Turkey’s Erdogan Gambles On Idlib

After almost a decade of internal strife and proxy wars, the Syrian crisis is transitioning to a higher threshold of inter-state conflict: Turkey and Syria are on the verge of conventional warfare. The epicenter of this confrontation is Idlib, where the regime of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad is pushing ahead to reassert its territorial control over the northwest of the country.

Its indiscriminate bombing of the civilian population, designed to de-populate this zone, is creating a large wave of internally-displaced people moving towards the Turkish border in fear of their lives. The United Nations puts the number at near 700,000, more than half of them children.