Dozens of military members of the Turkish Armed Forces died Thursday night in an attack by Syrian government forces or their Russian allies. The events occurred in the province of Idlib, in northwestern Syria, where the Turkish Army fights in support of the Islamist rebel forces opposed to the Bachar el Asad regime.
According to a local correspondent from Dokuz8 , the Reyhanli hospital, a Turkish border town with Syria, received "a multitude of bodies and injuries." The governor of the province, Rahmi Dogan, confirmed the death of at least 22 soldiers: "There are wounded and also seriously injured," he said without confirming the number, "they have been taken to hospitals in Hatay province."
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that at least 34 were killed and that it was due to an aviation bombing in the vicinity of the town of Bulion, although he could not specify whether it was the Syrian or Russian Air Forces, which also They act in the area. Other Turkish sources, on the other hand, raise the death toll to about a hundred. Until Thursday, clashes between the Syrian regime and Turkey that began earlier this month had killed at least twenty Turkish soldiers and an undetermined number of Syrians.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has called an emergency meeting with the foreign and defense ministers, the generals in command of the Armed Forces and the head of the secret services. Also the head of the Social Democratic opposition, Kemal Kiliçdaroglu, has called an emergency meeting of his party which gives an idea of the seriousness of the situation. Another of the main political leaders of the country, Meral Aksener, has decided to cancel all his acts and return to Ankara after talking with the president by telephone. The Turkish Armed Forces have canceled all permits granted for the next few days.
The attack of the Syrian Army and its allies came after the rebel forces, with Turkish support, recovered the strategic town of Saraqib, at the confluence of the M-4 and M-5 highways, the latter crucial for traffic between the Syrian capital, Damascus, and once the main city in the north of the country, Aleppo. The rebels had maintained control of this city until the beginning of this month, when regular Syrian troops took over it.
The Government of Asad began an offensive last year to reconquer Idlib, the last stronghold of the rebel and Salafist forces opposed to the regime, and the operations gained in intensity in December. Since then, the regime - thanks to the support of the Russian and Syrian air bombings and the contribution of Pro-Iranian militias - has advanced to capture almost a third of the province, which has caused the flight of one million civilians to the Turkish border. Ankara, who fears a new wave of refugees as it already hosts about 4 million Syrians in its territory, has sent dozens of convoys of military vehicles, tanks and artillery pieces, and has delivered anti-aircraft defense weapons to rebel forces to prevent the progress of the regime.
Erdogan had given deadline until Friday for the regime to withdraw to pre-offensive positions, a front line agreed in 2018 by the employers of the various forces in the Syrian conflict: Russia, Iran and Turkey. Otherwise, the Turkish president warned, the Turkish Army "will attack the regime everywhere." Since late January, Russian and Turkish delegations have met in Ankara and Moscow to try to reach an agreement, without result. In fact, on Thursday, the Russian Defense Ministry accused Turkey of "violating Sochi's agreements" for "supporting illegal armed groups with artillery fire and the use of rums against Syrian troops." According to the Sochi agreements (2018), the parties undertake to respect a kind of ceasefire from which “terrorist” groups are excluded, a lax language since for Damascus practically all those who oppose it are.