Erdogan seems to be acting as if he owns the region. He is invoking protection from NATO whilst being an aggressor and invader in Syria, he would like the support of Europe, whilst threatening to open the migrant gates to flood Europe, he buys weapons from Russia whilst asking for Patriot missiles. Is there no end to this man’s absurdity.
But the bottom line here is that Turkey was made a conduit for all the foreign fighters to go to Syria and these were armed by NATO and the west with money from KSA and the Gulf and with extreme logistic support from Turkey. Now that the tables have been turned there is no place for these terrorists to go. Certainly Erdogan does not want them to flood Turkey and neither does the EU. The answer according to Erdogan is to create a little statelet of terror in Idlib which will be a buffer between Turkey and the Kurds (mainly now used as an excuse).
But it seems so far that everyone is paying lip service to support Erdogan, who is by the way also suffering losses in his adventures in Libya, without offering actual logistic or military help. So far Putin has played an aggressive but cautious hand a the same time, in order to force terrorists out of Idlib.
Whilst the BBC is wringing its hands at the humanitarian catastrophe, no one mentions that this is due to support for terrorist of Al Qaeda in Syria. If these were not armed and forced to stop fighting, and maybe returned to face justice from where they came, the ‘humanitarian ‘problem is unlikely to resolve.