Turkish leaders are trying to persuade Russia not to protect Syrian dictator Bashar Assad’s military in a clash with the NATO power, days after an airstrike that killed more than 30 Turkish soldiers.
“Turkey does not take aim at either Russia or Iran in Syria,” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Monday. “We are only destroying the elements of the [Assad] regime.”
Turkish forces have targeted the Syrian regime’s military repeatedly over the last several days, in the wake of a strike that left at least 34 Turkish soldiers dead and spurred an emergency meeting of shocked NATO envoys. Erdogan blamed Assad for the strike, which U.S. officials said was likely coordinated with the Russian military.
“A war would trigger devastating consequences for both sides,” Anton Mardasov, an analyst at the Kremlin-established Russian International Affairs Council, told Russian media. “We do not know for sure who had carried out the strike [on the Turkish military], but everyone carefully stresses that this was the Syrian regime, and this shows that no one is interested in any Russian-Turkish escalation.”
Russian military officials aren’t ready to allow Erdogan to target Assad’s military, which relies on Russia for air support.
“In this situation, the Russian troops’ command can’t guarantee security of flights of Turkish aircraft in the skies over Syria,” Russian Rear Adm. Oleg Zhuravlev, one of the top commanders for Russia’s operations in Syria, was quoted as saying late Sunday.
The tensions have escalated as the Russian-backed Syrian military tries to reconquer Idlib, the last major rebel stronghold in the country. The region is packed with millions of civilians who have fled Assad’s rule in other parts of Syria, and it teems with al Qaeda affiliates and other terrorist groups that are also hostile to the regime.
“The overall offensive [was launched] with the specific purpose of driving the refugees into Turkey, the ones that aren’t bombed,” a senior State Department official told reporters last week.
Russia intervened in 2015 to stop Assad from being overthrown, in large part because the Syrian regime gives Moscow access to strategically significant ports on the Mediterranean Sea. Yet battlefield victories have left the regime with the problem of how to rebuild the cities destroyed in the war. Russian President Vladimir Putin responded by using the threat of a refugee crisis to lobby Western European leaders to finance the reconstruction of Syria for Assad.
U.S. officials long have predicted that Assad would still have to bring a final end to the fighting, adding that Western governments will not “subsidize Assad’s campaign of destruction,” as then-Ambassador Nikki Haley said during a 2018 meeting of the United Nations Security Council.
“Amid the Russian airstrikes, the chill of the Syrian winter, and the pangs of unending hunger, the Syrian people are desperate for aid, they are begging for relief, and they are praying for deliverance,” Ambassador Kelly Craft, who succeeded Haley at the United Nations, said Friday.
Erdogan and Putin are expected to meet Thursday in Moscow to discuss the crisis and a potential cease-fire.
“As we have said numerous times, it is known by everyone that we do not have an intention to come face-to-face with Russia [in Syria],” Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar said Monday. “What we want is for the regime to stop is massacre and thus the prevention of radicalization and migration.”
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'A war would trigger devastating consequences': Turkey and Russia try to avoid clash as Erdogan hammers Assad - Washington Examiner
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