Turkey’s impossible contradictions in Syria

In case anyone lost track or stopped paying attention, Turkey, Russia, and the Bashar al-Assad regime are now fighting each other in Syria. A few weeks ago, the Assad regime began making serious military advances in Idlib, the last Sunni-Arab opposition-held province of Syria. 

Turkish military observation posts scattered throughout Idlib came under fire from Syrian artillery and Syrian-Russian air strikes as well during the past week, killing up to 20 Turkish soldiers and wounding several more. Turkey responded with its own bombardments and even an attack by its forces and proxy rebel groups on an Assad-regime held town in Idlib, killing scores of Syrian troops and pro-Assad militiamen. 

This is all occurring at the same time that Turkey and Russia cooperate with joint military patrols along the majority-Kurdish areas of northeastern Syria that Turkey invaded in October. While Turkish troops come under fire from Russian air strikes, Turkey also continues to purchase Russian gas and even weapons systems, such as the recently delivered S-400 air defense units. The purchase of these Russian weapons systems got Ankara kicked out of the American F-35 fighter jet program and still risks American sanctions against Turkey.

Caught in the middle of all this are Syrian civilians. Tens of thousands of Kurds and other groups in northeastern Syria remain displaced since Turkey’s October invasion. In northern Idlib province, the mostly Sunni-Arab population would prefer Turkey to remain there (in contrast to the Kurds’ view a little to the east). With Assad’s forces on the move and their hospitals and homes the target of Russian air strikes, hundreds of thousands of Idlib’s population now find themselves fleeing northwards towards the Turkish border. Turkey, already hosting some 3.6 million Syrian refugees, has no appetite for a new influx of Syrians.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan must therefore try and balance impossibly contradictory objectives and positions. Just as he and his government were in the midst of a shift away from the United States towards Russia, they were rudely reminded that Russia backs opposing forces in Syria (as well as Libya and a few other places). In an ironic twist, Turkey reportedly requested that the United States deploy Patriot air defense batteries to their border with Syria to help protect them from Russian air strikes. These would be the same Patriot systems Turkey declined in favor of the S-400s. The Russian S-400 systems Ankara took delivery of in August are not yet operational.

If Turkey were still under the secular rule of its Kemalist old guard, things would have looked very different today. Turkey would never have backed Islamists against the Assad regime. Ankara would have cooperated with the United States against Islamic State (ISIS) radicals setting up shop right on its border. This in turn would have removed America’s motivation to ally with PKK-aligned Kurdish groups in Syria. 

If Turkey had taken action against jihadis on its border, Syria’s Kurds might not have even had to take up arms to defend themselves from these radicals – gaining a new sense of pride, organizational capacity and identity in the process and suddenly looming large as a threat in the Turkish imagination. Turkey’s relationship with America, Europe and NATO would thus not have fallen into question under such circumstances.

Under an Islamist or “Sunni Muslim nationalist” president and party since 2002, Turkey now finds itself in a quandary instead. Turkey’s goals in Syria, centered on putting a Sunni Muslim Islamist regime into power in Damascus, contradict the goals of virtually every other significant state with a horse in the race. Russia, America, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iraq, and Iran may not agree on much, but none of them wish to see an Erdogan-aligned Muslim brotherhood take over from Assad. Now that it seems clear the Assad regime has won the civil war and is not going anywhere, Turkey also has no idea how to extricate itself from Syria, even as it comes under mounting pressure there. If the Americans also lack a strategy in Syria, at least the problem does not lie right in their backyard. 

Russia, Iran, and Assad, meanwhile, enjoy clear and achievable goals in Syria: they want to see the Assad regime reassert control over the entire country. Faced with such concerted opposition, Ankara seems to have now entered a process of re-evaluating its relationship with Washington, hoping that not too many bridges were burned over the Kurds, Fetullah Gulen, Turkish aid to jihadi groups, beating up of protestors during visits to Washington, S-400 purchases, spats with Israel, brinksmanship on the Mediterranean, accusations that the US ambassador was behind the 2016 coup attempt, and all kinds of anti-American rhetoric. 

Luckily for Mr. Erdogan, leaders in Washington seem to have short memories and an indefatigable appreciation for Turkey’s importance. 

David Romano has been a Rudaw columnist since 2010. He holds the Thomas G. Strong Professor of Middle East Politics at Missouri State University and is the author of numerous publications on the Kurds and the Middle East. 

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw. 

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