Turkey faces strategic defeat in Idlib after failing to live up to its commitments on Syria

Turkey faces strategic defeat in Idlib after failing to live up to its commitments on Syria

Under the 2018 Sochi agreement, Turkey was supposed to disarm and disassociate itself from the terrorist organization Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. Its failure to do so has sown the seeds of Turkey’s inevitable defeat in Syria. When Turkey threw its weight behind the anti-Assad rebellion in 2011, it did so believing that it would be able to dictate the outcome on the ground by controlling the main organized resistance forces, namely the so-called Free Syrian Army (FSA), formed from the ranks of defectors from the Syrian Army and various bands of Islamist fighters affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood.