SYRIA
The Turkish military said on Tuesday that its forces have killed over 260 Kurdish and ISIS fighters in Operation Olive Branch so far. “And” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Similarly, so far in this post I’ve written over 50 words in English, German, and Tamil. I’m a polyglot! Also, this count ignores civilian casualties, suggesting that either the Turks aren’t tracking them or they’re screwing with the count. Either of those is bad. Reports from Afrin suggest that the Turks and their Free Syrian Army proxies may have lost territory to the YPG on Tuesday, in large part because cloud cover rendered Turkish air support less effective. This points to a potential issue for the Turks, who control Afrin’s air space but need to be able to win the fight on the ground too. In addition to the deaths, reports say that over 5000 people have already been displaced by the fighting.
The US says its airstrikes over the weekend killed around 150 ISIS fighters near al-Shafah, a town outside of Deir Ezzor. You can imagine that announcement was meant for Ankara, to bolster Washington’s “can’t we all just focus on ISIS?” message.
There have been four reports of chemical weapons attacks (chlorine gas attacks, to be specific) in rebel-held parts of Syria since the beginning of the year. They’re naturally being attributed to the Syrian government, which has led the Trump administration to blame Russia. It is Russia’s name on the 2013 agreement that supposedly put an end to Damascus’s use of chemical weapons, after all. Russia is pushing for a new UN investigation into the use of chemical weapons in Syria, which is interesting since they’re the ones who killed the last UN investigation, but the US says they’re trying to undermine a French-led investigation.
The Intercept’s Nour Samaha says that Israel, meanwhile, is expanding its “safe zone” in southern Syria to encompass more and more of the southern part of the country:
ISRAEL IS EXPANDING its influence and control deeper into opposition-held southern Syria, according to multiple sources in the area. After failed attempts to ensure its interests were safeguarded by the major players in the war next door, Israel is pushing to implement the second phase of its “safe-zone” project — an attempt to expand a buffer ranging out from the occupied Golan Heights deeper into the southern Syrian provinces of Quneitra and Daraa. The safe zone expansion marks a move toward deeper Israeli involvement in Syria’s civil war.
The buffer zone serves a political as well as military aim, in that it legitimizes Israel’s occupation of the Golan. It’s hard to argue that the Golan should belong to Syria if Damascus doesn’t really control the territory on its side of the border.
IRAQ
The Iraqis are concerned about Turkey’s war on the YPG to the extent that it threatens to cause the YPG to withdraw from the Iraq-Syria border region. ISIS is still active in desert areas on both sides of the border, and a reduction in the YPG presence on the Syrian side would potentially free up some of the group’s fighters to cross into Iraq and cause problems there.
YEMEN
At least nine civilians were killed in a Saudi-led coalition airstrike in Saada province on Tuesday.
LEBANON
Washington is urging the Lebanese government to block Hezbollah from the country’s financial system. The US is somewhat limited in the extent to which it can sanction Lebanon’s financial sector without collapsing it, so it can either stop obsessing about Hezbollah (unlikely) or keep stomping its feet and demanding that Beirut take action against the group.
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
The Trump administration seems to have exacerbated a trend that Benjamin Netanyahu began several years ago in making support for Israel an increasingly partisan issue. A new Pew poll finds that 79 percent of Republicans favor the Israelis over the Palestinians compared to only 27 percent of Democrats. In 1978, the first time Pew polled on this issue, just under half of the members of both parties favored Israel. In the long run this is going to work to Israel’s detriment, but with the collapse of the Israeli left, and with the poll also showing that young people are increasingly disapproving of Israel’s behavior, it’s very hard to see how the trend can be reversed.
EGYPT
Say, remember how retired Egyptian general Sami Anan was going to run for president against Abdel Fattah el-Sisi? Well, funny story: Anan just so happened to get arrested on Tuesday for “crimes and violations” that include “incitement against the armed forces.” He wisely decided to drop out of the race after his arrest. His departure likely clears the field for Sisi, who is apparently so insecure about his political standing that he couldn’t even abide facing a single, obscure, hopelessly doomed challenger in March. His decision to run unopposed is unlikely to help Sisi’s big electoral plan to get reelected with a high turnout, so it will be fascinating to see how he tries to fudge those numbers.
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The Foreign Exchanges Companion 