Turkey's regional rivals are going beyond Libya as they respond to the scale-tipping Turkish military intervention in the North African country. Having declared a red line at Sirte and al-Jufra on the Libyan battlefield, Egypt and its partners are stepping up efforts to impede Turkey on the diplomatic front as well as in Syria and Iraq.

While forging closer ties with Damascus, Egypt has at the same time focused on the Syrian Kurds, following in the steps of the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. According to Turkey’s state-run Anadolu news agency, Egypt has now sent troops to Idlib, the rebel-held province where Turkey has built up a military presence to keep the Syrian army from advancing. Citing “reliable military sources,” Anadolu reported July 30 that about 150 Egyptian soldiers, arriving via the military airport in Hama, had been deployed to front lines in Khan al-Asal in the western countryside of Aleppo and around Saraqib in southern Idlib, armed with light weapons and coordinating with Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Iran-backed militias.

Kamal Amer, chair of the Egyptian Parliament’s Defense and National Security Committee, denied the report and the Syrian Observatory of Human Rights said its local sources had failed to confirm the deployment.

The veracity of the report may be disputed, but such Egyptian assistance to Damascus would hardly be a surprise, given the course of events. Ample signs have already emerged that the Egypt-Emirati-Saudi axis is following a strategy to contain and distract Turkey in conflict zones in its proximity. The moves the three countries have been making and the ties they seek to develop are largely a response to Turkey and despite some gaps and discordance, they have complemented each other in terms of purpose.