From a White House statement to death on the streets. It has been a fast and distressing week in Syria

A coolly distant White House missive last Sunday evening, informing that the US would neither condone or condemn a Turkish invasion of Syria, very soon had on-the-ground ramifications.

By Wednesday, Turkey’s “Operation Peace Spring” had begun, and Syria’s nearly nine-year civil war was given a new chapter. Donald Trump’s apparently ill-thought out decision – following a phone call with Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan – was quickly and widely torn apart, by friends and enemies alike.

Former military generals, key Republican supporters – including Lindsey Graham – foreign governments and Trump’s own former Isis envoy were unanimous in decrying Trump’s effective greenlighting of Turkey’s longed-for incursion into Syria as a needlessly dangerous move. It was a decision, everyone seemed to believe, with no discernible positive outcomes at all.

The Kurdish autonomous experiment looked to be over. Years of relative stability – and freedom – were coming to an end. Bloodshed and humanitarian catastrophe seemed inevitable – and soon were.

To those of us who have been following the Syrian civil war since early 2011, it was momentous. But how to convey this to those readers who may have understandably become jaded by years of coverage of a seemingly interminable war?

While the facts on the ground almost spoke for themselves, dozens of civilians killed, 130,000 people fleeing their homes, hundreds of detainees – many of them Isis relatives – on the loose, it was important to get a sense of what was unfolding on the ground.

Hastily making arrangements for our correspondent based in Turkey, Borzou Daragahi, to return from another reporting trip, and for Richard Hall. based in Beirut, to travel to northeast Syria overground from Iraq – events on the ground soon overtook any plans we could make.

And when on Sunday evening, Kurdish forces in northern Syria announced an ad-hoc alliance with Damascus – designed at preventing further bloodshed at the hands of Turkish forces – our plans were dashed. All foreign journalists, wary of Syrian regime detention, were leaving northern Syria.

But when Bel Trew interviewed a Qamishli resident, Sharine Salih, about the situation there – the bloodied bodies and Turkish airstrikes – we were able to, hopefully, convey a sense of the disaster. “The freshly wounded people and the dead keep arriving,” she wrote, of the local hospital.

With Borzou now filing from the Turkish border, and Richard reaching out to Kurdish contacts gained from years of reporting in the field, we can attempt to paint a fuller picture of what is happening there.

What comes next is very unclear, and it seems hard to believe that yet another front has opened in this most horrific of civil wars. And that it likely didn’t have to happen at all.

Yours,

Olivia Alabaster

International Editor