their domestic Kurdish insurgency.
The Turks are also planning to repatriate a million refugees into this area, which may transform it into another opposition stronghold. While Turkey relies on the Arab and Turkoman Sunni factions, the fulfillment of this idea may also generate further tensions with the local Kurds. This will certainly mean the end of a de facto independent Kurdish statelet dubbed Rojava that arose from the ashes of the civil war in the Syrian North.
For their current offensive across the Turkish-controlled cease-fire zone in Idlib, Russia is using the pretext of its own edition of the global war on Terror, claiming that the agreement with Turkey on Idlib was not meant to cover operations against terrorists.
The area, indeed, remains largely under the control of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, a broad umbrella of rebel groups led by the Nusra front, originally an al-Qaida affiliate.
The fact is that this entity has since evolved into a type of civilian military administration, on which the livelihood of the local civilian population largely depends. Any effort to take it out comes at a huge human cost both in casualties and refugees. That is part of the Russian-Assad plan. The target of the operation is not so much the alleged terrorists, as the disloyal population altogether. Challenging the de facto authority of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham in order to effectively eliminate any pretext for further incursions in the name of the Assad regime appeared to be a risky task for the Turks, who opted instead for strengthening their own clients among the rebel factions in hope that they would somehow outmaneuver and supplant the Jihadists.
Populations that live under the sway of such entities have simply no choice, while their liberators, such as the mainly Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces, who now control the former ISIS-held Eastern Syria, are hardly better when they govern.
They are routinely accused of abusing the rights of locals whom they tend to see mainly as a security concern.
Armed groups functioning as state-like entities represent not only a Syrian issue, but a growing regional trend. Similar de facto governing bodies are becoming increasingly prevalent across the actual and frozen conflict areas of the Middle East and North Africa region, and not only in failed states such as Libya or Yemen.
Any serious international state-building effort in a country destroyed by conflict, would do better, according to a recent Chatham House report (https://reader.chathamhouse.org/between-order-and-chaos-new-approach-stalled-state-transformations-iraq-and-yemen#) to creatively adapt to the reality of hybrid political orders instead of creating a power vacuum by imposing solutions that do not stand on the local ground, all for the sake of recreating an “idealized archetype of the ‘orderly’ state”.
The problem with Syria is that, being formally ruled by a regime implacable in severe war crimes, it still operates as an internationally recognized de jure state, although de facto it has long ceased to exist and is only sustained through foreign military and humanitarian interventions.
Russia as a United Nations Security Council member had propped up the Assad’s regime continued international life after death by blocking effectively every international effort to stop the Syrian war.
This is the whole point of Russia’s Syria gamble: Russia is betting on the common human penchant for order weighing against the growing death toll.
People are too often willing to sacrifice life for the appearance of order and legality, even if only on paper.
This particularly works out well when it is a story about somewhere else and not your own country.
Syrian lives remain unprotected, hence, for the sake of maintaining what remains left of the old good post World War II international world order.
Oleksandr Bogomolov is director of the Institute of Oriental Studies in Kyiv. He speaks Arabic, Persian, Russian, Ukrainian and English fluently. He graduated from St. Petersburg State University with a master’s degree in Arab and Middle East studies and from the Moscow Institute of Oriental Studies with a Ph.D. in Arab linguistics.
