Turkey has not acted on their early ultimatum to Assad for him to go or on the discussions of creating a safe zone within Syria using Turkish forces where rebels could be sheltered.
Could Turkey's inaction be changing?
Turkey fired tank and artillery shells on a convoy of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), destroying a bus and two trucks, in response to small-arms fire on a Turkish border post on Tuesday, according to state-run Anadolu news agency. Until now, any Turkish military action has been aimed at Syrian government forces in the form of retaliatory strikes only when shells or bullets strayed across the porous 511 miles of shared border.
Things have changed. Inaction may once have been excused because the military wasn't ready (from purges, essentially), because it was believed Assad was doomed (before Iran and Russia went all-in for Assad and we went Kerry), and because the non-jihadi rebels weren't a threat to Turkey itself.
And then there is the issue of economic and financial difficulties that Turkey's leaders could want to demote in the headlines.
The Turks did operate in northern Iraq for a long time, beginning in the mid-1980s during the Iran-Iraq War. Kurdish rebels fighting Saddam were a threat to Turkey, so Turkey fought a parallel war as the main front raged. So Turkey could do it again.
This time, it seems as if the Kurdish issue is lower down the worry list, meaning that any buffer zone would be in the northwest with a focus on Aleppo and areas to the sea.
This focus would help the non-jihadi rebels by providing a major ally against both the jihadis and Assad.
With the Olympics coming up, I wondered if it was China's turn to do something, returning the favor for letting Putin sit watching the Peking Olympics while his troops assaulted Georgia.
Turkey might claim the right to move while Russia is too worried about putting on a good show in Sochi.
