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The ramshackle, Turkish-backed offensive has come with deceptive victories and major problems for Ankara since it launched on Aug. 24.
For a week in November, Turkish jet fighters stopped breaching Syrian air space after Damascus said it activated surface-to-air missiles and threatened to use them on Turkish intrusions.
Only after talks with Russia was Turkey able to resume air support to its FSA proxies.
Turkey appears to have tried to compensate for these losses by increasing its bombing of Al-Bab. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights conflict monitoring group reported that Turkish air strikes killed 72 civilians, 21 of them children, on Dec. 22. The following day another 16 civilians, three of them children, died in subsequent strikes.