Syria's Idlib region could eventually experience sustainable peace in the future, if the recent ceasefire deal between Turkey and Russia is respected, an expert said.
According to Hassan Hanizadeh, an expert on West Asian affairs, Russia is acting as the guarantor of ceasefire and a joint Syrian-Russian commission is to be set up to oversee the truce.
"In the framework of the agreement, the Syrian government has emphasized that Turkey needs to assure it would not support terrorist groups in the region," he told ISNA.
The Turkish government, on the other hand, has received assurances that Kurdish forces, including the Syrian Democratic Forces, will not set up bases along its borders to launch any attacks against Ankara, he added.
Russia and Turkey back opposing sides in Syria's nine-year conflict, with Moscow supporting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Turkey backing some rebel groups. Several previous deals to end the fighting in Idlib have collapsed.
Fighting in northwest Syria had intensified in recent weeks, bringing Turkish and Russian forces close to direct conflict in the battle over the last swathe of Syria still held by rebels.
The battle displaced nearly a million people in three months, causing what the United Nations feared could be the worst humanitarian crisis of the Syrian civil war.
Putin-Erdogan Meeting
Leaders of the two countries finally held talks and agreed a ceasefire deal on Thursday, which came into effect at midnight.
They agreed to establish a secure corridor near the M4 highway, which runs east to west through Idlib, and hold joint patrols along the road from March 15.
Russian President Vladimir Putin expressed hope that the agreements would serve as a good basis for a cessation of military activity in the Idlib de-escalation zone, but his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said Ankara retained the right to respond to all Syrian attacks in the field.
Ankara, which lost around 60 troops in the region over the past month, wants to push Assad's forces back to lines agreed in a 2017 deal brokered with Russia and Iran, which left a buffer zone in northern Syria near its border, but the deal did not spell out that Syrian troops withdraw to the edge of the Idlib de-escalation zone.
Turkey also hosts some 3.6 million Syrian refugees and says it cannot handle more. Seeking to extract more funding and support from Europe over Idlib, Ankara said last week it would no longer abide by a 2016 deal in which it stopped migrants crossing into the European Union in return for billions of euros in aid.
It, however, failed to engage Europe in the conflict by using the issue of migrants, according to Hanizadeh, because the EU is against Turkey's military operations in Idlib.
Turkey is now only to remain in parts of Idlib to help fight militant groups, but if it violates the deal, the Russian government will take action as the guarantor of the ceasefire, he said.
"In general, I believe if all parties stick to the agreement, this will help secure a ceasefire in Syria and the Idlib region," he added.
