IN a corner of this week’s BRICS summit in South Africa, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had an important conversation with Russia’s Vladimir Putin over Syria. The two leaders appeared to have become the best of friends after the brief but bitter row over Turkey shot down a Russian jet near its border with Syria in December 2015. But Erdogan is worried as Moscow’s client regime of Basher Assad prepares to move against Daesh (the so-called IS) and its Islamist allies in its remaining Syrian enclave of Idlib .

This is the province that Turkey itself invaded in October last year to attack Kurdish rebels of the YPG, which Ankara brands a terrorist force actively cooperating with its own Kurdish insurgents in the PKK. But the operation also targeted the extremist Salafists of Hay’at Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS), who are linked to Al-Qaeda. It was also supposedly in support of the Free Syrian Army which is fighting against the Assad regime. This January a full-on attack against Kurdish militias in Afrin and Manjib saw the YPG agree to evacuate the latter city this month. Afrin had been taken by the Turks early in their incursion.

It’s unlikely that Putin has much regard for the YPG, even though Assad effectively had a ceasefire with them in return for their driving Daesh and other Islamists out of large areas of northern Syria. A further element in this tangled web is the support that the Americans have been giving the YPG with weaponry and, at the very least, military advisers. The possibility that Turkish troops could find themselves in a firefight with US special forces did not, as far as if known, materialize. Now however, as Assad moves his army from the south of the country, where they have crushed the terrorists, the danger arises that his troops and their Russian allies, could end up engaging Turkish soldiers.

It was Turkey’s extraordinary unwillingness to stop the flow of jihadists and their arms across their territory to Syria, that empowered the fanatics and eventually came to seriously threaten the effectiveness of the FSA. The idea that the Islamist bigots were on the same anti-Assad side was always an absurd fiction. Daesh and its satraps cared nothing about Syria and its people any more than the wretched people of Iraq that they enslaved.

In Johannesburg, Erdogan will have echoed the concern he expressed to journalists before he flew to South Africa, which were that events in Syria were not moving in the direction Turkey wanted and as far as Idlib was concerned “Anything can happen at any time”.

It has emerged that when Putin met President Trump in Helsinki last month, he pressed the argument that the US should lead a Western move to recognize what he predicted would soon be a triumphant Assad regime. It is conceivable that Turkey might hold its nose and follow suit but Erdogan would make the neutralization of Syria’s Kurds on his southern border, a key condition for such a deal.

And the Turkish leader has another problem. Turkey already has 3.5 million Syrian refugees now generously housed in some excellent camps. But their presence is now unpopular and causing increasing discontent among locals. If the forces of Assad and Putin assault Idlib as predicted next month, that already great figure will swell still further.