THE world’s attention recently has focused on the Islamic State group’s last stand in northeast Syria, but on the other side of the country in Idlib province, what could prove the most catastrophic battle of this war looms again. Foreign Editor David Pratt reports.

IT was a bone chilling March day and patches of snow from a heavy winter still lay on the surrounding windswept hillsides. Guided by a grey-bearded but sprightly 61-year-old elder who went by the name of Abu Fahdi, himself a refugee from the Syrian town of Latakia, we made our way across muddy, forested slopes trying to stay out of sight of the Turkish army watchtowers that ran the length of the border with Syria.

A short time later we found ourselves at a rebel camp hidden deep in a pine forest. The men there were an assorted bunch, some foreign fighters but mostly Syrians. Almost all used a nom-de-guerre to hide their identity for fear of reprisals against relatives in Syria some even wore balaclava ski masks in the presence of myself and the other journalists accompanying me.

One called “Khalil” was a former Syrian soldier who had defected to the rebel side, another named “Mazzan” had worked for a shipping line on the Black Sea, before taking up the Kalashnikov assault rifle he was holding to fight the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.

“We tried to hold them back but we have no real weapons, only some Kalashnikovs and pump action shot guns,” complained Khalil as they recounted their hasty retreat after being routed the day before in a battle with government forces in a village called Ain al-Baida in Syria’s Idlib Province.

As Khalil spoke, his agitated eyes peering out from holes in the black ski mask he wore, told of the traumatic experience he and the others had undergone. As the men milled around us, I couldn’t help noticing that their boots and clothes were still caked in mud after the trek from the battlefield.

Almost eight years have now passed since that first encounter with these rebel fighters in Idlib Province. During the intervening period of bloodshed, Syria’s war has now killed as many as 500,000 people and forced 7.6m from their homes. Today Idlib is the last bastion of opposition to the Assad regime.

Even back then almost all the rebel fighters I talked with came from the country’s Sunni majority. With their beards and devout demeanour they displayed a religious zeal reminiscent of “holy warriors,” I’d met in other places like Iraq and Afghanistan.

It was as recently as 2017 that former US special envoy Brett McGurk called Syria’s Idlib, “the largest al-Qaeda safe haven since 9/11.”

Should those men I met back in 2012 still be alive today, it’s a fair bet that most would have found their way into the ranks of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) also known as al-Qaeda in Syria.

It was only a few months ago that HTS took full administrative control of Idlib, giving both the Assad regime and its Russian allies the strongest possible pretext for an assault on this final opposition holdout.

The Syrian regime has always made clear that it wants to retake every inch of the country. With Moscow’s help along with other allies like Iran and the Shi'a Islamist militant group Hezbollah from neighbouring Lebanon, it has clawed back probably two-thirds of it

More than once there has been talk of an all out assault on Idlib. Over the past week the chances of this happening have again intensified, a move the UN has warned that could trigger the “worst-scale humanitarian crisis of the 21st century”.

As many as three million people live in Idlib, their numbers having swollen by 600,000 since 2011 after people fled there from other opposition areas that have fallen to Russian air strikes and pro-regime forces.

Over the past two years that military process has accelerated leaving the entire civilian population of Idlib trapped. With Turkey now having sealed off its border and most of Syria back in the hands of Assad forces there is in effect almost nowhere for people to run in the event of a large scale offensive on the region.

Should this occur humanitarian agencies too would likely be unable to operate, making the prospect of a high civilian casualty rate a near certainty.

Already following January’s dramatic takeover of Idlib by HTS fighters, many international humanitarian organisations have withdrawn aid and support for schools and hospitals and Idlib’s population are feeling the impact.

This winter, cold temperatures and rains have plunged whole camps of displaced families into misery, flooding and destroying more than 3,600 tents and displacing some people yet again, according to the UN.

About 275,000 people are living in camps and rickety shelters, and there are just 1,092 hospital beds for the entire a population. Cut off from the national grid, many residents rely on solar power. Jobs are scarce and some 40 per cent of Idlib’s children have no schooling.

In addition to the concerns of those in need, aid groups are under other pressures too. For not only do they have the security of their own staff to consider, but must reassure major donors that funds are not diverted by HTS which is designated a terrorist organisation by most of the international community.

Last September when indicators last suggested such an attack on Idlib was imminent, UN secretary general Antonio Guterres underlined the serious consequences that would occur and appealed to Russia, Iran and Turkey to “spare no effort to find solutions that protect civilians” in Idlib and said it was “absolutely essential” to avoid a full-scale battle in Syria’s rebel-held province.

“This would unleash a humanitarian nightmare unlike any seen in the blood-soaked Syrian conflict,” he warned at the time.

Today as those fears are again being confronted, it’s important to recognise the wider geopolitics at play in order to understand why again the battle for Idlib looms.

Lately most attention in Syria’s conflicthas been focused on the north east of the country where the Islamic State (IS) group is making its last territorial stand in the beleaguered town of Baghouz. By contrast Idlib has been relatively calm, largely in part as a result of an 11th hour truce brokered by Moscow and Ankara last autumn sometimes known as the Idlib memorandum.

Until recently, Idlib was a more-or-less stable patchwork of territory dominated by armed groups, some extremist, some more moderate and a few pockets run by elected civilian councils.

In September, Turkey signed a deal with Russia to spare the province from an all-out onslaught, and in return Ankara pledged to force jihadist factions like HTS to leave Idlib. Since then that ceasefire has more or less held, but instead of HTS retreating, it has grown bolder and in January declared it had forced other armed opposition groups in Idlib into a surrender deal, effectively consolidating its control of the entire province.

This, as might be expected, has not gone down well with the Assad regime or its Russian allies who have become increasingly impatient with Turkey to live up to its promise of rooting out HTS.

“While Moscow is clearly disappointed, it does not despair of the situation,” Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Centre says.

“I don’t think that Moscow has ever deluded itself about the unity of the coalition. . . In a way, it is a miracle that Russia has managed to keep the coalition functioning,” he told the Financial Times recently.

It was last month on February 14 that Russian President Vladimir Putin welcomed the leaders of Turkey and Iran to the Russian Black Sea resort of Sochi to discuss the latest state of the ceasefire and Turkey’s seeming inability to deal with HTS.

By all accounts Putin expressed his impatience with Ankara, leading some observers to suggest that the deal is now in tatters and a military offensive against Idlib is back on the table.

Last Friday perhaps sensing that the rising tension could easily get out of hand and the ceasefire deal collapse, the Turkish and Russian militaries began joint patrols around Idlib.

“Today Russia will begin patrols in the border area outside of Idlib in the border region while Turkish armed forces’ patrols will begin in the demilitarised zone,” Turkey’s official Anadolu news agency confirmed citing a government official.

Many observers however say such moves are little more than window dressing and an effort to keep the lid on growing differences between Moscow and Ankara.

On the ground in Idlib itself the last few weeks has seen an uptick in shelling and air strikes against HTS forces by Syrian forces.

“Idlib is coming back under the Syrian government’s control,” warned Mohammed Khair Akkam, a Syrian MP aligned with the regime recently. “Maybe not tomorrow or the day after, but the battle is drawing nearer.”

For its part HTS has been working not only to prepare for any regime onslaught but through a shadowy power struggle has been consolidating its own position by eliminating potential rivals such a IS who still have some presence in Idlib.

HTS has launched its crackdown following a wave of bombings and assassinations largely blamed on IS sleeper cells.

Civilians in areas controlled by HTS meanwhile, say they are trying to cope with security lockdowns and the looming risk of violence, as uncertainty and fear once again descend over daily life in Syria’s last rebel-held enclave.

According to some Syrian activists and independent online news sources, last week there was an outbreak of armed clashes in one area of Idlib city following a HTS operation against a suspected IS cell. There were also reports that a suspected IS suicide bomber detonated themself inside a crowded restaurant in downtown Idlib city, reportedly killing several members of HTS as well as a number of civilians. According to unverified reports, senior HTS leadership members were meeting in the restaurant at the time of the attack.

Such localised problems for HTS however pale in comparison to the challenge they will face should Syrian government and Russian forces launch their own offensive. Today the estimated tens of thousands of jihadist fighters said to be in Idlib are far better armed and supplied than those fighters I met in the province back in 2012 in the early days of the war.

Likewise the firepower possessed by the Syrian regime forces and it Russian allies would result in massive levels of destruction, especially in urban areas just as it did when they launched attacks on former opposition strongholds like Aleppo.

Even before such large scale attacks begin many civilians in Idlib already live daily under fire unwilling to leave their homes and in fear of their lives.

“Where would we go to? The borders and camps are full of refugees, we can't find an empty tent or shelter,” said Salem Obayda, an Arabic teacher living in Maratnomn speaking recently to the online news outlet The New Arab.

Maratnomn is just one of many places in the province that has come under daily artillery fire, with many families forced to leave the southern part of the city.

Every day there is the sense that Idlib might be living on borrowed time with little needed to provoke and all out military reaction from Damascus and Moscow.

Only last week, HTS leader, Abdurrahim Attoun, upped the ante by refusing to deny that his fighters were planning to merge with other armed factions and take control of the crucial M5 highway, the economic artery that used to link Damascus to Turkish markets.

Such a “high-stakes gamble” would likely irk Assad, observed Sam Heller, a senior analyst with the Brussels-based International Crisis Group. And that precisely is what Idlib has become for all concerned, a high stakes gamble.

As Syria’s seemingly interminable conflict has show time and again, ultimately those that stand to lose most of course are the innocents, those civilians caught in the crossfire. As human rights group Amnesty International said in in a statement last September when an attack on Idlib looked imminent, the lives of “millions of people in are now in the hands of Russia, Turkey and Iran”.

For the people of Idlib and Syria one can only hope for a positive outcome, but the signs again are not good. Hard as it is to imagine, yet another swathe of Syria could soon become a charnel house, as the world looks on powerless to prevent it.