Assad readies last major showdown of Syria war

Bloomberg

Syrian troops are readying an offensive against the last remaining opposition bastion, an assault that could draw in the US, displace hundreds of thousands of civilians and cement President Bashar al-Assad’s hold over the country if his forces prevail.
The attack on the northwest province of Idlib is expected soon, weeks after government troops—whose march from possible defeat to near victory after seven years of war has been propelled by Russian and Iranian allies—retook the southern provinces of Suwaida and Daraa, the cradle of the 2011 revolt against the Syrian president.
The scale and timing will feature prominently on Friday, when Russian President Vladimir Putin meets his counterparts from Iran and Turkey. The three have a shared interest in defeating thousands of extremists in Idlib, many of them foreigners. But Putin and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan have other worries that may combine to restrict Syrian forces. A prolonged battle that kills large numbers of civilians might push a destabilising new wave of refugees north into Turkey, while dealing a major blow to Russian ambitions of eventually winning Western acceptance for Assad staying in power. “The summit is necessary to talk Erdogan into not
interfering with the Idlib operation,” said Alexander Shumilin, a Middle East analyst at the Institute of Europe in Moscow, noting how Turkey could order its forces into action if it
felt threatened.

‘Bigger War’
In return for Turkish acquiescence at the talks, Russia, Iran and Assad will “limit the scale so it doesn’t spread too much,” he said. The discussions “are needed to keep Erdogan from turning all this into a bigger war.”
The Syrian army fired shells into Idlib, with loud explosions heard at the Turkish border, according to Turkey’s Hurriyet newspaper. Aircraft and armored vehicles were moved from major military bases as a precautionary measure in case of airstrikes to punish Assad’s government, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the war through activists on the ground, said in an emailed statement.