Two weeks before the sudden ceasefire, Abdul Aziz Ajini’s neighbors thought he had gone crazy. While others in the village of Kurin, located in Idlib province, trembled with fear ahead of the major offensive on the immediate horizon, Ajini, a former professor of English literature at a local college, began to rebuild his home, which had been bombed to rubble years ago.
As the people of Idlib were trying to sell their homes, property and furniture to raise money for their escape -- even though no one was buying, and nobody even knew where they could flee to -- Ajini was busy collecting cement and bricks and hiring an engineer. Even the engineer pulled him aside and asked: "Tell me, Aziz, are you really sure this is a good idea -- now, of all times?"
He himself hadn’t even bought any new clothes for months. People were ready to flee at a moment’s notice, taking only what they could carry -- whatever fit on a motorcycle or in a car. An entire province of nearly 3 million people was waiting with bated breath, listening for the sounds of approaching fighter jets, those harbingers of death.
Then on Sept. 17, something happened that no one had been expecting: Turkey and Russia reached an agreement and the offensive was called off. There would be no new attacks. The news came 10 days after a summit in Tehran failed to produce any results. Now, weeks after Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s announcement that "this festering abscess must be liquidated," there has been a sudden turnaround. At least for the time being.
Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoygu presented the parameters of the deal at the Black Sea resort of Sochi on Monday of last week. The agreement calls for the establishment, by October 15, of a 15 to 20 kilometer-wide demilitarized corridor along the existing front line surrounding Idlib and the northern edge of Hama province. Any jihadi groups among the rebels would have to withdraw from that area five days prior to that date. A majority of rebels under Turkish control would be allowed to stay, but they would have to move tanks and artillery into central Idlib. The zone would be under the surveillance of the Turkish military and the Russian military police, who have long maintained bases here.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was opposed the offensive for a variety of reasons, some understandable, some more sinister. Storming Idlib would have driven hundreds of thousands toward the airtight Turkish-Syrian border and would have forced Ankara to take them in even as the government struggles to deal with the country’s tanking economy -- in addition to the 3 million Syrian refugees who are already in Turkey.
Geographical Buffer
Erdogan has always linked his support for Syria’s rebels with his campaign against Kurdish PKK separatists operating on Turkish and Syrian soil. Having Idlib under his control would be useful, providing him both with a human reservoir and a geographical buffer. A destroyed Idlib under Assad’s control, on the other hand, would endanger the protectorate that Turkish troops have fought so hard to establish in northern Syria in recent years.
Erdogan took significant risks to get Moscow on his side. Attacks by Assad’s troops against targets in southern Idlib had been answered with counterattacks by rebels armed with Turkish weapons and ammunition. Erdogan had also threatened to walk away from multilateral talks between Russia, Turkey and Iran on the future of Syria that were taking place in the Kazakh capital, Astana, should the offensive against Idlib go ahead.
Still, hardly anyone in Idlib believed that the horror could still be avoided. Except for Ajini, the chain-smoking ex-professor from Kurin. And since the evening of Sept. 17, his neighbors no longer consider him crazy. Whereas they used to drop by to look at his bags of cement in wonder and disbelief, Ajini says, now they come by to ask where they can buy some too.
The province of Idlib, widely known in Europe as one of the last remaining jihadist strongholds, is more than twice as large as the German state of Saarland. Its soil is fertile and was densely populated even before the war. The sense of relief that has overcome the entire province has nothing to do with ideology, but with the will to live. Suddenly, people are spending their money again. Farmers are buying fertilizer and seed. Merchants are getting back in touch with their old suppliers in Turkey and northern Iraq. And refugees are starting to return to their villages in southern Idlib.
For years, the farmer Adnan al-Sawadi was unable to harvest the crop produced by his 2,000 pistachio trees in Murik, located near the front lines - and prices were low as well. "But now, since Tuesday morning, customers are getting in touch again and saying they want to buy everything in advance." In the city of Khan Sheikhoun, the tire salesman Mohammed Mansour had to keep postponing a telephone interview because customers kept coming in. "You should have called on Sunday," he joked. "I was free the entire day."
Ahmed Dervish, an engineer and a member of the local city council, recalls the night-long debates in recent months: "Will the regime attack? Will Turkey come to the rescue? Will it betray us? Are we all going to die?" His wife, a trained pharmacist, used to dream of having her own pharmacy. But Dervish was opposed. "We had $5,000, our entire savings. We could take it with us. We couldn’t take a pharmacy." She heard about the Sochi agreement before her husband did and immediately called him: "Ahmed! They’re not going to attack! Find an empty storefront!"
Idlib rebel groups
The National Liberation Front, made up of other Turkish-led rebel groups, has more than twice as many fighters in its ranks as HTS, but ultimately the decision falls on Ankara whether to send them to destroy HTS -- like the government has said it would -- or to keep them in reserve for some later battle.
But how realistic is it that this agreement will stick? Or that it truly marks the beginning of a process that, while not exactly guaranteeing freedom and peace for the whole country, at least prevents further annihilation by Assad?
Based on experience, the opposite will likely turn out to be true. Moscow has one-after-the-other broken the "de-escalation agreements" it has entered, allowing its air force to bomb suburbs of Damascus in Eastern Ghouta and most recently in the southern Syrian province of Daraa. Idlib was the last de-escalation zone. Here, too, the attacks began according to the same pattern -- with Russian jets bombing the hospitals first.
Nothing, it seemed, could stop Assad’s last big offensive, one that would prove more murderous than all the others that preceded it. Ever since the regime regained control of eastern Aleppo in December 2016, it has given Syrians an option after every battle: Those who don’t want to submit to the regime can take a bus to Idlib. In 2018, as many as 110,000 people took advantage of this offer. This helped to placate some of the outrage in the West. But from Idlib, there is nowhere else to go.
The military victories Assad has been chalking up since 2015 aren’t thanks to his shriveled army. His successes were made possible, rather, by the Russian air force, tens of thousands of Hezbollah fighters following orders from Iran, along with Iraqi, Afghan and Pakistani militias under Iranian command.
Iran’s emissaries reportedly said at a summit in Tehran that they were not interested in bleeding in Idlib. The Iranian leadership has too many other conflicts on its mind at the moment, like Donald Trump’s decision to pull the US out of its nuclear agreement with Tehran and the fresh American sanctions that are strangling Iran’s economy. In the southern Iraqi city of Basra, demonstrators tried to burn down the offices of militias working with Iran. And Israel’s air force continues to fly bombing raids against Iranian targets in Syria.
In addition, the US will leave troops in northeastern Syria after all, contrary to an earlier announcement. And they’re not only there to fight ISIS. Some 2,200 American Special Forces will serve to expedite the Iranians’ withdrawal from Syria, with the help of the Syrian offshoot of the Kurdish PKK.
That’s what counts
Iran’s reservations could be one reason why Tehran was so quick to praise the agreement in Sochi. Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said on Twitter that "responsible diplomacy" had helped to avert war. The protection of civilians is "very important to us," a Foreign Ministry spokesman said.
Without Tehran’s mercenary army of foot soldiers, any land invasion of Idlib would have presented an indeterminate risk for Moscow. When the regime’s anti-aircraft militias shot down a Russian spy plane with a 15-person crew on the same night the agreement was reached in Tehran -- instead of the Israeli warplanes they were targeting -- it seemed like an omen of the chaos that an Idlib offensive would produce.
Syria is as far from a comprehensive peace deal now as it was before Sept. 17. But if the power dynamics on the ground in Syria have permanently shifted, it could ultimately result in a de-facto division of the country. A split-state solution wouldn’t provide real peace, but it wouldn’t exactly be Armageddon either.
"To be sure," Abdul Aziz Ajini says through a spotty connection on Skype, "we had hoped Europe" would exert is power to change Syria -- into a country in which the rights of all citizens are respected. But in the end, it wasn’t the EU’s or the UN’s calls for peace that prevented a bloodbath, but the Turkish president’s gamble with the Russians. "Whatever. We survived. That’s what counts," Ajini says.
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