(Bloomberg Opinion) -- It won’t hold. It can’t hold. The only question to be asked about the Idlib ceasefire agreed by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is whether it is a matter of days, weeks or months before the bloody battle for the long-besieged city in northwestern Syria is rejoined.
This ceasefire will fail for the same reason that every previous cessation of hostilities in Syria has: because the regime of Bashar al-Assad is not interested in ending the humanitarian crisis. In Idlib, as elsewhere, Assad’s strategy is to drive out civilian populations with maximum malice, and then take control of the emptied villages, towns and cities.
As Emile Hokayem, a Middle East analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, has pointed out, the humanitarian crisis is the purpose, not the product, of Assad’s military campaign. It is the only leverage he has to pressure the international community into accepting him as the legitimate ruler of Syria. If the regime’s unofficial slogan is “Assad or we burn the country,” then the coda is: “…and send millions more refugees into yours.”
The dictator in Damascus will use the truce as an opportunity to secure territory already taken, and replenish his troops, which have received a pounding from Turkish forces over the past two weeks. He will also take the time to plead with Putin for air cover ahead of another offensive.
Whether or not the Russian leader will provide it depends on a number of factors: his desire to see Assad reclaim all of the country, his economic interest in keeping Erdogan sweet, and his need to show the wider world that Russia alone decides what happens in Syria. It is conceivable that Putin will, after a pause, allow a fresh assault on Idlib by regime forces: He has no other way to help Assad keep Syria whole.
For his part, Erdogan will use the breathing room allowed by the ceasefire to focus on his ongoing confrontation with Europe over the Syrian refugees. There is little prospect of a return home for the hundreds of thousands who have fled Idlib in recent weeks. The Turkish leader has been employing a variation of Assad’s threat with the European Union: Provide us with more money for housing the refugees, or we’ll send them into Europe.
He seemed to carry through on the threat last week, by opening the borders to Greece. Thus far, the refugees heading Europe-wards have numbered in the tens of thousands. The Greeks have turned away over 26,000 people at the border; many have returned to the Turkish cities whence they came, and some are stuck in limbo between the two borders.
The Europeans are offering Greece, one of the main frontier states for entering the EU, financial help to keep the borders sealed, but their larger bet is that Erdogan’s threat is ultimately a bluff—that the numbers at the borders will not swell to hundreds of thousands, even millions. The EU hopes “to go back to the normality we had seen before last Friday,” a European Commission spokesman said on Tuesday.
In the past, Europe has talked Erdogan down from his threats by providing Turkey with substantial resources to house the refugees. But Turkish public opinion has turned against the presence of millions of refugees, so financial aid may no longer suffice.
More than likely, Erdogan will offer the EU two choices: Take some of the refugees, or back his plan to resettle a million of them in a “safe zone” in northeastern Syria. Both are unpalatable for European leaders, who fear a xenophobic backlash against migration and don’t want to be seen as giving in to Turkish pressure. The EU has previously condemned the “safe zone” plan, and threatened Turkey with sanctions and an arms embargo.
Heightened tensions between Erdogan and the EU would suit Putin very well: prizing Turkey away from the Western bloc is a longstanding Russian goal. So if the cessation of hostilities in Idlib allows for an increase in Turkish-European bellicosity, that might be an incentive to keep the guns quiet.
But that’s too slender a thread on which to hang a ceasefire. It will not hold.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Melissa Pozsgay at mpozsgay@bloomberg.net
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Bobby Ghosh is a columnist and member of the Bloomberg Opinion editorial board. He writes on foreign affairs, with a special focus on the Middle East and the wider Islamic world.
©2020 Bloomberg L.P.