Syria: The Greatest Mess in the History of Turkish Foreign Policymaking

BY ANTHONY SHERWOOD

*Then U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, left, meets with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, center, and then Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu, right, at the Dolmabache Palace in Istanbul, Turkey, on August 11, 2012. Credit: U.S. Department of State

Across the board, Turkey’s foreign policy is now in disarray. In Idlib, the advances of the Turkish army have been blocked by the Syrian military, backed by Russian airpower, with Turkish troops and the army’s proxies taking casualties and armor being destroyed. In Libya, a Turkish arms ship was blown up in Tripoli harbor, with Turkish forces, again, being killed while fighting in support of the Government of National Accord (GNA). On the ground and politically, Turkey is caught in a confusing regional and international power struggle, which pits the three supporters of the GNA (Turkey, Qatar and the UN) against the six backing Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan National Army (France, Russia, the US, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the UAE), with others undecided.

Stalemated by Russia in its attempt to prevent the Syrian army from liberating all of Idlib province, Turkey has begun oscillating towards the US, which has signaled its support for the Turkish operation but without going any further. Having rejected the US Patriot anti-missile defense system in favor of Russia’s S400s, Turkey is now suggesting that they could be deployed along the border with Syria. However, there will be few sympathetic ears in Washington or the US media. Erdogan personally is deeply out of favor over a host of issues going back years, not the least of them Turkey’s purchase of Russian S400 missiles and its anger at US support for the Syrian Kurds. Neither will the savage attack on demonstrators by Erdogan’s security detail in 2017 while the president watched from the car port at the Turkish ambassador’s residence be forgotten.

In Europe, following his belligerent attacks on EU governments over financial support for the Syrian refugees who had flooded into Turkey, many of them then moving onwards or trying to move onwards to Europe, Erdogan has the support of Hungary’s rightwing Jobbik party but no-one in western Europe.

True to form, rather than back down from an untenable position in Syria, Erdogan has gone in harder in the apparent hope that threats of a bigger crisis will force Russia to call off the Syrian military’s ongoing offensive in Idlib. He has talked of further military action by the end of February unless the situation is resolved in his favor, shrinking this ultimatum to action the Turkish army might take overnight, but the threats and weeks of negotiations in Ankara and Moscow have not worked.

Putin himself has said little but government spokespersons (Dimitry Peskov for the president and Maria Zakharova for the foreign ministry) have directly blamed Turkey for the worsening of the situation in Idlib since the signing of a ‘de-escalation’ agreement last year. This has resulted in a toning-down of the Turkish rhetoric, with army chief Hulusi Akar talking of the need for a ceasefire in Idlib and the government looking ahead to talks with Putin and Angela Merkel next month that might ease the situation.

At no stage in the past nine years has Russia retreated an inch from its support for the full liberation of all occupied Syrian territory. For the time being, with the Syrian army making gains every day, Putin seems unwilling to cut Erdogan any more slack. Even if he eventually saves Erdogan’s face by agreeing to a humanitarian ceasefire, most of the province has now been liberated and with the Syrian army only a few kilometers away from Idlib city, the rest will follow sooner or later. Increasingly, Turkey’s military observation posts look like islands in a Syrian military sea, with no other purpose than to maintain a Turkish presence in the province as leverage during negotiation.The Turkish media, 90 percent Erdoganist, is full of praise for the policy twists and turns that have led Turkey into this dead-end in Syria, literally a dead end, with young Turkish soldiers and members of the army’s proxy force being killed in Idlib. The gruesome photos are not being published in the mainstream media but they circulate on social media so the truth cannot be entirely hidden from the public.

Idlib is in the hands of Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS) formerly Jabhat al Nusra, formerly Al Qaida in Syria. The name changes are like dried peas shifted under walnut shells to deceive the onlooker. The ideology, the brutality, the repression of women and the drive to destroy the secular government in Damascus are all the same. Hayat Tahrir al Sham is officially designated as a terrorist organization not just by the UN and the US but the Turkish government. While in government statements and press commentary the terrorists are described as ‘rebels,’ on February 24 opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu told Cumhuriyet newspaper that Erdogan “has made Turkey almost a patron for the HTS … Our sons are martyred due to the wrongful policies of the government in Syria since the beginning of the civil war.”

Since 2012 Erdogan has played a central role in the war on Syria. Takfiri jihadists converged on Turkey from all directions to join the attempt to destroy the secular government in Damascus and install a hardline sectarian Islamist regime in its place. In 2016, in an apparent attempt to defang Erdogan, Putin brought him into the negotiations between Russia, Iran, and Turkey over Syria’s future as a peacemaker. Agreements were signed at Astana and reinforced at Sochi. Turkey was allowed to set up military ‘observation posts’ in Idlib and assigned the responsibility of ‘de-escalating’ violence in Idlib. This never happened: on the contrary, the violence increased. Initially fighting HTS for dominance of the province, Turkey’s proxies eventually fought alongside it against the Syrian army.

The Syria policy is now undermining domestic support for Erdogan and the AKP (Justice and Development Party). Turks have been disturbed for years by the presence of more than three million Syrian refugees in their country and now face a further influx from Idlib. While the fighting has displaced a large number of Idlibis, there is no doubt the numbers are being overblown for propaganda purposes, in the western corporate media as well as in Turkey. Once their cities, towns, and villages are in safe hands there is no reason why the Idlibis would want to leave their homes: what Turkey will get are the takfiris and their families and it does not want them. However, they now have nowhere else to go except Afrin or perhaps Libya, where, after the overthrow and murder of Muammar al Qadhafi in 2011, a ‘transitional government’ sent fighters to Turkey to take up arms against the Syrian government. Now it is the Turkish government sending its Syrian proxies to defend the government in Tripoli.

Why Erdogan and his then Foreign Minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, jumped into the attempt to destroy the Syrian government remains something of a mystery. The Bashar al Assad of 2011, was the same Bashar of 2010, the close friend and brother of the two Turkish leaders who virtually overnight was transformed into the ‘dictator’. Up till 2011 Turkey and Syria had settled all outstanding problems. Borders had been opened to visa-free travel and trade was flourishing. In this new era of ‘soft diplomacy’ and ‘zero problems’ with neighbors, relations with Syria had never been better.

Erdogan and Davutoglu seemed to have sensed an opportunity. Reform was about to sweep the Middle East and they wanted to ride the crest of the wave. Accordingly, the relationship with Syria had to be thrown under the bus. As long-entrenched leaders were being tumbled to the ground elsewhere, they assumed the same fate was in store for Bashar. They argued that they had given him chances to introduce political reform, which in their scenario including the lifting of the ban on the Muslim Brotherhood. This was something the Syrian government could not do and once it made this plain, Bashar was set up for destruction.

The central problem for Erdogan and Davutoglu was that for all the trips they had made to Damascus, they clearly did not understand Syria’s social and political dynamics. A repressive political system that had taken root in the 1970s, not Bashar personally, was seen by the people as the central problem. In fact, Bashar enjoyed a high level of popular support and was seen by many Syrians as the best hope of bringing about political reform. He was not going to be brought down within months or even weeks as Erdogan and Davutoglu kept predicting.

There was no popular uprising in Syria. There was a protest movement exploited by outside governments, in the same way similar protests had been used to unseat governments in Latin America over many decades. The armed groups spawned by outside intervention infiltrated cities, towns and villages. They were not ‘rebels’ by any description (many were not even Syrian) but terrorists who threw men from the top of buildings, murdered imams in their mosques, beheaded or burnt captured soldiers alive, massacred Alawis and other Syrians who did not share their twisted views of Islam and persecuted and murdered Christians. The Syrian people wanted reform but they did not want their country destroyed and they loathed these groups and their outside backers.

The takfiri groups were all variations on the same brutal theme. There was not one ‘moderate’ among them as even the Americans eventually had to admit. These were the ‘rebels’ outside governments were arming and financing in their determination to destroy the ‘regime.’ They had the full support of the corporate media, ever willing to ignore their atrocities or try to pin them on the Syrian government. Exposed for its lying over the wars on Iraq and Libya, the media was lying again.

Failing to understand Syria’s internal dynamics, Erdogan and Davutoglu also failed to take into account the significance of the Russian connection. No outside power was going to come to Qadhafi’s defense, but Syria had Russia behind it. The political, trade and strategic relationship between the two countries goes back to the 1950s. In 1971 Syria gave the Russians naval porting facilities at Tartus. The importance of this lies in the context of the historical Russian drive for access to the Mediterranean. Russia now had that access and while there were many reasons for supporting the Syrian government, naval access was certainly one crucial reason why it was not going to stand by and watch the Syrian government being destroyed. In 2015 its aerial intervention helped to turn the war around and since a further agreement was signed in 2017, Russia has been developing Tartus into a fully-fledged naval base.

Over the years, as circumstances changed, Turkey’s reasons for intervening in Syria shifted with them. The first was the trumpet call to bring down the dictator and bring democracy to the people; the second was the need to combat the Islamic State; the third was the need to prevent the Kurds establishing autonomous enclaves along the Turkish-Syrian border. In 2018 a Turkish force invaded the northwestern region of Afrin to suppress the Kurdish YPG (People’s Protection Units): in the northeast, the US had already formed the largely Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), so that Turkey now faced a Kurdish strategic threat the length of its border with Syria.

There was no such threat when the Syrian government was in full control of Syrian territory. In 2011 the SDF did not exist and the YPG was fully controlled by the Syrian government, in accordance with the Turkish-Syrian Adana agreement of 1998 which gave birth to Davutoglu’s successful policy of ‘zero problem’ with neighbors. Had he stuck to it, he might have gone down into history as Turkey’s most successful foreign minister: as it was, he wrecked his legacy. Taking all of these factors into account, Turkey’s Syrian policy is incomprehensible on rational policy grounds. Erdogan and Davutoglu seemed to really believe that Bashar would soon be gone and they would be walking into the Umayyad mosque in central Damascus as liberators.

Syria is the greatest mess in the history of Turkish foreign policymaking. The costs have been enormous for Turkey, if only a fraction of what the Syrian people have been put through. It is a policy whose eventual fate was written on the wall in 2015 when Russia came in behind the Syrian military with air support. Yet even now the AKP’s coalition partner, Devlet Bahceli, leader of the National Movement Party (MHP) is breathing fire. He wants Damascus conquered. “Let’s burn down Syria …. Let’s demolish Idlib.” The fiery comment in Yeni Safak is the same, with its leading columnist, Ibrahim Karagul, declaring that Syria from Aleppo to Qamishli is now a war zone.

The public mood in Turkey is turning against Russia, with its ambassador subjected to death threats on social media. Given the assassination of his predecessor in December 2016, these threats clearly have to be taken seriously. Everything in this situation adds up to advice which Erdogan needs to hear and might be hearing from those brave enough to speak out within his own party: get Turkey out of this mess and get it out now.

 Idlib

ANTHONY SHERWOOD

Anthony Sherwood is an Australian writer with a close interest in Middle Eastern affairs.