Turkey sent more reinforcements into northwestern Syria Thursday, setting up new positions in an attempt to stop a Syrian regime offensive on the last rebel stronghold in the war-torn country, the media and opposition activists said.
The move came after a rare confrontation between Turkey and Syria Monday that killed seven Turkish soldiers and a Turkish civilian member of the military, as well as 13 Syrian soldiers.
Turkey’s President Tayyip Erdogan threatened on Wednesday to drive back Syrian troops in Idlib unless they withdraw by the end of the month to stem an assault which he said had displaced nearly 1 million people.
Erdogan has criticised Russia, a key backer of Bashar al-Assad's regime, for failing to enforce peace agreements in the region and called for Moscow to "better understand our sensitivities in Syria".
"From now we will not turn a blind eye to any step that constitutes the violation of the agreements," he added.
A military source told Zaman al-Wasl that armed factions backed by Turkish artillery barrages launched early Thursday an attack on regime forces east of Idlib.
The ongoing clashes are taking place near the towns of Saraqeb and Al-Nayrab.
The source said at least 55 regime troops have been killed in the past 24 hours.
In Moscow, the Foreign Ministry announced that Russian soldiers have been killed in a northern Syrian province alongside Turkish servicemen, without saying when the incident occurred. The ministry blamed "terrorists" for the deaths, saying that the attacks in Idlib province intensified in January.
"Russian and Turkish military specialists died tragically," the statement said, without specifying when and how many Russian soldiers were killed.
Moscow and Ankara are on opposite sides of the Syrian civil war - Russia is a main backer of Syrian President Bashar Assad's forces while Turkey supports insurgents fighting his regime.
The Assad troops have been advancing since December into the country's last rebel stronghold, which spans across the Idlib province and parts of nearby Aleppo region. Turkish troops are deployed in some of those rebel-held areas to monitor an earlier cease-fire that has since collapsed.
Turkey has set up four military posts in northwestern Syria to prevent regime forces from marching deeper into Idlib, Syria's Foreign Ministry said, adding that Turkish troops have "flagrantly violated" Syria's border and deployed in several areas, including the villages of Binnish, Taftanaz and Maaret Musreen.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition war monitoring group, said Syrian warplanes attacked Thursday a military air base in the village of Taftanaz where Turkish troops deployed recently.
The Observatory and Syrian state TV said that government forces have laid a siege on the town of Saraqeb, which sits on the intersection of two major highways, one linking the Syrian capital of Damascus to the north, and the other connecting the country’a west and east.
Turkish leaders have repeatedly called on Russia to "rein in" regime forces, a demand to which Moscow responded by expressing concerns over growing "terrorist" activity in Idlib.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov reiterated the notion on Thursday, saying that both Russia and Turkey each have "their own sets of concerns." The concentration of insurgent groups in Idlib and their "continuing activity" was Russia's main issue, he said.
Peskov refused to say how many Russians were killed in Idlib, but said the Kremlin doesn't rule out a meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to discuss the situation in Syria.
Idlib province is home to some 3 million people, many of them displaced from other parts of Syria in earlier bouts of violence.
Regime forces were combing the town after rebel fighters fled following intense aerial and ground bombardment of Saraqeb, 15 km (9 miles) east of Idlib city, the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on its website.
Eye witnesses told Reuters that rebel fighters had left and that Assad forces were in control of the town, which lies at the junction of two main roads that Damascus seeks to fully control.
Syrian state-run TV said that the roads were now within firing range of regime forces.
Assad’s campaign to regain Idlib province, the last rebel bastion in a nearly nine-year-long civil war, has sparked a new exodus of thousands of civilians towards the border with Turkey, which backs some insurgent groups fighting Assad.
The renewed fighting is taking place despite a Jan. 12 ceasefire deal between Turkey and Russia, which back opposing sides of the conflict. Shelling by regime forces killed eight Turkish military personnel on Monday, prompting Turkish forces to strike back.
Erdogan said this week's clashes amounted to a "new era" in Syria, and that any further attacks would be "responded to in kind".
"The air and ground elements of the Turkish armed forces will freely move in the Idlib region and if needed will launch an operation," he said.
Eight humanitarian aid organisations on Wednesday called for an immediate ceasefire in northwestern Syria, where hostilities have displaced half a million people in the past two months.
The violence in the jihadist-ruled region of Idlib has forced 520,000 people out of their homes since the start of December, in one of the biggest upheavals in the nine-year civil war.
The aid groups -- including the Norwegian Refugee Council, Save the Children, Care and the International Rescue Committee -- labelled the situation a "humanitarian catastrophe".
They called for "an immediate cessation of hostilities in addition to immediate access to safety for the millions of civilians currently under fire".
Jan Egeland, head of the Norwegian Refugee Council, warned that the newly arrived were running out of options as to where to go.
"Camps are hosting five times their intended occupancy and rental prices have skyrocketed in towns in the north west," he said.
"We are calling on Turkey to let these terrified families seek safety either across the border or in areas Turkey controls in Syria."
Andrew Morley, the head of World Vision International, said children were sleeping in flooded fields, and some families were even burning their clothes to stay warm.
"The exodus of people is staggering, and tens of thousands more are joining them every day," he said.
The recent of violence has killed around 300 civilians, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor says.
The World Health Organization said on Monday that the violence had forced 53 medical facilities in northwest Syria to close in January and warned of "critical health threats" to fleeing civilians.
Nearly half a million people have been killed and millions displaced in Syria's long-running civil war, which erupted in 2011 in the form of anti-government protests amid Arab Spring uprisings and eventually turned into an armed insurgency.
Zaman Al Wasl, Agencies
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