{"id":15143,"date":"2018-09-15T05:23:48","date_gmt":"2018-09-15T05:23:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=15143"},"modified":"2018-09-15T05:23:48","modified_gmt":"2018-09-15T05:23:48","slug":"sdf-poised-for-assault-on-last-daesh-bastion-in-eastern-syria","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=15143","title":{"rendered":"SDF poised for assault on last Daesh bastion in eastern Syria"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\nISTANBUL: Disagreement between Turkey and Russia over how to tackle the Syrian rebel stronghold of Idlib seems to have deferred a looming regime offensive on the province, analysts say.
Russia and Turkey are on opposite sides of the conflict, but key global allies.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan met Russian and Iranian leaders Vladimir Putin and Hassan Rouhani in Tehran on September 7 to discuss Syria, just as a major assault by Russia-backed regime forces on Idlib appeared imminent.
But discord at the summit between Erdogan and Putin, in a rare scene captured on camera, may have prompted Russia to postpone the Idlib strike so as not to provoke Ankara, which is fiercely opposed to a military option.
\u201cI believe an offensive, if there will be one, will not come before several weeks,\u201d a senior Turkish official told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Turkey, which backs rebels fighting against President Bashar Assad\u2019s regime, co-sponsors \u2014 with regime allies Russia and Iran \u2014 the so-called Astana talks launched in January 2017 in the quest for a lasting cease-fire.
To date, the dialogue has resulted in the creation of four pre-cease-fire \u201cde-escalation zones\u201d in Syria, including in Idlib.
Idlib is the last major opposition stronghold in the war-torn country. Sixty percent of the area is controlled by the Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS) extremist group, an Al-Qaeda branch operating in Syria.
Intense negotiations have taken place between Turkey and Russia since the failure of the Tehran summit, to hammer out a compromise in a bid to avert an assault which Erdogan has cautioned would ignite a \u201cbloodbath.\u201d
Such a compromise could include neutralising the HTS \u2014 officially designated as a terror group by Ankara. Erdogan and Putin are expected to discuss the issue when they meet in the Russian resort city of Sochi on Monday.
For Turkey, the stakes are high.
Ankara fears a large-scale assault on Idlib, which lies on its southern border, could trigger a massive flow of refugees onto its soil. Turkey is already home to more than three million Syrians who have fled the conflict.
Abdul Wahab Assi, an analyst at the Syria-based Jusoor Studies Center, said disagreements at the Tehran summit \u201crule out a possible offensive in the short run, at least until the end of the year.\u201d
He said a possible compromise from the ongoing talks could take the form of a \u201climited military operation or surgical strikes\u201d targeting the HTS, or modifying the borders of the de-escalation zones to keep armed rebels from certain sectors.
Russia may be open to such a plan, Assi said, as long as it would secure the Idlib section of the Aleppo-Damascus highway and put an end to drone attacks launched from Idlib against Moscow\u2019s main military base of Hmeimim in the neighboring province of Latakia.
Some three million people live in Idlib province and adjacent areas, the United Nations says, around half of whom have already fled their homes in other parts of Syria.
Regime forces and Russian warplanes resumed airstrikes on Idlib in September but the strikes fell in intensity this week.
Turkish media reported Ankara has sent reinforcements, including tanks, to beef up its border with Syria and its observation posts in Idlib.
Turkish military analyst Metin Gurcan, judges these measures to be of a \u201cdefensive\u201d nature, aimed at protecting Turkish observation posts against any possible threat.
Gurcan said the lack of an agreement with Ankara could push Moscow, and thus the Syrian regime, to stage an \u201cincremental operation that will last months\u201d rather than a full-fledged attack.
\u201cRussia is trying to keep Ankara in the game,\u201d he told AFP, saying any confrontation between the two countries was \u201chighly unlikely.\u201d
\u201cMoscow needs Turkey as a Sunni power to balance Shiite militias\u2019 presence in northern Syria,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ISTANBUL: Disagreement between Turkey and Russia over how to tackle the Syrian rebel stronghold of Idlib seems to have deferred a looming regime offensive on the province, analysts say.Russia and Turkey are on opposite sides of the conflict, but key global allies.Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan met Russian and Iranian leaders Vladimir Putin and Hassan…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":15144,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15143","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-middle_east_news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15143","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15143"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15143\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/15144"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}