The northernmost region of Syria, which has a 910-kilometer border with Turkey, offers one of the world’s most complex war theaters. That is so not only because of the countless number of state and non-state actors operating in this third-world land with limited hydrocarbons, but also because of shifting alliances, conflicts with conventional and asymmetrical warfare tactics, and the surreal bedfellows that these factors often create.
The actors include countless radical jihadist groups and their 3.5 million civilian supporters; not-as-radical jihadist groups supported by Turkey, as well as Turkish, American, Russian and Syrian forces, and of course Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
