Erdogan’s counter-coup weakens the Syrian rebels

SYRIAN rebels looking to the heavens for salvation have grown used to seeing Russian incendiary and Syrian barrel-bombs raining down instead. But at least they could count on succour and sustenance from across the Turkish border. After the aborted coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, that seems in doubt.

The commander of the second army, who is entrusted with securing Turkey’s southern borders, is in prison, says a veteran Turkish commentator. So too are most of the commanders of combat units on Syria’s border. (They are among more than 100 generals and admirals and 9,000 security personnel arrested since the coup attempt.) As Mr Erdogan focuses on the enemy within, he has tried to batten down what hatches he can, periodically closing the Bab al-Hawa border crossing, hitherto the prime supply route to Syria’s Sunni opposition-held territory. “We’re seeing a more inward-looking, introverted posture,” says the commentator. “The military’s ability to project Turkey’s power regionally has been undermined.”

The downturn in Turkey’s relations with America, which harbours Fethullah Gulen, whom Mr Erdogan accuses of masterminding the coup, also fractures the external alliance backing Syria’s rebels. Irked by America’s sanctuary for Mr Gulen, Mr Erdogan temporarily cut electricity to Incirlik, a large air base, interrupting the American-led bombardment of Islamic State. The private American companies based near Turkey’s borders with Syria that are contracted to extend non-lethal support to Syrian rebels wonder whether they too might be swept into the fray. Both Turkey and America, for separate reasons, now appear to be hedging their bets on the war’s outcome. Both are seeking a working relationship with Russia, the prime sponsor of Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president whom the rebels had vowed to overthrow. “We’ve staked everything on changing the regime,” says a glum spokesman of the Free Syrian Army, the umbrella group holding Eastern Aleppo, the largest urban centre still in opposition hands. “Instead everything has changed but the regime.”

Even as international support for the rebels recedes, external support for the regime is strengthening. Russia continues to command the skies, despite pledges to withdraw. Iran and its satellites, which include the southern Lebanese militia, Hizbullah, prop up the regime’s exhausted troops on the ground. Two days after Turkey’s military establishment launched its coup, forces allied to the Syrian government established positions on Castello Road, the last supply road into Eastern Aleppo, imposing a full siege on the opposition enclave. Four more field hospitals and a blood bank were struck from the air on July 23rd. “Where are your red lines, Mr Erdogan?” asks an exiled Syrian politician in Gaziantep, Turkey’s gateway to Syria. “It seems Turkey no longer has a long-term strategy in Syria.”

By contrast, regime forces cheer Turkey’s mayhem. In Damascus soldiers at government checkpoints greeted news of the coup with bursts of celebratory gunfire. In the almost ten months since Russia launched its aerial bombardment in support of Mr Assad, Syrian rebels have lost between half and a third of their territory, says a Syrian opposition official in southern Turkey. South of Damascus Mr Assad’s forces have captured the farmland around Daraya, starving its population and bringing its fighters to the verge of defeat after nearly four years of siege. In Ghouta, another Damascus suburb where rebels are also losing territory, the regime is offering to bus rebels to safety if they surrender. It now appears to be applying the same tactics to eastern Aleppo after a counter-attack, in which some 200 rebels were killed, failed to reopen the road. UN agencies expect some food stocks to begin to run out after a month. The city’s plight, says a Red Cross official, is “devastating and overwhelming”.

Some still hope for a reversal of fortunes. Aleppo’s fighters say they have long anticipated a siege and built up supplies. Aided by Jabhat al-Nusra, an al-Qaeda affiliate, they suggest they could cut the road to regime-held Western Aleppo and impose a siege of their own. (Though the regime-held west hosts the bulk of the city’s remaining 1.4m people, students fleeing Syria’s former economic hub to Turkey say it suffers from collapsed services, and has no running water or electricity.) A few rebels argue that as part of his counter-coup Mr Erdogan might yet project his Sunni triumphalism abroad and come to their rescue. But among exiled leaders in Gaziantep and the Americans co-ordinating their logistical backup, the mood is one of despondency. “It’s game over [for Syria’s rebels] already,” says one.