Putin, Erdogan agree on military push in Idlib

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan may not have got the reprieve he hoped for during talks in Moscow with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who appears determined to rout remaining armed opposition groups from Syria. During Mr Erdogan’s one-day visit to Russia, the Russian leader told reporters that Turkey and Russia had agreed on joint measures aimed at clearing “terrorists” in Syria’s Idlib province.

“Together with Turkey’s president we have outlined additional joint steps to neutralise the terrorists’ nests in Idlib and normalisation of the situation there and in the whole of Syria as a result,” Mr Putin told a joint briefing with the Turkish president in Zhukovsky, near Moscow, on the sidelines of an international aviation and space show. The Russian president said that representatives from the two countries alongside Iranian officials would meet in Turkey in September to make progress on brokering a political solution to the conflict.

Mr Erdogan’s trip to Moscow was seen by observers as a plea for respite in the Syrian government’s offensive on the last bastion of opposition to President Bashar Al Assad. After eight years of conflict, government forces backed by Russia are several months into an operation to quash armed opposition groups and extremists in the north-west province of Idlib.

Victory for Mr Assad would all but mark the end of the military phase of the war in Syria, which erupted after his forces brutally suppressed a series of peaceful, anti-government protests in 2011.