In what was the largest Turkish incursion into Syria in the five-year civil war , Turkish tanks and special forces, and US planes on Wednesday helped Syrian rebels retake the town of Jarablus. In doing so they simultaneously ousted Islamic State from one of its last border strongholds and blocked the advance of Kurdish militias into strategically important territory.
The move by Ankara adds yet another layer of bewildering complexity to and shift in the balance of forces in Syria’s five-year war, a three-dimensional game of chess involving multiple overlapping and conflicting alliances, great powers and their proxies.
The US backed the Turkish initiative against IS, a proactive stance which it has long sought, but in doing so found itself forced to warn off the Kurds (YPG) who had been pivotal to US efforts to break the grip of IS in the area. They have taken control of a vast strip of Syrian territory along the Euphrates to the Iraq border. Unless they withdrew their forces from the area, US vice president Joe Biden warned, they would no longer get assistance from the US.
Turkey's President Erdogan regards the Kurds, an effective fighting force, as playing a double game, using the war to advance a de facto autonomous region inside Syria that Ankara sees as a potential boon to the PKK fighting at home in Turkey.
He believes the Kurds to be as much a threat as IS and is determined to drive a wedge between them and other non-IS rebels. One Kurdish leader warned, however, that the Turks will be defeated “in the Syrian quagmire”.
“Turkey is determined for Syria to retain its territorial integrity and will take matters into its own hands if required to protect that territorial unity,” Erdogan said in a speech in Ankara on Wednesday. “We have only ever sought to help the people of Syria and have no other intentions.” Some scepticism would be justified.
What Erdogan’s intentions are in the quagmire now is not clear. Is this the first of several offensives? Although the Syrian government protested at the incursion into its territory by the neighbouring state, the protest was muted, some suggesting a quiet nod of approval from Damascus which is only too happy to see IS get a bloody nose.
Turkey appears also to have moderated its insistence that President Assad must go before there is a rapprochement with Syria, and has rebuilt its relations with Assad's ally Russia which will presumably not wish to bomb the Nato state.
Moscow and Washington have even suggested that they could support mutually agreed, “vetted” is how some put it, rebels engaged in the fight against IS becoming part of a transitional Damascus regime. Not that the rebels are enamoured with the idea.
But such considerations and potential reshuffling of alliances – fed, not least, by the US’s determination to keep Erdogan on side – mean that a new military and political reality may be emerging in the bloodied countryside of Syria.