Turkey and a dangerous power vacuum in northwestern Syria
Turkish forces recently began massing on the southwestern border with Syria. As many as 80 military vehicles, including an unknown number of tanks and medical aid trucks, were dispatched to a part of Hatay province that’s approximately 50 kilometers from the border. Another convoy of an unspecified number of military vehicles was reportedly sent to another area of Hatay, just 3.5 kms from Syria’s border, and a third collection of 20 army vehicles was seen close to the border near Bab al-Hawa in Syria, about 10 kms from Reyhanli.
By themselves, these movements might seem innocuous – it is, after all, normal for Turkey to move soldiers and materiel around its borders depending on where it believes threats could arise. But context is everything, and the context of these deployments is not routine. On September 15, Turkey, Iran and Russia agreed in Astana to set up a safe zone in Syria’s Idlib province, just west of Aleppo. They reportedly agreed to divide the province into three zones, each controlled by a different country. That same day, a progovernment Turkish newspaper reported that 25,000 Turkish soldiers were preparing for deployment into Idlib province, with the goal of taking control of a roughly 5,000-square-kilometer area with over 2 million inhabitants.
Until now, Turkey has chosen to stay out of the fray in Syria as much as it can. The main exception was Operation Euphrates Shield from August 2016 to March 2017. The scope of that incursion, however, has been exaggerated by both Turkey and the mainstream media. Euphrates Shield was a limited, sevenmonth operation involving about 8,000 Turkish soldiers. Their main goal was to support the activities of the Free Syrian Army as it pushed Islamic State fighters back from the Turkish border. (Nominally, the objective was to weaken the Kurdish People’s Protection Units, or YPG, but the operation didn’t take any territory from the YPG.) The FSA bore the brunt of the casualties.
The situation more convoluted.