Syrian Civil War Increasingly a Regional Problem

All Five Neighbors Feel Effects of War

Syrian warplanes continue to strike along the border with neighboring Turkey, as rebels backed by the Turkish government set up shop over an ever-growing amount of territory along the frontier.

With shells falling mere meters from the border, the sense that they are “in the warzone” is growing for Turkish residents of border provinces, and while the Syrian military’s strikes rarely cross the border, the constant rebel presence on both sides of the border adds to the sense that the fight spans both sides of the border.

Turkey is by far the most effected of Syria’s five neighbors, but they’ve all felt the war in one way or another, from rebels killing Jordanian troops along the border to sectarian clashes breaking out in northern Lebanon.

Even Israel has ratcheted up their alert, though so far only a stray mortar shell and a lot of bellicosity seems to have resulted. In Iraq the impact is less direct still, with violence clearly rising along the Syrian frontier but the amount directly related to increased Islamist activity in the region difficult to measure in any real way.

Author: Jason Ditz

Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.