Syria’s militants give tepid support to demilitarized zone
BEIRUT- Militants in Syria indicated tepid support for a demilitarized zone in the country’s final opposition stronghold, even as they appeared to defy an internationally brokered deadline Monday for their withdrawal.
The area surrounding the northern province of Idlib is home to about 2.5 million people, most of them civilians. Aid groups have warned that an offensive there could spell a humanitarian catastrophe.
A Sept. 17 deal between Russia and Turkey - key backers of Syria’s government and rebel forces, respectively - called for heavy weapons and Islamist militant groups to be pulled out of a roughly 13-mile-wide buffer zone.
But as the deadline passed, monitoring groups said that although a bloc of Turkeybacked rebels had withdrawn their weapons, the province’s most extreme militants were still there.
“We value the efforts of all those striving - at home and abroad - to protect the liberated area and prevent its invasion and the perpetration of massacres in it,” the al-qaedalinked Hayat Tahrir al-sham, or HTS, said in a statement late Sunday.
“But we warn at the same time against the trickery of the Russian occupier or having faith in its intentions,” it added. The militant group also said it “would not forget” the foreign fighters who came to assist it.
Analysts interpreted the statement as a sign that HTS - whose reluctance to withdraw could throw up one of the biggest obstacles to the deal - would grudgingly comply.
“HTS’S statement seems to amount to a tacit acceptance of the [agreement’s] terms, even as HTS rejects more far-reaching concessions like renouncing armed struggle and voices its distrust of the deal’s Russian co-sponsor,” said Sam Heller, senior analyst on nonstate armed groups for the International Crisis Group.
The stakes are high. President Bashar Assad’s government routinely emphasizes its desire to control every inch of Syria, seven years into a war that tore more than a third of the country from its grasp.
In the event that the Turkish-russian deal breaks down, the Syrian military could yet launch a grinding offensive to uproot extremists from Idlib.
“Over and over again, similar deals have simply ended in a bloodbath,” Wouter Schaap, Syria country director for the CARE International aid organization, said last week. “Civilians caught in this standoff must be spared at all costs.”
Russian officials have indicated that they view the deadline as flexible, with the militants’ failure to withdraw unlikely to meet with immediate violence. “The quality of that work is far more important. We strongly support our Turkish partners’ efforts,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Wednesday.