NATO countries decided to satisfy Turkey’s request for an extraordinary meeting following the mass death of its soldiers in Idlib late Thursday after Syrian regime’s airstrikes.
President Assad’s airforces have killed 33 Turkish soldiers in Syria’s Idlib province, Turkey reported and added the discussions on de-escalation zone should assist allies to ease the tensions in the northwestern Syrian region.
“Today, the #NATO council meets at Turkey’s request to consult under Article 4 of NATO’s founding Washington Treaty on the situation in Syria,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said on Twitter.
In fact, the de-escalation zone is currently home to four million civilians. Among the refugees are hundreds of thousands displaced in recent years by regime forces throughout the war-torn country, the UN reports.
Despite the agreement between Turkey and Russia to turn Idlib into a de-escalation zone, the regime’s airstrikes continue to take the lives of both military personnel and civilians. Turkey sees those actions as acts of aggression, which are expressly prohibited under September agreement.
More than 1.7 million Syrians have moved near the Turkish border due to intense attacks.
Since 2011 when Syria faced the eruption of the bloody civil war, Turkey has taken in some 3.7 million Syrians who fled their country, making it the world’s top refugee hosting country.
