Turkey in talks over Idlib crisis

A Turkish delegation will travel to Russia to discuss the situation in Syria’s Idlib province amid mounting fears of a humanitarian disaster there, Turkey’s foreign minister said.

Hundreds of thousands of civilians in Idlib province are scrambling to escape a widening, multi-front offensive by Syrian president Bashar Assad’s forces.

“What matters is today around one million people from Idlib have been moving towards our border,” Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in a statement after a phone call with US president Donald Trump in which they discussed Syria and other topics.

“We are already hosting 3.5-4 million people. Unfortunately we are not in a position of accepting this another one million,” he said.

Turkish foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said after meeting his German counterpart on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference that two million people could head for Turkey’s border with Syria if no ceasefire is achieved.

He said a Turkish delegation was due to visit Moscow today to discuss the situation in Idlib, much of which remains in rebel hands.

German foreign minister Heiko Maas said he pushed Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, who was also in Munich, for Russia to lean on Mr Assad’s government to stop the fighting.

Mr Lavrov said that agreements between Moscow and Ankara “imply both a ceasefire and a demilitarised zone, but most importantly drawing a line between the normal opposition and terrorists”.

Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, said Russia is the key to stopping the crisis as it gives the Syrian government air support.

CARNAGE: Syrians gather around the wreckage of a government military helicopter that was shot down in the countryside outside Idlib