Turkey faces strategic defeat in Idlib after failing to live up to its commitments on Syria
Under the 2018 Sochi agreement, Turkey was supposed to disarm and disassociate itself from the terrorist organization Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. Its failure to do so has sown the seeds of Turkey’s inevitable defeat in Syria.
When Turkey threw its weight behind the anti-Assad rebellion in 2011, it did so believing that it would be able to dictate the outcome on the ground by controlling the main organized resistance forces, namely the so-called Free Syrian Army (FSA), formed from the ranks of defectors from the Syrian Army and various bands of Islamist fighters affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood. But the rebellion took on a life of its own, and in 2012 a Syrian Islamist fighting for Al-Qaeda in Iraq returned to Syria to form a new resistance organization loyal to Al-Qaeda which became known as the Al Nusra Front.
Over time, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani’s Al Nusra Front emerged as the most effective anti-regime combat organization, surpassing the Turkish-controlled FSA for relevance on the battlefield. Al Nusra Front’s Al-Qaeda affiliation, however, impaired its ability to receive outside funding, arms and equipment, and starting in 2015 Al Nusra Front underwent a series of rebranding efforts, before assuming its current name, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), in early 2017. But the rebranding efforts could not alter the fact that HTS remained a designated terrorist group in the eyes of much of the world, including Turkey.
Today, Jolani’s HTS comprises the bulk of the 30,000 or so anti-regime fighters operating in Idlib province, the last bastion of rebel-controlled territory in Syria. The Syrian Army, backed by pro-Iranian militias and the Russian Air Force, has been attacking both FSA and HTS positions in Idlib since 2015 to restore Syrian government authority over the area. In September 2018, to spare the civilian population in Idlib from the depravations of war, a ceasefire was agreed to by the leaders of Russia, Turkey, and Iran during a summit convened in the Russian Black Sea resort of Sochi.
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/481197-turkey-idlib-syria-sochi-agreement/