One month before the UN Security Council voted on the continuation of humanitarian aid for northern Syria, the Syrian army, supported by Russian fighter planes, attacked the rebel province of Idlib.

According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, at least ten people were killed in the most serious violation of the ceasefire, which has been in force since March 2020.

Rainer Hermann

Editor in politics.

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    2.6 million people live in Idlib, of whom every second has fled other parts of Syria.

    They are supplied by UN aid organizations via the Bab al-Hawa border crossing near the Turkish border town of Reyhanli.

    However, the UN Security Council resolution enabling these aid deliveries expires on July 10th.

    Russia wants to let it expire without replacement.

    Bab al-Hawa is the last of the originally many border crossings through which aid supplies have been brought into areas in northern Syria that are not controlled by the Syrian regime.

    Three have already been closed at the instigation of Russia.

    3.7 million Syrian refugees in Turkey

    If Russia does not agree to the extension of the resolution, a humanitarian catastrophe threatens, warns the human rights organization Human Rights Watch.

    Several hundred trucks pass the Bab al-Hawa border crossing every day.

    The Syrian regime is urging that supplies come exclusively from Damascus and the Syrian Red Crescent.

    It is feared that aid supplies will not reach their addressees.

    In addition, there could then be attacks against the regime's presence, which could become a pretext for conquering the province.

    This would lead to a military conflict with more than 10,000 Turkish soldiers who are defending the rebel province in around twenty so-called observation posts.

    The last Syrian offensive against Idlib from January to March 2020 had displaced 1.4 million people from the south of the province.

    About a million of them reached the tent cities on the border wall with Turkey.

    400,000 people took shelter in the neighboring province of Afrin, which Turkey has been occupying since the beginning of 2018.

    The Turkish government indicates that, in order to avoid increasing pressure along the Turkish border, it would direct new flows of refugees into the areas it controls in northern Syria.

    There are already 3.7 million Syrian refugees living in Turkey, and the number is growing by 100,000 every year.

    In northern Syria, Turkey rules over four areas with seven percent of the area of ​​Syria, in which four million people live.

    The first operation, called the "Euphrates Shield", in 2016 and 2017, north of Aleppo, aimed to liberate the region from IS.

    Operation "Olive Branch" followed in Afrin in 2018 to end the rule of the YPG, a sister organization of the PKK.

    The same goal was served by the invasion of a 120-kilometer border strip between Tal Abyad and Ras al-Ain at the end of 2019.

    Demographic changes

    In addition to the politically motivated fight against the Syrian Kurdish organization, the Turkish leadership wants to use the three operations to create safe areas in which they can resettle Syrian refugees.

    According to the Turkish government, it has already returned 435,000 refugees from Turkey to Syria and resettled 550,000 Syrian internally displaced persons in the regions it controls.

    The EU member states and human rights organizations criticize the demographic changes in the zones controlled by Turkey.

    Sunni Arab Syrians are now settling where the majority of Kurds used to live.

    The governors of the neighboring Turkish provinces coordinate the civil measures in the regions, such as the repair of the infrastructure and state services.

    Turkish officials take over on-site tasks, the Turkish lira is the means of payment, the local economy is integrated into the Turkish one.

    Refugees from Idlib would initially find safety in the neighboring province of Afrin.

    In 2011, 90 percent of the 200,000 inhabitants there were Kurds.

    Before the Turkish invasion of 2018, the Kurds made up 80 percent of the then 500,000 inhabitants.

    Most of the Kurds fled to Kurdish administered areas such as Kobane.

    Families of the Turkish mercenaries and Arab internally displaced persons moved into their homes.

    Human Rights Watch also criticized the looting of Kurdish property by the mercenaries.

    The American think tank Center for American Progress describes the evidence of deliberate demographic changes and forced evictions as overwhelming in an extensive study.

    Internally displaced persons from Idlib have also been admitted to the Euphrates Shield region since the end of 2019.

    Turkey sees it as a “safe zone” and is preparing it with numerous measures to absorb new flows of refugees.

    In the third region between Tal Abyad and Ras al-Ain, 25 percent of the population were Kurds before the Turkish invasion.

    Today almost exclusively Arabs live there.

    Turkey wants to settle one million refugees in this sparsely populated region in the long term.

    For most Syrians, however, life in Turkey is still more attractive than in the Turkish-controlled areas of Syria.