Residents of Idlib, the last opposition-held stronghold of Syria, most of them living in displacement and with sparse electricity, have stayed glued to their phones. “We have become a toy in the hand of other countries,” said Abu Hayyan, a man displaced from his home in Taybet al Imam, southern Hama, moments after learning through a WhatsApp group about the new agreement reached between Russia and Turkey to suspend fighting in the province. Under the agreement, Hayyan and hundreds of thousands of others in Idlib would not be able to return to their homes since the Syrian regime controls their towns, and, like many in Idlib, he expects to be killed if he returns to live under government rule.
The mood was much more upbeat on the night of Feb. 27, when Syrians huddled into overcrowded camps in the country’s northwest cheered, with a sense of vengefulness mixed with relief, as videos were shared from one WhatsApp group to another. Nine years into their country’s devastating civil war, Syrians watched Turkish drones destroying tanks, armored vehicles, and air defense systems operated by Syrian army soldiers. “For the first time, we are seeing aircrafts and saying, ‘Praise be to God, these are on our side,’” said Omar,* a journalist displaced from his home in Maarat al Numan. The displaced were cheering at their countrymen being killed by a foreign power because the same Syrian soldiers being targeted by the Turks drove them from their homes, looted them thoroughly, and desecrated graves of regime opponents.
“Everyone is hopeful that we will be able to return to our villages,” said Omar. Upon learning of the agreement, he sounded somber. His city remains under regime control, and he cannot return. “The war will continue. Previous ceasefire deals have all failed.”
Turkish actions marked the first true foreign military intervention to protect Syrian civilians in the history of the nine-year conflict. All powers that have intervened to date did so to advance their priorities in combating the threat of the Islamic State. Turkey isn’t driven by humanitarian concerns but its own interests: namely, preventing masses of refugees from spilling across the border. The Syrian rebellion began in March 2011 as part of the Arab Spring protests. Assad has been willing, with Russian backing, to use conventional and chemical weapons to put it down. After nine years, at least half a million dead, 7 million internally displaced, and nearly as many having fled, the war appeared to be approaching a particularly bloody crescendo, with a real possibility for mass atrocities if the regime succeeded in retaking Idlib, the tiny stretch of land still under opposition control.
The escalation by Syrian, Russian, and Iranian forces in and around Idlib since April 2019 has sent more than 1 million Syrian civilians fleeing their homes. Since Dec. 1, intense airstrikes, shelling, and advances on the ground by Russia and the Syrian regime have uprooted 961,000 people from their homes. The area is home to about 3 million, most of whom now reside along the Turkish border.
Humanitarian organizations were completely unprepared for the displacement, resulting in families living in open fields, without even a tarp to cover them, and fleeing regime forces on foot for hours. Several children froze to death, as temperatures dropped below zero in Syria’s northwest.
The mass flight of civilians toward the Turkish border prompted Turkey to send more than 6,000 additional troops and heavy weaponry into Idlib. Ankara’s policy of continuing to host 3.6 million Syrian refugees is domestically unpopular. Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s personal political survival could be in jeopardy if millions of Syrian refugees break through the border. Since Turkey significantly beefed up its presence in Idlib starting in early February, the Syrian army and Russian air force have killed more than 50 of the Turkish soldiers dispatched there. Turkey’s unprecedented escalation against the Syrian army following the night of Feb. 27, after a Russian and Syrian attack that killed at least 36 Turkish soldiers, signals Turkey’s growing willingness to assert itself in its near-abroad. It also likely stems from the recognition that the rebels will not be able to hold the front lines unless the regime’s military capacity is significantly degraded.
But Turkey does not face the Syrian regime alone. Turkey has shown a willingness to escalate against Assad’s armed forces, killing hundreds of Syrian soldiers within days, downing Syrian jets, and destroying armor and weapons depots, but it is largely trying not to become involved in a direct fight with the regime’s strongest backer, Russia. Turkey can easily take on Assad’s military, aptly described by a U.S. official as “laughable, pathetic, [and] keelhauled,” but the Russian air force can wreak havoc on Turkish soldiers stationed in Syrian territory.
Russia is backing the Assad regime to the hilt. According to air traffic monitors, most airstrikes currently being carried out in Idlib are Russian, and many of the forces fighting on the ground are Russian-trained Syrian militias and army units. Russia adopted an uncompromising stance, reportedly offering Turkey a tiny strip of land along the border that would be spared the final regime takeover once Assad’s Moscow-backed victory was assured. Supplying aid to this strip of land, in which millions will be crammed, disconnected from their lands, homes, and sources of livelihood, would be a nightmare. It would ensure that the area is in a constant state of humanitarian crisis, producing refugees able to scrounge up the cash for a smuggling trip across the border.
The horror in Idlib was a long time coming. The current catastrophe is the result of the “reconciliation” tactic pursued by the Assad regime and marketed to Western governments as a “de-escalation” mechanism. To preserve manpower, the regime would freeze fronts in certain areas, only to attack other rebel-held towns. One after the other, the regime violated the agreements and violently recaptured areas held by the Syrian opposition across the country, such as eastern Aleppo and northern Homs, through these surrender deals. Under the agreements, rebels and civilians who refused to surrender to the Assad regime were bused to Idlib. Most of the population across these pockets chose to remain under regime control, tired of the war and wishing to avoid displacement. These mass population transfers and flights of civilians throughout the war swelled the area’s population to 3 million people, half of them from areas outside of the region.
Idlib became a dumping ground for Syria’s “irreconcilables” — those who refused to live under Assad’s police state. The “reconciliation” deals kicked the can down the road, preventing visible, large-scale atrocities following the capture of rebel-held towns of the sort that took place in the first year of the war, when the rebels were too weak and unable to hold off the regime and evacuate through orderly agreements and regime forces stormed towns such as Darayya, Banyas, Houla, and Qubair and massacred civilians en masse. Under the “reconciliation” deals, the atrocities are hidden from sight, carried out in torture dungeons of Syria’s multiple secret police branches. In post-“reconciliation” areas, the regime locked up thousands and tortured many to death after they surrendered on false promises of amnesty.
The regime perceives those who refused to surrender and instead decamped to live in territory still under rebel control as traitors and terrorists. The regime’s secret police repeatedly arrested mothers for daring to speak on the phone with their sons who chose to be internally displaced rather than live under Assad’s control. The conduct of regime forces is indicative of how they perceive the population they are “liberating”: Soldiers documented themselves torturing, executing, and torching the corpses of civilians they managed to capture alive. Throughout the history of the war, regime soldiers and militiamen carried out mass summary executions of civilians, slaughtered civilians with knives, and raped women in front of their male relatives.
Now, with the agreement to halt fire, few of those displaced from towns under Assad regime control are likely to return. “People are willing to live in tents, under trees, in poultry farms, wherever, just to escape the areas the regime is capturing,” said Ahmed, an employee of a humanitarian NGO displaced from his home in Maarat al Numan. Most Idlib residents don’t see returning to live under regime control as an option. A poll conducted among the displaced in the latest offensive by the Syrian Association for Citizens’ Dignity found that more than 90% ruled out returning to live under the Assad regime. In some of the previous offensives on rebel-held pockets, Russia and the Assad regime opened crossings for civilians to flee into regime-held areas. When faced with the prospect of death, some chose surrender. Throughout the current campaign on Idlib, out of the million people who fled their homes, only about 1,000, or 0.1%, chose to flee to regime-held areas through these crossings, while the rest fled away from the advancing regime forces.
For civilians remaining in Idlib, the prospects for “reconciliation” are slim, and for those refusing it, there is no place left to go. Even civilians who don’t back the rebels fear returning to live in an area governed by abusive Syrian army units and pro-regime militias. As for the rebels, their backs are up against the wall — the cement border wall Turkey erected along its frontier with Syria — and they’re vowing to fight until death. “We will complete the revolution, God willing, even if we have 1 square meter left,” said Muhammad, a 23-year-old rebel who has been fighting the Syrian regime since he was 15 years old.
Turkey locked its gates to Syrian refugees in 2015, and border police shoot at fleeing refugees, but human smuggling continues across the border and has picked up in recent months, according to local Syrian smugglers. Thus far, however, Turkey’s border defense system, partially financed by the European Union (which fears another refugee influx from Turkey), has largely held up. This could change if Syrian forces reach the densely populated zones along the border. “If the regime advances and people don’t have anything in front of them other than the border, of course people will storm the border without hesitation, even if thousands of us die. If we have the choice of death by bullet or returning to the regime, we will choose bullets,” said Ahmed, who now lives in displacement near the Turkish border. “Everyone who returns to the regime is wanted for interrogation, and this means beatings, humiliation, torture, and death under torture.”
Surrender was never in the cards for Idlib. Until the latest Turkish move, which signaled its refusal to let the last rebel-held pocket collapse, the advance of the regime’s forces seemed unstoppable, prompting fears of mass atrocities. After the Turkish bombing run, Ahmed says that “people are optimistic, but at the end of the day, the Turkish intervention has its limits. Turkey is fighting the regime, not Russia.” Russia would not tolerate a Turkish effort to retake too much of Idlib or threaten the Assad regime’s grip on power, the source of fear for Syrian refugees refusing to return to their country. The best alternative for Idlib residents appears to be an untenable situation: living in a densely populated area that has been destroyed by years of intense Russian and Syrian regime airstrikes, utterly dependent on cross-border aid, hoping that Turkey will be able to prevent the Assad regime and its backers from violating the latest ceasefire, with no end in sight to their misery.
*All Syrians cited in the report requested that their full names be withheld as a security precaution.
Elizabeth Tsurkov is a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute focusing on the Levant. Follow her on Twitter @Elizrael.
