President Vladimir Putin and Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan have spearheaded an unlikely but so far sustained partnership to bring peace to Syria since late 2016
There is still a hope in Moscow to find an agreement with Ankara that could allow the Syrian regime to take control of Idlib without a new rupture with Turkey, says analyst
ISTANBUL: Russia and Turkey are in intense negotiations to ensure the rebel-held province of Idlib does not become a breaking point in their alliance on Syria, but the long term fate of the area still risks provoking a rupture, analysts say.
President Vladimir Putin and Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan have spearheaded an unlikely but so far sustained partnership to bring peace to Syria since late 2016, despite being in theory on opposite sides of the civil war.
The cooperation now faces its biggest test over Syria’s northwestern province of Idlib, bordering Turkey, which Syrian President Bashar Assad wants to recapture to complete a string of military successes.
Idlib has over the last years become an increasingly densely populated region where problems in resolving the seven-year Syrian civil war were effectively dumped to be resolved at a later date.
That moment is now drawing closer with expectations of a government offensive and fears over the combustible mix in the province of displaced people from other Syrian regions, moderate rebels and Islamist radicals.
Erdogan has been a champion of the anti-Assad rebels and bitterly denounced Putin in the crisis that followed the shooting down of a Russian war plane by Turkey in November 2015.
But the burgeoning alliance with Moscow, which also includes cooperation in trade, energy and defense, is now of critical importance to Ankara at a time when a crisis in relations with the US has caused the Turkish lira to bleed value.
“There is still a hope in Moscow to find an agreement with Ankara that could allow the Syrian regime to take control of Idlib without a new rupture with Turkey,” Kerim Has, a Moscow-based analyst on Turkish-Russian relations, told AFP.
He said Moscow was carefully watching Turkey-US ties and could launch a full operation at the “moment when the Turkish leadership is in most desperate need of the Kremlin’s encouragement during a deepening Turkey-US crisis.”…..“Russia and Turkey are trying to find agreement with suitable terms for both sides,” Timur Akhmetov, Ankara-based researcher at the Russian International Affairs Council, told AFP……
Source: arabnews.com
Saturday, May 2, 2026
