Thanks to a never ending religious war there are not many tourists in Syria these days. Foreign governments including America, Russia, Turkey, Israel, and Iran are making things worse.

Wall Street Journal - As Alliances Shift, Syria’s Tangle of Wars Grows More Dangerous. As multiple actors raise the stakes, the potential has grown for a disastrous miscalculation. There may be no country in the world that is more volatile than Syria right now, with the U.S., Turkey, Israel, Iran and Russia all with military interests in the area.

By Yaroslav Trofimov Updated Feb. 15, 2018 3:20 p.m. ET 66 COMMENTS

DUBAI—Here’s what happened in Syria over the past week or so. Try to make out who’s whose friend—and who’s whose foe.

The Russian-backed Syrian regime gave free passage through its territory to American-backed Kurdish militias so they could fight against America’s NATO ally Turkey.

The Syrian regime at the same time attacked these American-backed Kurdish militias in another part of the country, triggering U.S. strikes that killed more than 100 Syrian troops and a significant number of Russian military contractors.

In yet another part of Syria, Turkey threatened to attack American troops embedded with these Kurdish forces, prompting a counterwarning of an American military response.

Russia, meanwhile, stood by and didn’t use the vaunted S-400 air-defense system it had deployed to Syria as Israeli bombing raids wiped out as much as half of Syria’s own air defense capabilities.

Moscow also remained determinedly silent over the Russian deaths in U.S. strikes, the first time a large number of armed Russian citizens were killed by the U.S. military since 1920.

Let’s see…Russia also lost a military jet (to a missile fired by Syrian rebels who cooperate with Turkey), as did Israel (to a Syrian regime missile), while Turkey had a helicopter shot down (by a Kurdish missile) and Iran a drone (by an Israeli chopper.)

If you’ve lost track, welcome to the messy patchwork of foreign-power entanglements that Syria has become as its seven-year war enters a new—and more dangerous phase.

“What’s happening in Syria is a multidimensional conflict at this point,” said Emile Hokayem, Middle East security fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. “It’s become a fully regionalized conflict, and all the Syrian parties today act as a proxy for someone else.”

With so many actors ramping up involvement in Syria through fleeting alliances of convenience, the potential has grown for a disastrous miscalculation—and for the conflict to expand dramatically and beyond Syria’s borders, even though nobody seems to want it to.

The most obvious flashpoint is the U.S. relationship with Turkey, whose leaders are inflamed by U.S. support for the main Syrian Kurdish militia, known as YPG. The group is close to the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, an organization that both Ankara and Washington consider terrorist, and that has waged a bloody war on the Turkish state since the 1990s. (U.S. officials draw a distinction between YPG and PKK.)

As Turkish officials make clear in increasingly virulent statements, they are no longer prepared to tolerate American funding and support for their country’s existential enemy. Their immediate target: American forces advising the YPG that are deployed to the northern Syrian town of Manbij, shielding it from an assault by Turkish troops and their Syrian proxies.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, speaking to parliament this week after American generals made a high-profile visit to Manbij and warned against any Turkish offensive, pledged to seize the town anyway.

“It’s quite clear that those who say they will respond aggressively if we strike have never had an Ottoman slap,” he thundered.

It might seem unthinkable that Turkish troops would strike American forces embedded with the YPG. Yet as body bags keep coming home from battles with YPG in Syria’s Afrin enclave, the level of anti-American rhetoric in Turkey has turned so high that rational calculations may no longer matter.

“Erdogan backed himself in by talking about going to Manbij so many times, it would be very hard for him to walk it back. If he doesn’t deliver, he will look weak,” said Gonul Tol, head of the Turkish center at the Middle East Institute in Washington. “If the U.S. cannot offer anything to him, the Manbij operation is possible.”

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Russia and the U.S., too, are eyeing each other from opposing sides of a Syrian front line as Washington seeks to protect its area of influence, the part of Syria largely east of the Euphrates that YPG and its Arab allies have liberated from Islamic State with American assistance.

President Bashar al-Assad’s regime wants to reclaim those territories, and on Feb. 7 sent a battalion-sized column to seize a critical gas plant near Deir Ezzour, east of the Euphrates.

While Russia’s official military didn’t take part in that offensive, hundreds of Russians employed by a private military contractor did. Many of these men previously fought in Russia’s “hybrid war” in eastern Ukraine in 2014-2015, and it is an open secret that these mercenaries train at official Russian military bases and that their operations are intimately connected to Russia’s military and intelligence establishment. (Moscow denies official links with these “volunteers.”)

The Feb. 7 American strikes killed at least 11 of these Russian contractors, according to military sources cited by Moscow’s Kommersant newspaper; other Russian reports quoted a much higher number. So far, Moscow has played it down, the Kremlin spokesman saying Russia only focuses on its regular forces and isn’t keeping track of “other Russians who may be in Syria.”

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If another deadly contact between Americans and Russians occurs in Syria, that cautious approach may no longer be feasible, warned Pavel Baev, a professor at the Peace Research Institute in Oslo and a former analyst at the Soviet ministry of defense.

“Both sides are pretending that this incident had no importance, and the Russian government keeps denying the huge losses that are impossible to deny,” Mr. Baev said. “This approach may work for now, until something else happens. But the Syrian war is carrying on, and the risk of new uncontrolled developments is growing with every day.”

The issue of casualties—and their impact on policy—is exponentially more sensitive for another military power increasingly embroiled in the Syrian tangle: Israel.

The Syrian air defenses had a rare success in striking an Israeli F-16 jet on Feb. 10, but the plane crashed on Israeli soil, and its crew managed to eject over friendly territory. That allowed the conflagration to die down by the end of the day, once Israel completed a wave of retaliatory airstrikes against Syrian military targets.

It is easy to imagine what would have happened if the F-16 had crashed over regime territory and the pilots were captured alive. By now, the world would likely be trying to deal with a full-scale Israeli-Syrian war.

Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at yaroslav.trofimov@wsj.com