What does Turkey want? Ten days after the start of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) lightning offensive, this is one of the questions posed by the resumption of the war in Syria. Yesterday, Recep Tayyip Erdogan appeared to bless the rebels’ march on the capital: Idlib, Hama and Homs and of course the Damascus objective: the advance of the opponents continues
declared the Turkish president, hoping that the operation would take place sans incident
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The reality is not so simple. Before giving them the green light, the Turks held back the rebels for a long time: they doubted their ability to seize Aleppo and feared that a counterattack by Bashar al-Assad’s army against the region of Idlib, the HTS stronghold, is causing a new exodus of civilians. Turkey already hosts at least three million Syrian refugees, often there for a decade.
With the disarray of the Syrian army, Erdogan and his Minister of Foreign Affairs, Hakan Fidan, a Machiavelli who long headed Turkish intelligence, very quickly redid their calculations. And activated their real relay on the Syrian ground, namely the Syrian National Army. Under this umbrella operate militias paid and fully equipped by Ankara.
These units made up of Arabs and especially Syrian Turkmens number several tens of thousands of men. Known for fighting among themselves and extorting populations, they hold the buffer zones created in recent years during repeated incursions by the Turkish army into northern Syria.
-In the wake of HTS, these Turkish proxies went on the offensive, seizing Tall Rifaat and threatening Manbij, two Kurdish strongholds north of Aleppo.
Push back the Kurds, send back the refugees
Because Turkey’s number 1 priority is there: to create a “security zone” tens of kilometers deep along the Turkish-Syrian border. His role? Cut the PKK, the Kurdish guerrilla of Türkiye, from its Syrian branch, the YPG, which controls a vast territory in eastern Syria.
With the rapid progress of HTS fighters towards Damascus, Erdogan dreams of achieving his second objective. It is less about overthrowing Bashar al-Assad than forcing the Syrian dictator to negotiate and share power with his opponents. Stabilizing the neighboring country would allow the Turkish President to send home the millions of Syrian refugees, whose presence in their country fuels real anger among the Turks… Including against their own leaders.
