On May 4, the FSA advanced beyond Syria's Kurdish canton of Afrin, which it has occupied since March 2018, entering the adjacent Shahba canton, where YPG forces that withdrew from Afrin maintain an active presence. The YPG has used the territory to launch guerrilla attacks on Turkish troops and FSA fighters.
While the FSA initially advanced and captured three villages, where the YPG claimed it had no presence, it quickly withdrew when it came under "heavy shelling", likely by Syrian regime forces which maintain a presence in Shahba. The operation was over before it began.
It seems that without close Turkish air and fire support, the militias were not willing to put up a fight and hastily retreated.
Turkey is training these proxies for a long-threatened campaign against the YPG east of the Euphrates. This "includes training on airdrop operations using Turkish army helicopters" and "lessons in tactics for storming enemy positions".
Turkey has sought to improve the effectiveness of its proxy army on several occasions.
In the August 2016 to March 2017 Euphrates Shield operation against the Islamic State (ISIS), the FSA, with close air, artillery and armour support, made some initial headway, capturing the border city of Jarablus and several ISIS-occupied towns and villages. This was largely because ISIS chose to withdraw most of its forces to the city of Al-Bab, where it dug itself in and prepared for a long fight.
In the Battle of Al-Bab, Turkey had to reinforce its proxy army, so much so it sent an equal number of Turkish soldiers and FSA fighters into battle. This exposed one of the most fundamental shortcomings of the FSA - that its primary purpose is to enable Turkey to carry out a large-scale operation in Syria while limiting the number of its own troops and tanks on the ground.
Furthermore, the FSA failed on several occasions to provide adequate infantry protection for Turkish tanks used in that operation. As a result, Turkish M60 Pattons and even more advanced Leopard II tanks were destroyed by anti-tank missiles throughout the campaign.
When Turkey launched its "Olive Branch" operation into Syria's northwest canton of Afrin in early 2018, it initially bragged it would crush the YPG there in about a week. In reality, the invasion phase ended up taking two months despite the almost complete encirclement of the outgunned and outnumbered YPG.
Also, the Kurds notably did not fight for Afrin city, aware such a confrontation would have been futile in the long-run and would have reduced the city to rubble like so many before it. Had the YPG opted to hold the city, the FSA would have been pulled into an extremely brutal and destructive urban campaign that would have seen Olive Branch drag on much longer and the FSA suffer much higher casualties.
More generally, if the FSA had been denied continuous air and fire support from the Turkish military it would have fared a lot worse against its Kurdish adversaries.
In late March 2018, several YPG units escaped Afrin to neighbouring Tal Rifaat and the wider Shahba canton to fight another day. This was primarily thanks to Russia, which briefly closed Afrin's airspace. That incident, coupled with the failed May 4 offensive, demonstrates just how limited the FSA's capabilities are without Turkish air and fire support.
Consequently, Olive Branch was not a sparkling example of FSA improvements since Euphrates Shield, despite several Turkish initiatives between the two campaigns to bolster the force.
Since then, another Turkish-backed proxy has suffered a much more embarrassing setback.
Last September, the Astana process powers Russia and Iran tasked Turkey with containing the jihadist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) group in Syria's northwestern Idlib province. This was designed to stave off a fresh Syrian regime offensive, that would almost certainly have resulted in another large influx of refugees fleeing into Turkey.
The agreement necessitated the establishment of a demilitarized zone completely free of HTS forces and heavy weapons. To make this a reality, the Turkish Army was to use its 12 observation posts around the province and its Syrian militia National Liberation Front (NLF) proxies.
Turkey utterly failed to contain HTS, which has since expanded and consolidated its control over Idlib and even parts of neighbouring Aleppo province. In January, the NLF essentially surrendered most of its positions in Idlib to the HTS, attempting to save face by calling the shambolic failure a ceasefire.
Despite its formidable size, numbering in the tens-of-thousands on paper, the NLF barely lasted a week against HTS.
Since HTS took control of the area designated for the demilitarized zone, Syria and Russia have launched a series of attacks on Idlib, starting in late April, citing the failure of Turkey and its proxies to implement an alternative solution for the region as justification.
Turkey's use of the FSA east of the Euphrates in the near future could yield it some short-term benefits. For one, it can once again use these proxies as cannon fodder so it can keep the number of casualties among its own soldiers to a minimum, something which will reduce the likelihood of widespread public opposition in Turkey to another Syria incursion.
However, in the long-term, the FSA will unlikely offer an adequate occupation force, despite the fact its fighters are themselves Syrians. In Afrin, its has carried out a blatant campaign to eradicate Afrin's Kurdish-majority demographics and character.
Consequently, it is despised by the majority of locals there, who more likely than not sympathize with continued partisan attacks of the YPG. After all, "no Kurds will ever accept the fact that part of their ancestral homeland has been taken from them".
Even in the Arab-majority Euphrates Shield zone, there are indications that the FSA's thuggish behaviour is detested by locals in the area.
If it is actually deployed into the Kurdish-majority areas east of the Euphrates in the near future, the FSA will likely face protracted resistance by the local population no matter how much Turkey arms and trains its fighters.
Ultimately, the FSA is not and will not provide the solutions Turkey needs for its myriad problems in northern Syria.
