If Russia wants to consolidate its influence, one play could be to encourage SAA to attack Turkish observation points in Idlib, drawing Turkey to respond and ofcourse destroy pro-Assad assets, and then when Turkey drives Assad back Russia would come and "save" Assad with their air force (only a...
Dude, no need to put so many RPGs in your comments.
CombatMaster already tried explaining that to him, but getting knowledge into OguzSenturk's brain is harder than penetrating the armour on a Kirpi. He can't even understand that there are 2 impacts.
Rebels haven't assaulted from any of those fronts into SAA territory for a very long time, unlike Latakia, where rebels did a raid a couple weeks ago. There's shelling happening there all the time and probably SAA will try to take some of those hills back too.
The propaganda to try to turn Turkey into Iran begins. Also interesting that this is written by someone left wing, given the way they omit Obama's nuclear deal with Iran.
Edit: yep, it's the same institute that runs the left wing propaganda house here in Australia called The Conversation.
A few years ago Peter Zeihan predicted that Russia would try to bog Turkey down in Syria so as to give Russia enough freedom of action to take and secure the Caucasus approach to its territory. If that's true, we can expect Assad to make a move for Idlib.
He also predicted the US would pull...
In terms of population and areas of value they don't hold much though:
Raqqa is now flattened so the only area with significant population and value the YPG has left is Deir Ezzor, and Assad and Iran definitely will not accept YPG keeping that - they were unable to take it back militarily so...
"Putting AESA on Akıncı is as stupid as putting AESA on MQ-9 haha" - lol, that's exactly what the US is doing. A normal person at this point would say "ohhhh, I don't know wtf I'm talking about" and move on.