"We sided with the Syrian people because regimes will go but the people always stay," said Turkish foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu Sunday, Sept. 18 in a bid to vindicate the "zero conflict" doctrine he advocates. In order to talk down the many critics who say his doctrine is a flop, he resorted to bending Syrian reality out of its shape. In fact, most of "the people" were gone when Davutoglu made his remark: Bashar Assad and his army had virtually smashed their six-month protest, aided substantially by Turkey reneging on its pledge of military backing for "the people" against the regime's bloody crackdown.
Indeed the Turkish foreign minister cynically exploited Assad's successful blackout on world media coverage behind which, on Sept. 8, DEBKAfile's military and intelligence sources report, Assad and his army embarked their final massive purge.
See DEBKAfile of Sept 8: Syrian units pulled back from Israeli border for big offensive.
Since tank-backed military massacres city by city were not enough to wipe out dissent, Assad mobilized his 300,000 strong army and called up 50,000 reservists for a coordinated, systematic cleanup of all protest centers. The operation, dubbed "Biraq Assad" – Assad's flag –aims to raise the dictator's flag once more over every Syrian town, village and building.
The uniformed killers are given lists of addresses of protesters and deserters from the army. They shoot as they burst into homes, leaving no survivors from their "visits," whether men, women, children or elderly. Whole families are massacred, one by one.
Since the operation began, our sources report street demonstrations have declined by 80-90 percent.

The army is also giving special attention to the Jabal al-Zawiya region of northeast Syria not far from the Turkish border. Thousands of Syrian soldiers on foot comb through caves, dense brush and every possible place of concealment to flush out and kill on the spot the many Syrian army deserters who refused to fire on civilians. They are also slaughtering any living creatures to deny the fugitives food.
Turkey, while capitalizing politically on providing some opposition leaders with a base of operation, has not lifted a finger to halt the carnage. Bashar Assad would certainly agree that Davutoglu's doctrine of "zero conflict" is a smash success.