Turkey’s incursion into Syria involves several actors and moving parts. And it threatens to further destabilize an area already dealing with unrest. CGTN’s Gerald Tan takes a closer look.

To understand Turkey’s offensive in Syria, we must examine a region mired in different layers of conflict.

The starting point is the civil war in Syria. Fighting over the last eight-and-a-half years has fractured the country into a jigsaw.

The biggest piece is held by the Syrian government and the rest by disparate opposition groups.

The northeast is under the control of Kurdish forces. The area bordering southern Turkey is the focus of the Turkish incursion.

Turkey wants to establish what it calls a ‘safe zone’ that’s 32 kilometers deep and stretching 450-kilometers along the Syrian side of the border.

Once it clears the area of Kurdish fighters, Ankara said the nearly one million Syrian refugees, who fled the war to Turkey, can return and resettle there.

But the Kurds are part of the Syrian Democratic Forces or SDF, who’ve been instrumental in the fight against ISIS.

The SDF said it currently has around 12,000 suspected ISIS fighters in prisons within their territory. Additionally, it’s holding the families of those fighters in two Syrian camps inside this same zone. The big concern is that the SDF cannot fight ISIS and Turkey at the same time.

So why would Turkey attack? It regards the Kurdish forces as an extension of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party or PKK. It’s been fighting for more autonomy in Turkey for decades, and Ankara designates it a terrorist group.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said he wants to eliminate the “terror corridor” along the country’s southern frontier. But with the fate of hundreds of thousands of civilians in the area — and the defeat of ISIS still in question — many are asking who will ultimately pay the price of this operation.