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Turkey Stands Firm Against Russia, Even as Both Try to Step Back After a Face-Off in Syria, Turkey and Russia Try to Pull Back From the Brink
(about 4 hours later)
ISTANBUL — Turkey vowed on Friday to resist further aggression against its troops in northwestern Syria, a day after air and artillery strikes by pro-Syrian forces killed 33 Turkish soldiers, bringing Russia and Turkey close to open conflict. ISTANBUL — Turkey and Russia tried on Friday to step back from the brink of a war that neither side wants, after 33 Turkish soldiers were killed in northwest Syria by forces backing the government in Damascus.
NATO ambassadors met on Friday in an emergency session called by Turkey, a member state. They expressed ‘‘solidarity’’ with Turkey, condemned the airstrikes, and called for a de-escalation of the conflict and for a renewed cease-fire. But they did not approve any military action, let alone the no-fly zone that Turkey has demanded over Idlib, the region where the strike occurred. But tensions between the two nations — one a nuclear power, the other a NATO member — remained high, not just because of the fight in Syria, but more broadly as a contest over who will be the pre-eminent regional power as the United States scales back its global role.
Turkish officials have warned that if the pressure in Idlib is not resolved, Turkey will not be able to hold back Syrian refugees from forging across borders into Europe, which officials in Brussels have interpreted as a veiled threat to leverage a refugee crisis for cooperation from NATO. Turkey wants to protect its border with Syria, while Russia wants show that its military intervention has preserved Syria as a client state. Both sides have said they want to de-escalate, but neither side has been willing to back down, leading to fears of sliding into war. Emotions are running high and the source of their antagonism — the fate of Idlib, the last rebel stronghold in Syria — festers dangerously.
Ivan Konovalov, a Russian military analyst in Moscow, predicted that, with Washington out of the game in Syria, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, would, once again, pull back from open conflict and try to settle Syria’s future on their own.
Russia and Turkey, he said, “came to a critical point” but “we retain a relationship on the Syrian problem because we don’t have any other option, not for Russia, not for Syria.”
Russia and Turkey have been here before — teetering on the edge of all-out war, only to make up — but not with so much of their own blood spilled. Can the Kremlin and NATO’s easternmost member once again pull back from the brink?
That is the unsettling question after the deadly attacks Thursday on Turkish troops near Idlib. That is where the forces of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, aided by Russian warplanes and troops, are battling to crush the only surviving remnant of an anti-government uprising that started nine years ago with backing from the West.
Mr. Putin and Mr. Erdogan support opposite sides in a Syrian war that has killed up to 400,000 people, and also in the conflict in Libya. Similar in their leadership styles and tough-guy personalities, they have endured nine years of wary cooperation interrupted by venomous breakups over the war in Syria.
Now tensions are high following air and artillery strikes on Thursday on Turkish forces that have plunged relations between Moscow, the Syrian government’s main backer, and Ankara into a crisis even deeper than a 2015 rupture precipitated by Turkey’s shooting down of a Russian warplane near the Turkish-Syrian border.
Turkey, desperate to keep Mr. Assad’s last foes alive and slow the tide of Syrian refugees flooding across its border, is determined to prevent Idlib from falling. But Mr. Putin is just as determined to see it conquered by Mr. Assad so that Moscow can declare victory and end, or at least scale back, an expensive and increasingly risky military operation that is now in its fifth year.
That the dynamic between the two leaders has become so decisive in determining the fate of Idlib, and Syria as a whole, is a measure of how far the United States under President Trump has pulled back not only from messy foreign entanglements but also from its former role as a pre-eminent world power.
With the United States on the sidelines, Russia and Turkey have been haggling over Idlib since September 2018, when Mr. Putin met Mr. Erdogan in Sochi, Russia, and reluctantly agreed that Mr. Assad’s forces, which are also supported by Iran, would hold off on a long-anticipated final assault.
But Moscow’s impatience for an end to the conflict has grown steadily as the domestic political gains Mr. Putin enjoyed when he first sent warplanes and tanks to Syria in August 2015 have worn thin.
Reluctant to put Russian soldiers, many of them conscripts, in the line of fire in Syria, Russia has increasingly relied on mercenaries, scores of whom were killed by U.S. forces in February 2018, before President Trump ordered American troops out.
As NATO ambassadors met on Friday in Brussels in an emergency session and European leaders called for calm, Mr. Putin spoke by telephone with Mr. Erdogan in an effort to calm tensions. Mr. Trump also spoke by telephone with Mr. Erdogan and the leaders promised “additional steps to prevent the great humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in the Idlib region,” according to the Turkish government.
Asli Aydintasbas, a senior fellow with the European Council on Foreign Relations, said NATO would offer “plenty of moral support” to Turkey but that “no one wants to get militarily entangled with Russia.” This, she added, meant that “Erdogan will have to fix this with Putin.”
Russia said on Friday that it was sending two warships equipped with Kalibr cruise missiles toward Syria’s coast in the eastern Mediterranean, but insisted that its forces had played no role in the attack on Turkish troops. That contradicted reports from the scene that described a Russian jet striking a Turkish convoy, and then artillery strikes pounding Turkish troops in several buildings.
Mr. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, sought to calm tempers in his daily briefing on Friday, insisting that Russia had honored a pledge to safeguard Turkish observation posts near Idlib. He said no Turkish servicemen had been hurt in these outposts, while suggesting that it was Turkey’s fault that some of its troops strayed beyond these designated areas into territory controlled by rebels.
“The tragic instances of deaths among Turkish personnel happened in the areas where terrorist gangs were conducting offensive operations,” Mr. Peskov said.
Turkish planes, artillery and drones retaliated after the attack, pounding Syrian government positions. “Our operations will continue until the bloody hands laid on our soldiers are broken,” said Hulusi Akar, Turkey’s defense minister.
While he avoided placing direct blame on Russia, Mr. Akar noted that Thursday’s attack had been carried out even though Turkey had coordinated the location of its troops with Russian forces on the ground. He also said there were no rebel groups near the scene of the attack, as the Kremlin asserted.
Moscow denied that Turkey had shared coordinates of its troops with Russian forces, and said that it had tried to stop attacks by Syrian government forces as soon as it was told about them.
While Russia appeared eager to dial town tensions, Turkey bristled with fury at the killing of its troops.
“We will not leave the blood of our brave soldiers on the ground,” Fahrettin Altun, the director of communications in the Turkish presidency, wrote in a thread of comments posted on Twitter.
But no matter how intense its anger, Turkey has limited options. Its NATO allies, with which Turkey has had increasingly strained relations, particularly with the United States, have no appetite for a wider war.
“Turkey cannot fight Russia on its own,” said Soner Cagaptay, director of the Turkish Research Program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He said Mr. Putin, fed up with a grinding war that has only weighed on his popularity at home, “was trying to intimidate Erdogan into submission with this attack.”
But, he added, “it might backfire on the Russian leader” by pushing Turkey back toward the West.
The two countries, rival empires since the 16th century and adversaries in multiple wars in the 19th century, have in recent years shown a capacity for brinkmanship followed by de-escalation.
Omer Taspinar, who teaches at the National Defense University in Washington, said Turkey’s public fury, though perhaps heartfelt, was also theater.
“No one in Turkey wants war with Russia,” he said. “It is much more convenient to do this Kabuki dance.”
He predicted that while news media outlets loyal to Mr. Erdogan have played up Turkey’s strikes on Syrian government positions, Turkey will need to reach an agreement with Russia that could reduce its presence in Syria to an even narrower strip than now exists along the Turkish border.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia spoke to each other in an effort to calm tensions. According to the Russian side, they agreed to hold a summit meeting in the near future. When Turkey downed a Russian SU-24 attack aircraft in 2015, Mr. Putin denounced the action as a “stab in the back” and a “crime,” stirring fears of all-out war.
But emotions were still running high in Turkey on Friday. “We will not leave the blood of our brave soldiers on the ground,” Fahrettin Altun, the director of communications in the Turkish presidency, wrote in a thread of comments posted on Twitter. “The international community must act to protect civilians and impose a no-fly zone.” Following the attack on the Russian plane and the death of the co-pilot, who ejected safely but was killed on the ground, demonstrators attacked the Turkish Embassy in Moscow and a Kremlin-controlled news outlet unleashed a torrent of incendiary abuse on Turkey and its president.
Russia denied any role in the attacks, saying on Friday that none of its jets were operating in the area when they occurred. “Aircraft of the Russian Air Force did not engage in combat in the Behun vicinity,” the Defense Ministry said in a statement. In the end, Russia limited its retaliation to economic sanctions and the storm passed — with Moscow then recruiting Turkey as a customer for Russian weapons. To the fury of NATO, Turkey spurned antiaircraft systems on offer from the United States and last year took delivery of the sophisticated S-400 air defense system from Russia.
Turkey has blamed the strikes on the Syrian government. But it has also indirectly blamed Russia, saying it knew of the presence of Turkish troops and did nothing to stop the attack even after being alerted. Russia has also found in Turkey an eager partner in the energy business. Just last month, Mr. Putin was in Turkey to celebrate the opening of a natural gas pipeline running 580 miles underneath the Black Sea from Russia to Turkey, a project that the European Union and United States opposed for years because it undercut Ukraine’s energy business.
Russia has been conducting a ferocious campaign of aerial bombardment in the province of Idlib in support of the Syrian offensive to seize control of the last rebel-held region. This week’s escalation of tensions between Moscow and Ankara prompted an exasperated we-told-you-so from Washington.
Turkey has twice staged incursions over the border, the latest in October after the United States pulled back from the region, with Mr. Erdogan arguing that Turkey needed to create a buffer zone and flush out Kurdish forces that it considers terrorists. “I hope that President Erdogan will see that we are the ally of their past and their future and they need to drop the S-400,” Kay Bailey Hutchison, the Trump administration’s ambassador to NATO, told reporters in Washington.
But that mission threatens to embroil Turkey deeper in the Syrian conflict, placing it increasingly in direct confrontation with Russia, which supports the government of Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad. Andrew E. Kramer contributed reporting from Moscow.
Turkey’s defense minister, Hulusi Akar, said the attack was carried out even though the Turkish troops had coordinated their location with Russian forces on the ground. He added that there were no other armed groups near the Turkish units at the time of the attack, as Russian officials have suggested.
“Following the first strike, although another warning was made, the attack continued; during those airstrikes even ambulances were hit,” he said in comments to the Anadolu news agency in the Turkish border city of Hatay.
Turkish planes, artillery and drones retaliated after the attack, pounding the Syrian government positions responsible, Mr. Aksar said. “Our operations will continue until the bloody hands laid on our soldiers are broken,” he said.
The Russian Defense Ministry rejected Turkey’s assertion that it had alerted Russian forces before the strikes. “Immediately after obtaining information about injured Turkish servicemen, the Russian side took comprehensive measures to completely stop shelling by the Syrian military,” its statement said.
Moscow also denied that Turkey had shared coordinates of its troops with Russian forces, saying they tried to stop the attacks as soon as they were told about them.
While there was no way to resolve the conflicting accounts, Russia is known to practice hybrid warfare, of which lies and deception are an integral part. In Crimea, for instance, it took nearly a year before Mr. Putin admitted that the “green men” who invaded the territory were in fact Russian soldiers without insignia.
Reports from the scene described a Russian jet striking a Turkish convoy and then artillery strikes pounding Turkish troops in several buildings. The prolonged strikes prevented rescuers from reaching the wounded, Ahmed Rehal, a Syrian journalist, reported.
Turkey was not able to evacuate the casualties by air, because Russia controls the airspace in northwestern Syria. As a result, rescue workers and civilians were forced to transport the dead and wounded to the Turkish border in trucks.
Sergei V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, said at a news briefing following talks with Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn of Luxembourg on Friday that Russia’s presence in Syria was justified. “We insist that there should be no compromises with terrorists, who have been rearing their head after the so-called Arab Spring broke out in 2011,” he said.
Russia said earlier on Friday it was sending two warships armed with cruise missiles to waters off the Syrian coast.
NATO ambassadors met for their emergency session under Article 4 of the alliance’s founding treaty, which allows any NATO member to request talks when it believes its “territorial integrity, political independence or security” is threatened. The talks do not commit the 29-nation alliance to any particular action or response.
‘‘Allies condemn the continued indiscriminate airstrikes by the Syrian regime and Russia in Idlib Province,” said the NATO secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg, who was chairman of the talks. “I call on them to stop their offensive, to respect international law and to back U.N efforts for a peaceful solution.”
Mr. Stoltenberg added: “This dangerous situation must be de-escalated and we urge an immediate return to the 2018 cease-fire to avoid the worsening of the horrendous humanitarian situation in the region.”
Mr. Stoltenberg said the alliance would “augment its air defenses” protecting Turkey “against the threat of missile attacks from Syria,” but that was all.
“NATO provides political and practical support, constantly assessing and looking into what more they can do,” Mr. Stoltenberg said in response to a question.
The consultations did not take place under Article 5, which is about mutual self-defense and refers to an attack on the territory of any member. The attack on Turkish troops did not take place on Turkish soil.
Ian Bond, head of foreign policy studies at the Center for European Reform in London, warned that “if the Turks are driven out of Idlib, then there is nothing in the way of a massacre.” That would have security implications and implications for refugee flows, Mr. Bond said.
“NATO has to show it’s standing behind Turkey and send a clear message to Putin that there has to be a cost, not necessarily military, for what they’re doing in Syria,” Mr. Bond said.
Given Mr. Erdogan’s position and desire not to lose face, Mr. Bond suggested that Turkey may be more likely now than before to try to defend Idlib from the Syrian government.
Also on Friday, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell Fontelles, warned that “there is a risk of sliding into a major open international military confrontation. It is also causing unbearable humanitarian suffering and putting civilians in danger.”
In a tweet, Mr. Borrell called for the escalation around Idlib to “stop urgently,” and underlined that “the E.U. will consider all necessary measures to protect its security interests. We are in touch with all relevant actors.”
Steven Erlanger contributed reporting from Brussels, and Oleg Matsnev from Moscow.