Syria crisis is lurching ever closer to a war with Turkey

The war in Syria is escalating on many fronts, with the rebel-held district of Eastern Ghouta suffering the worst violence — 100 people are being killed daily by the Syrian government bombardment. What is needed is a safe corridor out of the besieged enclave for the 350,000 civilians trapped inside.

The war in Syria and Iraq has been a war of sieges conducted mercilessly by all sides. Some are highly publicised while others are never heard of by the wider world. All outcomes are grim for the besieged but the least worst — as happened in East Aleppo at the end of 2016 — is when a mass evacuation of civilians and fighters to a safe area is arranged and no final assault takes place.

The greatest loss of life was in the nine-month siege in Mosul, Iraq, last year when Islamic State killed any civilians who tried to escape the US air force and Iraqi army air and artillery strikes. Thousand died and their bodies are still being found under the rubble.

The siege of Eastern Ghouta will eventually come to an end because it is the last of the big rebel strongholds that once ringed the centre of Damascus. President Bashar al-Assad has won the war for the capital and probably for Syria as a whole. Eastern Ghouta can only hold out because it is so large but its fall is inevitable and what is desperately needed is a negotiated formula for an organised exodus that reduces the loss of life.

But an ominous development in Syria is that just as some sieges are drawing to close, others are beginning. In the north, the Kurdish enclave of Afrin, similar in population to Ghouta, is nearly surrounded by the Turkish army and its militia allies who are trying to cut it off from the rest of Syria.

The Kurds have called on Assad for help and pro-government militiamen from nearby Shia villages have been rushing into Afrin over the past couple of days. As their convoys race down the single government-held road, they are coming under shellfire from Turkish artillery, a sign that we may be at the start of a Syria-Turkey confrontation.

Another horrific siege is in the making in Afrin, with the multiple participants in the Syrian civil war capable of blocking their opponents but not strong enough to win themselves.

Turkey is promising to defeat the Kurds there, something it will only be able to do in the face of stiff resistance by the Kurdish forces, who are now supported by the Syrian government in Damascus and possibly by Russia.

The only real solution is somehow to bring the seven-year war to an end in the whole of Syria.