The Syrian rebel commander stared at photographs of his fighters on the hilly frontline at the Kurdish enclave of Afrin, their pickup trucks stalled in the mud after a torrential downpour of rain. “It’s going to be a tough battle, maybe five or six months,” he said. “[But] we have nobody except Turkey.”The image of the soldiers bogged down in a fight against Kurdish militants captured the central predicament of the Syrian rebel fighters, about 10,000 strong, who are spearheading a battle ordered by Turkey.

Abandoned by all other international allies and very nearly defeated, Syria’s armed opposition now finds itself waging a battle against Syrian Kurdish militias on behalf of Ankara, a patron that in recent months has pursued geopolitical and national security interests that are far more important to it than the opposition’s aim of ousting the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad. It highlights the rebels’ deep dependence on Turkey, their one remaining benefactor, and the powerlessness of Syrians to determine the course of a civil war that has now lasted nearly seven years.(theguardian)…[+]