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Kassioun Editorial 1097: “Day of Solution”!
The Turkish Defense Ministry’s declaration of the raids it carried out on Saturday night on areas in northern Syria and northern Iraq was accompanied with the phrase: “day of reckoning”, implicitly indicating that these raids are revenge for the terrorist bombing in Istanbul last Sunday. The raids resulted in casualties in each of Iraq and Syria, including civilians, SDF fighters, and Syrian army soldiers.
Among the clear conclusions about this new aggression, with regards to Syria and the region in general, are the following:
First: The bloodshed in Syria and the region will not stop without reaching a comprehensive political solution on the basis of UNSC Resolution 2254.
Second: The ceasefire in Syria for nearly three years now is a fragile one and can explode to some degree at any moment, as long as the political solution has not been fully achieved. The longer the solution is delayed, the more fragile the ceasefire will be and the more likely it will be breached.
Third: Syrian sovereignty will remain violated and subject to blows from whoever sees an interest in serving it a blow, as long as the crisis continues, and as long as the extremists who have no interest in a solution invest politically in every new aggression, not to respond to the aggression, but to use it against the political solution.
Fourth: The new Turkish aggression, and before it the Istanbul bombing, have the same political objective, something that is revealed by the timing. This objective is working against Astana and its next meeting, which is supposed to push with an additional step towards settling Syrian-Turkish relations. This means that the extremists on both sides of the border, who ultimately work against the Astana track and in line with American goals, still insist on prolonging the quagmire policy in Syria, and against the interests of both the Syrian and Turkish peoples.
Fifth: In the same context, the extremists’ obstruction of intra-Syrian understanding will remain a tool in promoting sabotage, deepening the crisis, and creating pretexts for external interventions. This requires defending the sovereignty of Syrians through primarily understanding among them, and through a political solution that preserves the rights of all and takes Syria towards a new model based on an advanced formula for the relationship between centralization and decentralization, and far from formulas that are provocative and pose a danger to the unity of Syria (whether formulas bearing the title of federalism or those that insist on extreme absolute centralization).
Both the Istanbul bombing and the recent Turkish raids are, in essence, no different from the downing of the Sukhoi 24 in 2015 or the assassination of the Russian ambassador to Turkey in 2016. All of these ultimately aim to prolong American presence in Syria, prolong the life of the quagmire, and block the path to radical comprehensive change through UNSC Resolution 2254, which is in the interest of Syrians and the peoples of the region in general. The most important response to these sabotage operations is to insist that what it is really the “day for” is the solution, and what is over is sabotage and escalation.
