Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his entourage quite sharply reacted to the invasion of Turkish troops in the northern regions of the country. Speaking to soldiers and officers of the Syrian army, Assad called the Turkish president a thief: “Erdogan is a thief, he has plundered factories, grain and oil, and now he is stealing our land.” Assad’s adviser, Mrs. Bouthaina Shaaban, was even more categorical in her remarks. She called the Turkish leader an “occupier” and compared his actions in Syria to the behavior of Adolf Hitler.

Today, we can summarize the preliminary results of this military punitive operation code-named “Source of Peace”. Using the withdrawal of the American contingent from the north-eastern regions of the Syrian Arab Republic (SAR) that border Turkey, Ankara launched a series of missile attacks and bombarded several Kurdish militia bases and a number of border settlements.

Then, Turkish mechanized units and detachments of the Syrian armed opposition invaded Syria to a depth of 32 km and along a front of about 100 km between the cities of Ras al-Ayn and Tell Abyad. The new enclave captured by the Turks in Syria is approximately 2,200 square kilometers. In previous military operations –the Euphrates Shield and the Olive Branch– Turkey established control over the administrative region of Afrin, the northern part of Aleppo province and the so-called “de-escalation zone”: the Idlib province.

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