Syrian Rebels Withdraw Heavy Weapons to Spare Idlib From Assault

KAFAR NAHA, Syria — Syrian rebel fighters have pulled the last of their heavy weapons from front-line positions in Idlib province, meeting the deadline for a truce negotiated by Russia and Turkey — and possibly sparing the civilian population from a bloody government offensive.

It was a rare act of unity for the ordinarily fractious rebel forces, who on Monday drove trucks carrying a tank, artillery and missile batteries out of their base in this small town, as a small group of international journalists looked on.

“We are now standing in the demilitarized zone,” said Saif Raad, a spokesman for the National Liberation Front, a grouping of roughly 20 rebel factions operating in Idlib, the last bastion of rebel-held territory in northwest Syria.

Under the agreement brokered personally last month by President Vladimir Putin of Russia and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, the rebels are unilaterally withdrawing heavy weaponry to create a demilitarized zone 15 kilometers, or 9 miles, wide. The deadline for the withdrawal is Wednesday, and a cease-fire is to commence five days later.

The withdrawal represents a particular success for Turkey, which opposes President Bashar Assad of Syria, and it has the potential to increase Erdogan’s leverage as all sides look toward an end of the seven-year-old war. There is little telling whether an agreement — other truces have come and gone — will indeed last, or whether the pause will simply be used by Russia and its Syrian government allies to consolidate their own positions.

Yet, alone among NATO members, Turkey has directly engaged with Russia, which supports the Syrian government, to try to de-escalate the violence in the country, and for now the truce could avert catastrophe.

“We are very glad because we were expecting a very, very big attack on our small area, where we have a huge number of civilians,” Raad said. “The most important thing is that fighter jets and Syrian airplanes will not fly deep inside Idlib and cause a massacre.”

Erdogan has been unable to stem past Russian and Syrian offensives, but this time he secured a promise from Russia to hold off the threatened assault on Idlib, and persuaded the rebels to pull back their heavy weapons, which would ease shelling on the government side.

Turkish security forces escorted the group of journalists in a rare visit across Turkey’s southern border and deep into Idlib province to show how the deal was working on the ground. Turkey has committed troops to maintain 12 military observation posts around the perimeter of Idlib over the past year, which has already helped reduce violence from both sides.

Assad appears to have accepted the latest agreement, although in comments Monday he said it was only a “temporary measure.” Idlib and other territory under rebel control will eventually fall again under government authority, he insisted at a meeting of the central committee of his Baath Party, the Syrian state news agency SANA reported.

The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that some of the rebels were hiding their heavy weapons rather than withdrawing them fully.

Turkey, along with the United Nations, and major Western countries, had warned that a Russian and Syrian government offensive on Idlib would lead to one of the worst calamities of an already catastrophic seven-year war.

Turkish officials feared a humanitarian disaster and warned that they would not be able to stop millions of Syrians trying to escape the carnage from flooding into Turkey. That raised concerns across Europe about a new wave of refugees, similar to that of 2015.

Idlib, a stronghold of thousands of rebel fighters, is crammed with an estimated 3.5 million civilians, most of them displaced from other regions of Syria and becoming increasingly desperate. Most would flee again rather than live under Syrian government control, local officials in Idlib said.

The two-hour journey from the Turkish border through northern Idlib to Kafar Naha, about 7 miles from Aleppo, revealed the heavy toll seven years of government and Russian bombardment has taken on the province. Large buildings and government compounds are bombed out, homes abandoned and fields desiccated.

Yet the region is full of people: Girls and boys walk to school, women carry bundles on their heads from the market, and men work outside mechanic shops and in building yards.

Displaced families are evident, living in tents strung with lines of washing and pitched among farmhouses on the edge of town. More families, sitting atop belongings piled onto trucks, journey along the provincial roads.

In Kafar Naha, there is not a pane of glass in the windows of any building, and there is little electricity. The rebels have made a base in several large walled villas beside a factory, many of them abandoned and showing bomb damage. The house that serves as a rebel headquarters has been hit 40 times over the years by airstrikes and artillery, a commander of the National Liberation Front said. A major general and former senior officer of the Syrian army who defected to the rebels early in 2012, he asked that his name not be published for security reasons.

The commander said that he supported the Russian-Turkish deal to stop the bloodshed, and even suggested that the deal offered a beginning toward a political settlement to end the war. But he warned that his troops would fight if attacked. The government was still shelling the region, he said, and he was relying on Turkish intervention to enforce the planned cease-fire.

The consequences if the cease-fire does not work are clear to everyone here.

Across from the street from rebel base, two families were wounded when their home was flattened by a barrel bomb, officials said. And a family of refugees living behind the compound pointed out the marks of a strike 40 days ago. Faisal Abdullah Allawi, 41, a vegetable seller who also works as a guard, said three children had been hit by shrapnel from the blast.

“This girl is not from Afghanistan, she is not a terrorist,” he said, bringing forward his orphaned niece, one of those injured. “She is the symbol of Idlib. We are only defending our families.”

The rebels agreed only very reluctantly to withdraw the heavy weaponry — only lightly armed forces are now allowed in the demilitarized zone — said a Turkish security official given the job of persuading them. Turkish security officials began trying to soften up the rebels after the deal was announced three weeks ago, and only secured their agreement three days before the deadline, he said.

The Turks, who took over supporting the rebel forces after the United States ended its assistance to the Free Syrian Army at the end of last year, sat rebel leaders down and promised to increase humanitarian and development assistance if they could secure a cease-fire. They made clear that if the rebels did not agree, Turkey would not be able to prevent the pending assault, the security official said.

The rebels’ compliance with the deal was on full display during the journey across Idlib. Different groups stood guard along the way, providing security through their patch of territory. At one point, several heavyset, bearded commanders in pickup trucks escorted the Turkish convoy for several miles, peeling off from the convoy where their territory ended. Other groups were more casual, their fighters in T-shirts and sandals, assault rifles hanging loosely by their sides, guarding sandbagged positions at intersections. But they waved the convoy through, signaling their compliance.

Uniting the myriad rebel groups, which include radical Islamists, in Idlib was no mean feat by the Turks. The province has been notoriously dangerous for aid workers and reporters, and there was a spate of kidnappings by some of the rebel groups in recent years.

The Turkish officials in northern Idlib said they had not dealt directly with the most radical group, Hayat Tahrir al Sham, which is linked to al-Qaida. Turkey declared the group a terrorist organization last month, but Erdogan suggested in comments last week that Turkish units had negotiated with even the most radical rebel groups.

Syrian rebel leaders in Kafar Naha said that they had accepted the deal to prevent bloodshed, and that all the groups had complied because of the tremendous burden of the civilian population.

“The civilians broke our backs,” said Abu Jamil, a rebel leader who used to own a textile factory in the city of Homs. Abu Jamil is a nom de guerre.

The civilian population has been surviving on humanitarian aid, but that is dwindling, not least because the United States recently cut its assistance to the rebel areas of Syria, he said. There are signs of past assistance — the local administration has paved much of the main road across northern Idlib, and Syrians are building and repairing houses in the towns and villages — but poverty and lack of development is evident.

“There is a great lack of food and medical services for the population,” Abu Jamil said. Some medical facilities and nongovernmental groups have closed, he said.

The Syrians lamented the absence of American support. The National Liberation Front commander said he was grateful for the past assistance, but quoted a Syrian saying: “If you start something, you must follow through.” The Americans had not followed through, he said.

In the absence of U.S. support, Syrians in Idlib, rebels and civilians alike, are placing their trust in Turkey.

“We hope that they are not making a mistake,” Abu Jamil said.

Rebel commanders said that if the cease-fire did not work, they would fight. “We trust the Turks, but we don’t trust the Russians,” said Raad, the spokesman. “If they break the truce, our soldiers are ready.”