ISTANBUL -

"It is out of the question that the "claw-sword" will be limited to the air operation, and we will decide on the size of the ground forces that should participate," a phrase summed up by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's aspirations for Ankara, as he announced the launch of intensive raids targeting the headquarters of Kurdish organizations opposed to Turkey. In northern Syria, after Ankara accused the Kurdish People's Protection Units of masterminding the recent Istanbul bombing.

Turkey has never hidden its desire to launch a large-scale operation to remove Kurdish organizations, linked in Ankara's view to the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which is on terrorist lists in Turkey and the West, from the country's southern borders, in order to achieve Turkish "national security" from Ankara's perspective.

This Turkish demand is usually opposed by both the United States, which is allied with the Kurdish units under the name of the Syrian Democratic Forces, and Russia, which supports the Bashar al-Assad regime, and believes that the incursion of Turkish forces into the country undermines the sovereignty of its ally in Damascus.

Fill in the gaps

Observers describe the current Turkish military operation against the strongholds of the Kurdish units as broader in terms of scope and objectives, operations about which the Turkish president said he had not held talks with his US counterpart, Joe Biden, and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin.

Erdogan's talk about the joining of ground forces to the operation raises questions about the prospects for the operation, the possibilities for its development into a large-scale ground operation, and the positions of the two international forces that are deploying forces in the region.

Fakhri Erenil, retired brigadier general and vice president of the Turkish-Asian Center for Strategic Studies (TASAM), says that Turkey is seeking to carry out a military operation in a way that "bridges the gaps between the areas of operations it previously carried out in northern Syria, and clears the entire border from terrorist organizations to a depth of 30 to 35 kilometers from the border." .


Northern Syria has witnessed 4 massive military operations with the wide ground participation of Turkish forces since 2016, which is the "Euphrates Shield" (2016) against the Islamic State, and followed it up with the "Olive Branch" operation in 2018 against the People's Protection Units.

Turkish forces also launched Operation "Peace Spring" in the areas of Tal Abyad and Ras al-Ain in 2019 against the Syrian Democratic Forces, then "Spring Shield" in Idlib Governorate during 2020, which was a process of repositioning the Turkish forces already present.

Ankara believes that Operation Peace Spring, which it ended under two separate agreements with Moscow and Washington, did not achieve its goal, as the two agreements stipulated the removal of the Syrian Democratic Forces to a depth of approximately 30 kilometers from the Syrian-Turkish border.

Breadth and depth

"The breadth and depth of the ground operation are important, and it will not be possible to provide regional security and border security without removing terrorist organizations 30 to 35 kilometers from our borders," Erenil, an assistant professor at Istinye University in Istanbul, believes in a statement to Al Jazeera Net.

On the other hand, Abd al-Wahhab Assi, a researcher at the Jusoor Center for Studies, based in Gaziantep (southern Turkey), considers that the "claw-sword" is tantamount to a change in the tactic of military intervention in Syria compared to previous operations.

Asi explained to Al-Jazeera Net that the new Turkish tactic requires separating air strikes and a ground incursion in time, until the appropriate political conditions are available for the participation of ground forces in the operation.

Are the conditions right?

On the field level, all parties raised their military readiness in preparation for the possibility of escalation. On the one hand, Turkish military convoys were monitored crossing the Syrian border towards the northern Syrian region, while the Syrian Democratic Forces confirmed, through its spokesman, Aram Hanna, that it had taken "multiple defensive measures."

As for the Syrian National Army factions, which are allied with Turkey, the leader in their ranks, Mustafa Sejri, said that there are preparations in their ranks, and he said in answer to a question by Al-Jazeera Net about this matter, "Certainly, our forces are ready and ready to carry out the expected military operation with the allies in the Turkish Republic." .


However, at the international level, Russia has expressed its understanding of Turkish concerns about its security, stressing the existence of subtle differences in the approaches of Turkey and Russia to Syria, while the US State Department called on Turkey to stop the escalation in Syria to protect civilians.

Despite the US warnings, sources inside Turkey and the Syrian opposition said that Turkish warplanes penetrated the airspace controlled by Russia and the United States for the first time to attack the Kurdish People's Protection Units.

And the Central Command of the US Army said on Tuesday that its forces were "out of danger", and no raid targeted the sites where they were found.

escalation potential

The researcher at the Bridges Center, Abd al-Wahhab Assi, draws attention to the fact that Turkey's guarantee of non-collision with foreign forces requires either coordination or notification, suggesting the notification scenario, based on its possession of a very large information base that allows it to suffice with prior notification through the military and security channels between the two sides.

However, there are risks in the event of military activities of a mobile nature, according to researcher Asi, who confirms that reporting may not be sufficient to ensure non-collision and cancellation of missions, pointing to what Russia did when it canceled a military patrol that was scheduled in Ain al-Arab (a Syrian border city with Turkey), at a time when Turkish planes were carrying out attacks against PKK positions.

According to Assi, if the possibility of a collision exists during the air strikes, this possibility increases with the presence of ground participation, and he adds, "It seems that coordination at this level is absent between Turkey and the rest of the foreign forces (in Syria), and Turkey will seek during the coming period to secure it."

For his part, Turkish political analyst Firas Radwan Oglu believes that Turkey will continue to bomb the Kurdish units, pursue them through drones, and hunt their leaders through the intelligence apparatus, saying that "this will never stop."

In an interview with Al-Jazeera Net, Radwan Oglu considered that Turkey will maintain military power and prosecutions, as well as put great pressure on the United States, but at the same time it does not want Russia to lose, as well as the signs of rapprochement that Turkey is showing towards the Syrian regime.