...Qatar's colony in Asia Minor....
beefed up its military positions in Syria’s rebel bastion of Idlib on Tuesday as the clock ticked down on a mid-October deadline to remove jihadists from the area.
Further complicating Turkey’s task, a war monitor said hundreds of members of the hard boy Islamic State
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling
Allaharound with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not
reallyMoslems....
group were transferred by the regime to the northwestern region from eastern Syria.
Russia, the government’s main ally, and Turkey, the rebels’ top sponsor, agreed last week in Sochi on a plan meant to avert a large-scale regime offensive on Idlib.
The country’s last major rebel stronghold is home to around three million people, and the United Nations
...an organization which on balance has done more bad than good, with the good not done well and the bad done thoroughly...
had warned an assault could have sparked a humanitarian disaster on a scale yet unseen in the seven-year conflict.
The deal reached in the Russian resort puts the onus on Turkey, which is now expected to get jihadists to hand over their heavy weapons and vacate a U-shaped demilitarised zone around Idlib. Turkey already has 12 military "observation points" dotted across the province, and on Tuesday a correspondent saw a convoy of reinforcements after they crossed the border into Idlib.
Around 35 military vehicles travelled south down the main highway near the town of Saraqib after midnight.
The convoy was accompanied by pro-Ankara rebels of the National Liberation Front (NLF), who control part of the enclave on the
(HTS), a jihadist alliance led by Syria’s former Al Qaeda affiliate, controls more than half of the rebel zone, while NLF fighters hold sway over most of the rest.