Lord of the Flies level shit there
Greetings anons,
Just wanted to give my perspective on the recent Syria happenings. I'll admit first off that this is based on what I have seen, and by no means is it a complete picture, but I have seen a lot of incorrect info getting posted here that are heavily slanted in Syria/Iran's favor, and I just wanted to remind everyone that Iran has a fairly large cyber team and part of their job is disinformation. I've come to believe that a lot of Syria updates here have been influenced by Iranian interests one way or another. Having said that, I'll provide what I see happening based off of information publicly available and provide my opinions on the matter.
To start off, Turkey made a very good move recently that backed Russia into a corner. As the US withdrew main forces out of Northern Syria Russia became more involved in brokering their style of 'peace' in the region. Turkey has done a fairly masterful job of playing both sides, first with testing the waters in the north with their incursion and now in Idlib. Russia tried to play both sides with Turkey and Syria and have put themselves in a corner where they have to decide one over the other.
Turkey is a NATO ally, and while I'm not the biggest fan of Turkey there are still obligations that NATO is responsible for in the event that Russia outright attacks Turkey. Though NATO has been showing cold feet on this lately, the fact of the matter is that the US has backed Turkey, ergo NATO (whether they want to or not) will back Turkey.
Essentially, Russia doesn't want a fight with NATO, and is very limited in the involvement that they can actually perform in Idlib now that Turkish forces are overtly operating in the area. What that does is basically make the fight a Syria vs. Turkey fight, and Turkey has a fresh 'modernized' military ready to go. Meanwhile Syria's military has been weathered and beaten down over a decade long civil war. You decide which can win in a fight.
Like it or not, Turkey is a very stable government within the middle east and has the troops and income to exert that stability if it so chooses, which it has apparently decided to in Idlib. The people's reactions to Turkey within Syria has admittedly been mixed, but you rarely see anything pro-Turkey in the news. There is notable support for Turkey's actions in Syria, it's just never talked about.
Obviously I can't give too much away, but here is my prediction based on publicly available knowledge and also based on understanding that Q/POTUS have a master plan:
Turkey will probably take a chunk of Syria and keep it. Nobody that can stop them has the interest of doing so. We will probably see them take Manbij as well to make a straight line between their security zone and the Idlib province, but that's speculation. We will likely remain in eastern Syria for a while until it becomes more manageable, and then probably gift the region to the Kurds so that they can unify it with semi-autonomous Kurdistan. Semi-autonomous Kurdistan in Iraq COULD EFFECTIVELY declare themselves fully autonomous right now, and Iraq wouldn't be able to stop them - but first they will probably deal with ISIS. Little problems before big problems. Additionally, Trump just free'd up a healthy amount of troops and resources from Afghanistan that we could potentially use elsewhere, and you better bet that there are parties in the middle east that don't want a higher concentration of American badassery at their doorstep.
So the way I see it, contrary to popular belief, we could be setting the middle east up for peace. Turkey takes their chunk, Russia has to settle with helping out what remains of Syria, Kurds get more land and money (oil in Eastern Syria) and provide a buffer between Iraq and Syria, and Iraq will eventually root out the corruption in their government (it's been a long and hard process but the people are relentless).
Just two cents.