The Presidents of Iran, Russia and Turkey met in a high stakes summit in Tehran on Friday to discuss the future of Syria as a bloody military operation looms in the last rebel-held area of the war-ravaged nation, each laying out terms and issues on the battlefield most critical to their own concerns.
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan appealed for a ceasefire in Syria’s Idlib, saying a government offensive in the northwestern province would be a national security threat to his country and unleash a humanitarian catastrophe. “Idlib isn’t just important for Syria’s future, it is of importance for our national security and for the future of the region,” Mr. Erdoğan said. “Any attack on Idlib would result in a catastrophe. Any fight against terrorists requires methods based on time and patience,” he added. “We don’t want Idlib to turn into a bloodbath. We must find a reasonable way-out for Idlib.”
Vladimir Putin reiterated Russia’s stance that the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad should be able to regain control of all of Syria. “We should think together over all aspects of this complicated issue,” Mr. Putin said, speaking of Idlib. “We should solve this issue together and (we should) all realise that the legitimate Syrian government has the right and eventually should be able to regain control of all of its territory.”
Call for ceasefire
Reacting to Mr. Erdoğan’s proposal for the joint communiqué to call for a ceasefire, Mr. Putin said “a ceasefire would be good” but indicated that Moscow does not think it will hold.
For his part, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani demanded an immediate withdrawal by American forces in the country. The U.S. has some 2,000 troops in Syria. “We have to force the U.S. to leave,” he added, without elaborating. “The fires of war and bloodshed in Syria are reaching their end,” Mr. Rouhani said, while adding that terrorism must “be uprooted in Syria, particularly in Idlib”.
Each of the three nations has its own interests in the years-long war in Syria.
Iran wants to keep its foothold in the Mediterranean nation neighbouring Israel and Lebanon. Turkey, which backed opposition forces against Mr. Assad, fears a flood of refugees fleeing a military offensive and destabilising areas it now holds in Syria. And Russia wants to maintain its regional presence to fill the vacuum left by the U.S.’s long uncertainty about what it wants in the conflict.
Northwestern Idlib province and surrounding areas are home to about three million people, nearly half of them civilians displaced from other parts of Syria. That also includes an estimated 10,000 hard-core fighters, including al-Qaeda-linked militants.
Military victory
For Russia and Iran, both allies of the Syrian government, retaking Idlib is crucial to complete what they see as a military victory in Syria’s civil war.
A bloody offensive that creates a massive wave of death and displacement, however, runs counter to their narrative that the situation in Syria is normalising, and could hurt Russia’s longer-term efforts to encourage the return of refugees and get Western countries to invest in Syria’s postwar reconstruction.
Naji al-Mustafa, a spokesman for the Turkey-backed National Front for Liberation, said on Friday his fighters were prepared for a battle that they expect will spark a major humanitarian crisis. “The least the summit can do is to prevent this military war,” he said.
Early on Friday, a series of air strikes struck villages in southwest Idlib, targeting insurgent posts and killing a fighter, said Rami Abdurrahman, the head of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.