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The Syrian rebel commander stared at photographs of his fighters on the hilly frontline at the Kurdish enclave of Afrin, their pickup trucks stalled in the mud after a torrential downpour of rain.
“It’s going to be a tough battle, maybe five or six months,” he said. “[But] we have nobody except Turkey.”
The image of the soldiers bogged down in a fight against Kurdish militants captured the central predicament of the Syrian rebel fighters, about 10,000 strong, who are spearheading a battle ordered by Turkey.
Abandoned by all other international allies and very nearly defeated, Syria’s armed opposition now finds itself waging a battle against Syrian Kurdish militias on behalf of Ankara, a patron that in recent months has pursued geopolitical and national security interests that are far more important to it than the opposition’s aim of ousting the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad.
It highlights the rebels’ deep dependence on Turkey, their one remaining benefactor, and the powerlessness of Syrians to determine the course of a civil war that has now lasted nearly seven years.
“We have to reinforce and start over,” the rebel commander said. “The armed Syrian revolution was defeated militarily, but it wasn’t Bashar al-Assad who won, and the fact that there is an opposition at all is a victory in itself against the entire world. Syrians have zero influence over any decision related to Syria.”
Syrian rebels patrol in muddy conditions in the Afrin region. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
Interviews with nine Syrian rebel commanders and officials, most taking part in the Afrin campaign, show they are determined to stand by Turkey, the only country they say continued to support and train their forces despite global indifference.
They spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss relations with Turkey, a sensitive matter for commanders and officials allied with Ankara and with offices in the country.
Turkey launched a major offensive a week ago in Syria, named Operation Olive Branch, spearheaded on the ground by a force of about 10,000 Syrian rebels.
Ankara hopes to dislodge the Democratic Union party (PYD) and its military wing, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), from the Kurdish-majority enclave of Afrin, which borders Turkey.
Ankara has been pounding the canton’s border towns with artillery fire and thousands of people have reportedly fled, many of them to Afrin city.
The campaign has set it on a collision course with the US, which provided air cover and direct military support to the Kurdish militias who led the ground assault on Islamic State strongholds in Raqqa and northern Syria. But Ankara considers the YPG as the Syrian wing of the Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK), a designated terrorist group that has fought a decades-long insurgency against the Turkish state.
“We will continue our fight until there is no terrorist on our border leading to Iraq,” the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, said in a speech in Ankara on Friday, vowing to “clean up” the city of Manbij, east of Afrin, also held by the YPG.
A YPG flag flying near an entrance to the city of Afrin. Photograph: George Ourfalian/AFP/Getty Images
It is Turkey’s second major campaign in Syria. In August 2016 it launched the Euphrates Shield offensive, also spearheaded on the ground by Syrian rebels, which ousted Isis from a number of key towns close to the border and limited the YPG’s westward expansion.
Olive Branch was launched after the US announced it would build a 30,000-strong border force including the YPG to patrol Syria’s frontiers and prevent Isis’s re-emergence, a prospect that Ankara decided was an intolerable national security threat.
But the campaign has created a crisis of conscience among Syria’s mainstream opposition, long divided and scattered after military setbacks against Assad and his allies Russia and Iran, and beset by infighting and advances by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a coalition led by a former al-Qaida affiliate.
Some see it as in effect the end of the Syrian uprising that began with peaceful protests against Assad’s police state in 2011, with opposition fighters working to advance Turkey’s interests at the expense of the revolution’s goals.
But rebel officials and commanders interviewed by the Guardian say Turkey has helped them train thousands of fighters who could form the core of a unified rebel army, providing a lifeline in their battle against Assad. They say a victory in Afrin would open a ground corridor into Idlib province, controlled by HTS and under regime assault, allowing them to launch a full-scale attack to purge al-Qaida from the area.
They also resent the PYD and YPG, which they accuse of harbouring separatist sentiments and of cooperating with the Assad regime, in particular helping precipitate the fall of Aleppo in 2016, a blow the opposition has never recovered from, by seizing a rebel supply road six months earlier.
Ankara hosts 3.5 million Syrian refugees and lets the opposition reside in Turkey, while the US has stopped much of its help for the rebels. The CIA cut support late last year that was ferreted through a joint operations command centre in Turkey, according to several rebel commanders. “Turkey is doing something, and you have to appreciate these efforts, otherwise we would be bastards,” said one rebel official involved in the Afrin campaign. “Turkey hasn’t abandoned us, and we cannot abandon them. We need them more than they need us.”
But Turkey’s interests have diverged from those of the rebels over the last two years, as its focus turned to the Kurdish militias and it sought a rapprochement with Russia, Assad’s most important ally, to kickstart peace negotiations.
Turkish officials in briefings no longer demand that Assad be ousted outright, although Erdoğan recently described him in a speech as a terrorist. Ankara informed the government in Damascus in writing about the Olive Branch operation.
“It’s a cliche now that Turkey’s primary concerns in Syria are the Kurds, the Kurds, the Kurds,” said one western diplomat.
In one example, confirmed by multiple rebel officials, a 700-strong Euphrates Shield force was sent to the Turkish border crossing with Idlib in August to prepare for the first phase of a ground campaign against HTS, a battle many of the rebels were eager to prosecute.
A Syrian rebel fighter in the Afrin region. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
They were turned back, as Moscow, Tehran and Ankara closed in on a “de-escalation” deal that included Idlib to reduce violence around the country.
The rebels have not extracted any promises from Turkey to support a future Idlib campaign against HTS. But they said they would need international backing anyway to launch it, and Turkey continues to support a project for a national rebel army that has so far trained between 10,000-15,000 fighters, mostly from Euphrates Shield forces.
The rebel officials interviewed said battling the YPG was also a necessity because it wanted an independent state within Syria. They used language similar to Turkey’s, describing the US-backed militia as a terrorist group and pointing to allegations that it had displaced Arabs from cities and towns where they were the majority.
Still, while many rebels say they believe in the strategic wisdom of the Afrin operation, they are under no illusions that they have much of a say in the matter.
“It is simply an international battle,” said one rebel official in a faction taking part in the Afrin campaign. “Neither the regime nor the opposition has a say.”
“We have to fight for our survival,” he added.
(THE GUARDIAN)
