On the same day that the ceasefire failed, Turkey’s President Erdogan announced that his country’s forces and their allies planned to push towards the ISIS-held town of al Bab. Al Bab thus seems poised to attract the competing efforts of Turkey, the SDF and the Assad regime, as all of these close in on this last major ISIS stronghold near the Turkish border.
President Erdogan also announced that as part of “Operation Euphrates Shield,” Turkey may expand the area it occupies in Syria from the present 900 km2 to an area of some 5000 km2 . That would make Turkey’s “safe zone” in Syria more than 30 km deep and up to 200 km long. By way of comparison, Israel’s zone of occupation in south Lebanon between the early 1980s and their withdrawal in 2000 was some 20 km at its deepest and about 100 km long, creating an area of some 900 km2 .
The similarities do not end there, however. Just like Turkey’s intervention in the Syrian civil war, Israel justified the occupation of civil-war torn south Lebanon by the need to protect its borders and prevent the creation of a “terrorist enclave” there. It did so with the cooperation of a Lebanese militia it equipped and backed – the South Lebanese Army. Like Turkey, Israel enjoyed a serious advantage in military power and technology over the non-state actors active in the area. Just like with Turkey, the Israeli intervention set off alarm bells in Damascus and Tehran as well, which reacted by sponsoring militias like Hezbollah to wage guerrilla war upon the occupying Israeli forces.
There are differences in the two cases as well, of course. South Lebanon looked relatively simple compared to the dizzying array of actors involved in northern Syria. The fighters of the South Lebanese army were really from the immediate area, not imported from several hundred kilometers away as Turkey has done with the FSA rebels it brought in. The Palestinian forces in south Lebanon were not universally reviled like ISIS is, nor were they keeping the border with Israel quiet the way that the SDF, Syrian Kurds and even ISIS (mostly) were. South Lebanon was also a significant Syrian interest rather than actual Syrian territory. Finally, Russian and American forces were not as directly involved in the fighting in Lebanon as they are in Syria.
The key differences should lead Turkey to expect a harder time in Syria than Israel experienced in Lebanon, however. Particularly if Turkey expands its zone of Syrian operations to some 5000 km2 – an area roughly five times the size of the former Israeli zone in south Lebanon – things could become very ugly very fast for Turkey.
Currently, Turkey is resupplying its forces and refueling its tanks and armored personnel carriers on Turkish territory just over the border. Israel did the same thing in the 1980s and 90s. If Turkey were to push further south, however, it would need to establish resupply depots within Syria, along with supply and refueling convoys to places further away from the border like al Bab. These supply bases and convoys and the additional personnel they require are, of course, the favored softer targets of guerrilla warfare, which is the strategy we would expect the relatively weaker SDF, PYD, ISIS and others to choose.
Turkey’s enemies in Syria also have a lot more discipline, combat experience and military hardware available than the Palestinians in Lebanon or even Hezbollah in its early days. As Turkey’s presence in the area continues, these enemies will be watching for Turkish military weak points, patrol routines, routes for infiltrating Turkish bases and so forth – just like Hezbollah did during Israel’s occupation. Turkey also seems unlikely to enjoy unfettered air superiority in northern Syria as the Israelis did in Lebanon, given the presence of Syrian and Russian air and ground-to-air weapons systems. In short, Ankara should expect more and more body bags with the corpses of young Turkish servicemen heading back to Turkey.
If Ankara’s occupation of Syria enjoys one key advantage over Israel’s occupation of Lebanon, however, this is where it may lie – Turkey’s tolerance for casualties is much higher than Israel’s was. We already know this from the war in Turkey’s southeast, where the PKK is now causing scores of casualties every week. In Israel, every soldier killed in Lebanon created a flurry of media coverage, while in Turkey the media is not even allowed to report truthfully or accurately about these matters.
If this is the key difference, then perhaps Turkey’s foray into Syria should more accurately be compared to the Soviet Union in Afghanistan – although that hardly ended well for the USSR either.
David Romano has been a Rudaw columnist since 2010. He holds the Thomas G. Strong Professor of Middle East Politics at Missouri State University and is the author of numerous publications on the Kurds and the Middle East.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw.
