Turkey stops major crisis spilling into EU: US expert

ANKARA

Turkey’s actions in Syria are stopping a major humanitarian crisis from spilling into Europe, an American foreign policy expert said on Friday.

Luke Coffey, director of the Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies at the Washington, D.C.-based Heritage Foundation, voiced support for Turkey in its fight against the Syrian regime and its allies, which have killed, injured, deported, and displaced millions of Syrian civilians over the course of the Syrian war.

"Right now Turkish troops (our NATO brothers & sisters!) are fighting against Assad and Russian forces in Syria. They are the only thing stopping a MAJOR humanitarian crisis spilling into Europe," Coffey tweeted after an airstrike by the Syrian regime martyred 33 Turkish troops and injured many others late Thursday.

"Many Turkish soldiers have been martyred. May God bless & protect them!" Coffey added, with American and Turkish flags attached to the tweet.

The soldiers in question are across Turkey’s border in Idlib, northwestern Syria, working to protect civilians under a 2018 deal with Russia under which acts of aggression are prohibited in the region.

Against Turkey’s protests, the de-escalation deal has been violated multiple times by the Assad regime and its allies, sending about a million Syrian migrants fleeing the attacks towards Turkey’s border.

Earlier, Mike Doran, a senior fellow at the U.S.-based Hudson Institute, rebuffed the U.S. foreign policy experts who claimed Turkey was playing into the hands of Russia.

"Cast your memory back to when Trump pulled back in NE Syria to accommodate Turkish concerns. Remember the phalanx of experts & talking heads who screamed that Erdogan was Putin's puppet?" Doran wrote on Twitter.

"How many of them will now admit that their assessments were emotional & overwrought?" he tweeted amid rising criticism in Turkey of Moscow's support for the Assad regime.

In the wake of Thursday’s deadly airstrike, Ankara has vowed to retaliate against all known targets of the “illegitimate” Syrian regime.

According to UN officials, some 900,000 people in the embattled have been displaced by the offensive carried out by the Russia-backed Assad regime since December.