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Surviving in the "forgotten province" of Syria
"This will be much more catastrophic than anything we have witnessed so far" in the Syrian conflict, said Mona Yaoubian, a Syria specialist at the US Institute of peace. She said that the large number of civilians and the fact that there was nowhere to go were making impending fighting a particular risk to civilians. "I think obviously the regime will stop at nothing to take over this territory," she said. "We are therefore expecting a particularly brutal assault from the Syrian regime supported by the Russians"
Andrew Tabler, an expert on Syria at the Washington Institute, said it was important to monitor how the aggression unfolds: "Does this focus only on certain arteries of the road? Does it grow beyond? This is where it becomes very difficult. Because you have about 3 million people in Idlib and you have a lot of extremists in this region.
The Russian Defense Ministry said on Wednesday that its planes had bombed targets belonging to al-Nusra, the former al Qaeda affiliate that is now part of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a coalition of Islamist groups, in Idlib on Tuesday. They did not target the civilian areas, said the ministry …if the Russians in the past have claimed that the civilians that they killed in Syria were terrorists. Indeed, these civilian areas will probably be discussed this Friday when the leaders of Russia, Iran and Turkey will meet in Iran to quote the Kremlin "new joint efforts to ensure the long-term normalization of the situation in Syria. . "The United States is not part of this process.
Russia's air strike came a few days after President Donald Trump and the Russian Foreign Ministry went back and forth. The US president tweeted Sunday that "Assad" should not recklessly attack the province of Idlib, warning that it would be a "grave humanitarian mistake". Trump, whose skepticism about the US military's involvement abroad is well-documented The United States hit targets in the country following the use of chemical weapons by Assad in April 2017 and April 2018.
President Bashar al-Assad of Syria should not rashly attack the province of Idlib. Russians and Iranians would make a grave humanitarian mistake by participating in this potential human tragedy. Hundreds of thousands of people could be killed. Do not let this happen!
– Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 3, 2018
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, however, dismissed Trump's tweet: "The mere act of speaking with a few warnings, without considering the very dangerous and negative potential of the whole situation in Syria, is probably not a problem. complete approach ". I said.
Assad and Syria maintain that they are fighting terrorists. Indeed, among the many rebel groups present in Idlib, there is HTS, the alliance led by the former Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria. It is almost certain that when Russia and Assad talk about terrorists, they mean HTS, but they also put this label on any group fighting the Assad regime. Indeed, Assad and his allies seldom distinguished between Islamists and moderate groups when they unleashed weapons of war in rebel-held areas with large civilian populations. Tuesday, Mike Pompeo, US Secretary of State, told reporters that he shared Russia's concerns about "terrorism emanating from north, northwestern Syria … [who] need to be taken care of … We hope this can be solved diplomatically. "
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