You're reading: Los Angeles Times: Turkey and Russia work to avert a bloodbath in Syria’s last major rebel bastion

Los Angeles Times: Turkey and Russia work to avert a bloodbath in Syria’s last major rebel bastion

Published Oct. 3, 2018 at 1:14 pm

Syrian rescue teams clear the rubble in the morning of April 10, 2018 at the site of an explosion of unknown origin which wrecked a multi-storey building the previous night in the war-battered country's northwestern city of Idlib.The cause of the explosion in the jihadist-held city, which killed more than a ten people and wounded 80, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group, was not immediately clear. / AFP PHOTO / OMAR HAJ KADOUR

Photo by AFP

The best hope for averting a bloodbath in the northwest Syrian province of Idlib — home to 2.6 million people and the last major bastion of rebels fighting the government — depends on cajoling tens of thousands of militants there to lay down their weapons.

That job falls to neighboring Turkey, which in an eleventh-hour deal last month brokered with Russia put on hold a Syrian government offensive to take back the province and end the long insurgency.