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On March 5, Turkey signed a ceasefire agreement in Moscow in fact accepting that it lost the battle against the Syrian Army in the region of Greater Idlib. Since the very start of Operation Spring Shield, Turkey has achieved zero of the goals declared: Turkey failed to defeat the Syrian Armed Forces, push the Syrians back from the areas that they had liberated from terrorists, free Turkish observation posts encircled by the Syrian Army, and enforce own rules of ‘de-escalation’ in the region (meaning the official protection to Turkish-backed al-Qaeda terrorists).
All these ‘great achievements’ came amid numerous victorious statements by the Turkish Defense Ministry. According to them, Turkish-led forces have ‘neutralized’ over 3,000 of Syrian troops and eliminated hundreds of Syrian military equipment pieces. It remains unclear how Turkey lost the battle if all these numbers were true.
