After losing three soldiers in a bomb attack in Idlib, the last bastion of Islamist rebels in Syria, Turkey pounded Syrian Kurdish targets last week, sending a misleading message of revenge to its public. The episode underscores Ankara’s growing predicament in Idlib, where jihadi forces target Turkish troops even as Turkey’s military presence shields them against the Syrian army.
In Idlib, Turkey has sought to use the dominant Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) group to suppress smaller jihadi groups, eager to create the impression that terrorist groups are being eliminated in the region, as its deals with Russia require. Meanwhile, it has kept reorganizing its allies from the Syrian National Army, an umbrella group for various opposition forces. Ultimately, all those efforts have been aimed at preventing a fresh Syrian-Russian offensive to retake the region. This calculus seems to be failing, and tensions in Idlib are on the rise.
Turkey’s predicaments stem from several fronts. Its military and intelligence have sought to create a regular army out of the armed opposition groups that have backed Turkish forces in the regions seized in northern Syria. The Syrian National Army, proclaimed in October 2019, was an outcome of those efforts. Yet factions in that setup have continued to act autonomously, clash with each other, and commit crimes against local civilians.
In a bid to keep those factions under control, a new grouping, called the Syrian Liberation Front, was created last week under the umbrella of the Syrian National Army. The five groups involved — the Sultan Suleyman Shah Division, the Hamza Division, the Mutasim Division, the 20th Division and Sukur al-Shimal — had formed a joint operation room in July, but it was soon marred by disagreements. But no matter how the factions are reorganized, they stand no chance of evolving into a regular army. Many of them have turned into war profiteers, and their rivalries and internal divisions have persisted, as in the case of Ahrar al-Sham, one of the groups on which Turkey had counted the most.
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