Some ten days ago there were rumors of an imminent jihadist attack on Idlib in north west Syria. Idlib, a governate city that once had 100,000 inhabitants, is only a few miles from the Turkish border and the Syrian government forces only held a narrow corridor towards it.
Three weeks ago the Turkish government closed all nearby border crossings between Turkey and Syria to civil traffic. Four days ago a coalition of Jabhat al-Nusra (the alQaeda affiliate in Syria), the Islamist Ahrar Al-Shams group and a few smaller groups started an all out attack on Idlib. At least 1,500 fighters took part in the attack. Four huge vehicle borne suicide attacks on government held road barriers broke the outer government defenses.
The Syrian army sent a few reinforcements but those were not enough to hold the attacks coming simultaneously from three sides. Today the government forces retreated and formed a new blocking line south of the city. Jabhat al-Nusra published videos showing some of its fighters in the center of the seemingly empty city. This map by Peto Lucem shows the current situation.
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Other videos and pictures out of Idlib show only very few captured vehicles. One T-62 seems to have been destroyed and only one more plus three infantry carriers were captured. This suggest that the government side had already pulled out its heavy weapons and was ready to cede the city to its opponents.
Under current circumstances the city was of little strategic, military or economic value but it took rather large efforts to hold and resupply it. Giving it up while intensifying efforts in the more strategic areas in the south and around Damascus is the right decision from a purely military point of view but is still a loss in the propaganda and political ground of the war.
But with obvious nearby Turkish (and U.S.) support for Jabhat al-Nusra and other jihadist groups any further efforts to hold the city against a determined attack would have taken disproportionate forces and would have weakened defenses elsewhere.
It is an interesting coincidence that three simultaneous events in three countries,
- the attack on Idlib,
- the U.S. intervention against Shia militia in the Tirkit operation,
- the Wahhabi attack on Yemen,
all seem to be designed to weaken Iran-allied forces. This at the same time as the negotiations over Iran nuclear program in Switzerland reach their climax. Does this coincidence suggest a central coordination of these attacks designed to weaken Iran's (psychological) position in the nuclear negotiations?