CROPS LEFT TO ROT AS RUSSIA-TURKEY TENSIONS INTENSIFY IN NORTHERN SYRIA
Farmers flee as conflict brews in Idlib, where the two powers came close to full-fledged war last year
Ripe figs fall to the ground from trees in a rugged region under the Turkish sphere of influence in north-west Syria.
The harvest in the Zawiya Mountain region of Idlib governorate was due last month.
But most farmers have fled to areas closer to the border with Turkey in the past few weeks after renewed bombing by the Syrian regime and Russia.
The scene in Zawiya Mountain was described to The National by Osama Al Ayham, a farmer from the town of Al Bara.
“The figs of Jabal Al Zawiya are the best,” Mr Al Ayham said. “But we didn’t dare come near the trees this season.”
He said he fled to the border town of Atma after cluster bombs killed Hussein Abido, his neighbour, and Abido’s teenage son, while they worked the land last month.
The escalation of violence in Idlib and other parts of the north-west echoes a build-up in the region last year between forces in the Syrian civil war with ties to Turkey and Russia.
An offensive on Idlib by regime forces and pro-Iranian militias, supported by Russian air power, brought Moscow and Ankara close to war in the first quarter of 2020.
Large-scale violence would affect Turkey’s expansion in Syria and its ability to check advances by Kurdish militias in areas on its border.
It would test the limits of Russian support for President Bashar Al Assad’s regime, as Moscow tries to maintain coordination with Turkey in the South Caucasus and the Black Sea.
In the past decade, Idlib and areas in the adjacent governorate of Aleppo have become a laboratory of the internationalisation of the conflict, and how far big powers can push each other.
Factions are as disparate as Marxist-Leninist Kurdish militias, Sunni Uighur fighters, the Alawite-dominated Syrian military and Shiite militias from Lebanon and Iraq that are supported by Iran.
Hayat Tahrir Al Sham, an Al Qaeda offshoot regarded as having connections with Turkey, rules most areas in Idlib outside regime control, including Zawiya Mountain.
Rebels who fought the regime and lost, after the 2015 Russian intervention restored large parts of Syria to the government, have regrouped in the past few years.
Under Turkish supervision they formed the Syrian National Army in late 2017, concentrated in the northern parts of Aleppo governorate.
The rebels and the Turkish military have been trading blows with Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) in the pocket of Tall Rifat, north of the city of Aleppo.
With Russian air support, the YPG captured Tall Rifat from the rebels five years ago.
Support by Moscow has been crucial to incremental territorial gains by the regime and pro-Iranian militia in northwest and south-west Syria over the past year.
Ankara regards further regime advances in the north-west as driving more Syrian refugees towards its territory. It is also worried about Russia’s links with Kurdish militias.
Dozens of Turkish army observation points are spread throughout Zawiya Mountain and around the nearby M4 motorway to the north.
The M4 is part of a “security corridor” agreed upon with Russia in a deal that curbed hostilities between the regime and anti-Assad forces in Idlib in March last year, after three weeks of fighting.
But Russia stopped joint patrols with Turkey along the M4 in August last year, citing the possibility of militant attacks.
Mr Al Ayham said Hayat Tahrir fighters in Zawiya Mountain are dug in, and that their command and control centres are underground.
He said he saw their pick-upmounted anti-aircraft guns on the road leading to Al Bara.
A Syrian officer who defected to the opposition said Russia appears intent on bombing the region into submission to secure the M4 motorway.
The M4 connects Aleppo, which the regime captured in late 2016, with the Mediterranean coast, where Russia has the bulk of its forces in Syria.
The officer said Russia also wants the regime to capture the town of Jisr Al Shughour, on the western edge of Idlib.
It is the nearest rebel-held town in Idlib to the Alawite Mountains.
Uighur fighters control Jisr Al Shughour. They made their way there from China, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
“Jisr Al Shughour, and even Zawiya Mountain, might be dispensable for Turkey,” the officer said. “But Turkey cannot afford to give up more than this.”
He said Ankara needed to maintain a buffer zone around the city of Afrin and to prevent another refugee influx into Turkey.
Afrin was a Kurdish enclave in Aleppo until overrun by Turkey and its proxy forces in 2018.
Hundreds of thousands of Syrians, mostly from the country’s Sunni majority, fled to Turkey in the early years of the civil war. The Turkish authorities later prevented entry.
In Istanbul, an opposition figure in contact with Turkish security said Ankara’s military stance in north-west Syria “shows that it is ready for war”.
“If the fall of the north-west becomes the popular perception, refugees will break through the border,” he said. “It is a scenario Turkey cannot afford.”
The region’s population, particularly in Idlib, has grown in the decade after the crackdown on the 2011 revolt against five decades of Assad family rule and the ensuing civil war.
Nearly four million people, mostly refugees from across Syria, live in Idlib, compared with the governorate’s one million inhabitants in 2011.
Galip Dalay, a Turkey Programme fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin said that “the danger of confrontation with Russia” factors significantly in Turkey’s strategy.
At the same time, he said Russia seeks to pressure Turkey “without wanting the relationship to reach breaking point”.
But “all the indications point to a major escalation” in northwest Syria, Mr Dalay said, pointing to inconclusive talks over Syria between Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on September 29.
Mr Dalay said the relationship between Moscow and Ankara regarding Syria is marked by “a pattern of military escalation on the ground, and after a while, a new fragile reality”.
The deal in March last year between Turkey and Russia reduced bombing in the Zawiya Mountain region, allowing farmers to return home in time for the fruit harvest.
Before 2011, a large proportion of Idlib’s figs were exported to Russia, while much of its olive oil went to western Europe.
The picking season for olives is in a few days. But Mr Al Ayham, who owns a grove, does not expect to be back.
“The olives will go to waste,” he said.