Istanbul: Syria and Turkey inched closer to all-out war on Monday as their troops exchanged deadly fire for the second time in a matter of days in Idlib, a contested and ravaged northern province that is the last major rebel redoubt remaining in Syria's nine-year war.
Rebel fighters fire a missile towards Syrian government positions in the province of Idlib.Credit:AP
The latest hostilities started after shelling by Syrian forces killed five Turkish soldiers and injured five others, according to Turkey' s defence ministry. The deaths came a week after a previous round of Syrian shelling in Idlib killed eight Turkish military personnel.
Turkey's response on Monday included attacks on what it said were "115 regime targets," including mortar positions, tanks and a helicopter. A hundred and one troops loyal to Syrian President Bashar Assad were killed, the Turkish defence ministry said.
The clashes followed a recent decision by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to send more Turkish troops to Idlib: a gamble aimed at slowing the pace of a quickening Syrian military advance.
A Russian-backed Syrian offensive aimed at recapturing territory in and around the province has killed hundreds of civilians over a few months and sent hundreds of thousands of displaced people fleeing toward Turkey's border – startling Erdogan's government, which already hosts roughly 4 million Syrian refugees.
Turkish military convoy drives through the village of Binnish, in Idlib.Credit:AP
Assad's government, in its drive to retake all the territory it lost to rebels during Syria's long war, has vowed to defeat the rebels in Idlib, a province largely controlled by extremist militants. The Trump administration has condemned the Syrian offensive and supported Turkey's recent actions in Idlib, even as U.S. officials have fretted about the growing sway of Islamist militants in the province.
To deter the Syrian army, Turkey has sent reinforcements to a dozen military observation posts it maintains in Idlib. But deadly strikes by the Syrian government on Turkish positions, twice in the last week, appeared to show that the deterrent was failing.
Instead, Syria and its allies were striking with greater intensity, on civilian and military targets alike.
The first attack occurred February 3, when shelling by Syrian government forces near the town of Saraqeb killed seven Turkish soldiers and a civilian employee of the Turkish military. In the aftermath of the attack, Erdogan said Turkey had carried out retaliatory air and artillery attacks.
On Monday, Syrian forces carried out "intense artillery shelling" on a Turkish position in Taftanaz, about 13 km northeast of Idlib's provincial capital, killing the five Turkish soldiers, according to Turkey's defence ministry and monitoring groups.
"The war criminal, who ordered today's heinous attack, targeted the entire international community, not just Turkey," Fahrettin Altun, Erdogan's spokesman, wrote on Twitter, in an apparent reference to Assad. "Turkey retaliated against the attack to destroy all enemy targets and avenging our fallen troops."
The defence ministry statement did not explain how it had determined that precisely 101 Syrian troops had been killed.
The Syrian army has made repeated attempts to take Idlib over the past year but found its advances beaten back by the rebels or blocked as Turkey and Russia have negotiated cease-fires.
For the moment, no such agreement stands in the way of the latest offensive, which began in late January. Negotiations between Russia and Turkey over the past few days had failed to yield an agreement on halting the violence, Turkish officials said.
Syrian forces have undertaken a two-pronged attack over the past two weeks, from the east and the south, capturing towns in southern Idlib and western Aleppo. The army forces linked up Saturday in the western Aleppo countryside, allowing them to attack the rebels from a newly-opened front, the Syrian news agency SANA reported.
Syria's government was also on the verge of retaking the strategic M5 highway, which connects Damascus and Aleppo, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group.
As the Syrian army rolls through the province, worries that the fighting is causing an unprecedented civilian exodus – a preoccupation of the Turkish government – have intensified.
Since early December, nearly 700,000 people in Idlib have been displaced, said David Swanson, a spokesman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. A hundred thousand people have fled their homes, or places where they were sheltering, in the past week alone, he said.
"The numbers are changing literally by the minute," Swanson said in a phone interview. "This singular wave of displacement since December 1st could well prove to be the largest level of displacement since the crisis began almost nine years ago."
Civilians have packed into cars to escape the increased airstrikes and shifting front lines, heading north toward the Turkish border, hoping to find appropriate shelter in the miserable cold. Few are successful.
"The situation is catastrophic," said Mustafa Haj Youssef, Idlib director of the White Helmets civil defence group. "Civilians are in tents without any protection or heat. The temperature is under zero. The situation is tragic and is worsening with the continuation of aerial and ground attacks."
The Washington Post
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