Russia's humanity has sunk into the swamp in Syria

As a result of the attacks the regime has been carrying out in Idlib for some time with Russian support, nearly one million people have left their homes and homeland and, as expected, set out for Turkey, indeed have reached the border. Meanwhile the sounds of the human dramas unfolding have become deafening.

Let everyone go on asking how Russia could become an instrument of such a massacre by the regime and how it can commit such a violation despite the Sochi agreement. The Russian Ministry of Defense, in recent days, made a statement blaming Turkey for what has happened in Idlib. According to the statement, "The main cause of the crisis is Turkey's failure to separate moderate opposition from terrorists."

What a heartless, what an irresponsible statement. We immediately asked them this: Which of the two is easier to tell apart: infants in swaddling clothes from terrorists, or armed moderate opposition from terrorists? Is it easier to distinguish patients and wounded receiving treatment in a hospital from terrorists who have strapped on their weapons, or people who are both armed and opponents of the regime, but one of whom has hidden himself well and carries out his activities in secret?

Is it because Russia distinguishes the armed terrorist from the armed opposition so well that there are one million refugees on our border right now?

In these scenes of refugees there is no fight against terror at all; there is precisely a blindness in distinguishing the terrorist from women and children. Of course the worse possibility, rather than blindness, is a genocide and deportation program deliberately carried out to deport a people. If not, how do bombs searching for terrorists find thousands of women and children, hospitals and bakeries?

Even if it is admitted that Turkey has difficulty in separating the terrorist from the armed opposition, the result of this could at most be that some terrorists think they have gained a bit more time, temporarily. But what is the logic, the calculation, the conscientious measure of causing such a humanitarian catastrophe while claiming to target the terrorists?

The moral legitimacy of fighting terror lies in the activities of terrorists that target civilians, defenseless and uninvolved people. If, while claiming to fight the terrorist, you kill civilians and women and children rather than terrorists, and then also deport the rest in the middle of this winter, your only difference from the terrorist is that you are a bigger, more merciless, bloodier and more immoral terror machine.

The most important dimension of the agreements in Astana and Sochi was that the Iranian and Russian sides accepted that the ways the Syrian regime has resorted to in dealing with its opponents have drenched Syria in blood and made life unlivable for the Syrian people, and therefore accepted the right to rebel because of the massacres and repression they have been subjected to. That is, after it was accepted for the first time in Astana that the current regime in Syria has a legitimacy problem in the eyes of its own people and that this problem inevitably gave rise to a right to an armed and legitimate opposition, it was accepted in Sochi that the regime and this opposition could resolve their problems through a political process.

The details of how this would happen were of course to be discussed. But because in fighting its opponents in Syria the regime, through the methods it applied, has targeted not so much the armed opponents as all the civilians living in that region, it is causing mass migrations in Syria. Those who could find a way to go abroad have already gone, but for those who could not, the only place left to take refuge inside Syria is Idlib. The status, position and character of Idlib as the only refuge inside Syria for the opponents in Syria are clear. Idlib is a result of the inhumane, cruel practices of the Syrian regime.

The Astana and Sochi understandings obliged neither the regime nor Russia to refrain from deciding Syria's future by eliminating all opponents through massacres. The bill that this path, followed until now, has presented to the whole world is clear: the killing of at least one million people, as many missing and wounded, cities burned and destroyed, and the migration of 12 million Syrians inside and outside Syria.

The Syrian regime is fighting not against a power from outside but against its own people, and in its war against its own people, with the most merciless and most inhumane methods, it receives support from Iran and Russia.

It is not understandable what calculations Russia and Iran are making in agreeing to become accomplices of someone who is carrying out a genocide against his own people.

Although the alliance reached in Sochi and Astana had already accepted that Idlib, as a part of the political solution and the negotiations, is a refuge for at least some of the opponents, what is now sought is to use the terrorists there as a pretext and, by destroying all the opponents, to leave no ground for negotiation.

This path coveted by the Syrian regime under Russia's guidance is unacceptable. Because, in committing an unparalleled crime against humanity, in the name of destroying the great majority of its people in order to protect its own criminal regime, it is also placing the material bill for this especially on Turkey.

What Assad is doing, trying thus to sweep his own internal opposition problem toward Turkey, already constitutes a first-degree security problem for Turkey. The matter has long since ceased to be an internal problem of Syria.

Russia too, even if its conscience does not ache on humanity's behalf, must see the security problem that protecting this criminal regime, to whose aid it has rushed, has caused for Turkey, and must withdraw.

As Assad and Russia kill the Syrian people, they are now, inevitably, attacking Turkey as well. This is the reality of the matter, and Turkey, which is living the matter with all its cost and consequences, is doing what is necessary to defend itself.