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Turkey and Russia Clash over Syria
(Ha'aretz) Zvi Bar'el - In the past few weeks the Syrian army, together with the Russian air force, has attacked armed militias in Syria's Idlib province. As a result, "more than a million refugees and displaced people are making their way to the Turkish border," Turkish President Erdogan warned on Saturday. A Turkish-Russian agreement signed in September 2018 requires Turkey to persuade the Syrian militias in Idlib to disarm and to leave the province. But Ankara apparently can't persuade the radical militias to do so. Moreover, Turkey fears that a Syrian army takeover of Idlib would prevent it from establishing a security zone in northern Syria, to which it wants to relocate at least a million Syrian refugees now living in Turkey.