Demilitarized zones aren’t safe

The Washington Post reports:

“The territory controlled by the Syrian opposition must be demilitarized,” Erdogan told reporters in the Russian town of Sochi. “But together with Russia, we will put our efforts into clearing those territories of radical elements,” he said, referring to al-Qaeda-linked extremists in Idlib.

What could go wrong?

Everything. Such “safe zones,” where civilians are herded for supposed protection, are vulnerable. There are foreseeable problems:

1. They can’t protect themselves but will have to rely for protection on Turkish and Russian forces as well as restraint by the regime and Iranian-backed militias. The Russians are unreliable at best. The regime, the Iranians, and their friends are pernicious.
2. Provocateurs will hide in these safe zones and give nearby Syrian and Iranian-backed forces an excuse to attack them, most likely using barrel bombs and other stand-off weapons.
3. Eventually, the Syrian opposition people who take refuge in such safe zones will be turned over to a regime that has been killing “reconciled” fighters and likely also civilians.
4. People who fail to take refuge in what amount to unsafe zones will be subjected to the kind of brutal bombardments that have characterized the regime takeovers of East Ghouta, Aleppo, Daraa and other former opposition-controlled area.

To be effective, civilian protected zones would require the presence and active assistance of impartial military forces, which simply don’t exist in Syria, as well as a kind of restraint neither the regime nor the Iranian-backed forces have shown. Woe betide the innocent civilian who thinks she will be safe in a demilitarized zone.

What would be better? Agreement for the Turks to take over all of Idlib and do what they can to disarm and arrest extremists would be better. Non-extremist fighters would then cooperate with the Turks and ensure the safety of the entire province, provided the regime and its friends would agree not to attack. That is what the regime should want if it looks forward to the eventual reintegration of Idlib with the rest of the country.

But Assad is not into peaceful reintegration. He is trying to prove his state so fierce (the word Steve Heydemann uses to great effect) that no one will ever try to buck his rule again. This is achievable, as the Algerian regime has demonstrated, and Egypt’s President Sisi is trying to confirm. When you’ve gone to war for more than seven years and presided over the deaths of more or less half a million people, people would be stupid not to be afraid. Now all Assad has to do is kill a few thousand more and he’ll have achieved a large part of his objective.

He will still however have a big chunk of his country outside his regime’s: control: the north and east are in the hands of the Turks and Americans, supported by Turkman, Kurdish and Arab allies. If they could somehow act in a unified way, Ankara and Washington would have some serious cards to play in the coming diplomacy over post-war Syria. We’ll have to wait and see whether they can somehow make their common interests in not returning the areas they occupy to Syrian and Iranian control prevail without a political transition in Damascus over their differences with respect to the Kurds. Either they hang together, or they hang separately, in Benjamin Franklin’s striking phrase.

Here are Putin and Erdogan announcing their agreement: