July 23, 2024
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Turkey’s Uphill Battle to a Rapprochement With Syria
Ideology and the presence of several foreign actors complicates the situation.
By: Hilal Khashan
Since the 1950s, Turkey has expressed interest in the domestic affairs of Syria more than any other Arab country, driven by a long shared border, demographic overlap, security concerns and Ankara’s regional ambitions. Turkey even threatened to invade Syria in 1957 over the growing Soviet influence in the country, fearing that the Syrian Communist Party could stage a military coup. It again threatened Damascus with war over its support for the irredentist Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK.
However, the two countries’ relations improved significantly after the Justice and Development Party, or AKP, won parliamentary elections in 2002 and announced its “zero problems with neighbors” policy. After becoming Turkish prime minister in 2003, AKP leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan also forged a personal friendship with Syrian President Bashar Assad. But the Syrian uprising in 2011 cut short their detente as Erdogan sided with the opposition. He believed that the Arab uprisings could help make Turkey a prominent regional power. His gamble only antagonized many Arab regimes and eventually led to Turkey’s semi-isolation in the region. In his bid to reverse this trajectory, Erdogan has since made several gestures to restore ties with Arab states, including Syria – even indicating that he would meet in person with Assad. However, given the complexity of the situation in Syria and the presence of several foreign actors there, resolving the two countries’ differences will be an uphill battle.
Origins of the Conflict
When Mustafa Kemal Ataturk announced the establishment of the modern Turkish state in 1923, he pursued an ambitious national policy focused on creating a capable central state and solid national identity. Under Ataturk’s plan, the state would concentrate on internal security and distance itself from its regional neighbors in West Asia and North Africa, opting instead to identify with European secularism and ways of life. Ataturk’s untimely death in 1938 weakened his Republican People’s Party, leading to a landslide victory for the opposition Democrat Party in 1950. Its leaders, Adnan Menderes and Celal Bayar, loosened Ataturk’s clampdown on Islam and engaged Turkey in Middle Eastern affairs by joining the Baghdad Pact in 1955. This move drew Ankara closer to the Hashemites in Iraq and Jordan while alienating it from Egypt and Syria, where pan-Arabism surged.
Turkey’s current borders were drawn between 1920 and 1938, when Turkish forces entered the Iskenderun district and placed it under Ankara’s control. However, there is a big difference between Turkey’s territorial and ideological boundaries – a disparity that has invariably been a source of tension between Turkey and Arab countries, namely Syria.
The idea of a harmonious Turkish identity dominated political discourse among the Turkish elite beginning when the Kurds were described as “mountain Turks.” In the 1940s, efforts to “Turkify” the economy began by weakening non-Muslim segments of the population (Christians and Jews) through the imposition of a wealth tax in 1942 at a rate that reached 80 percent. Hostility toward non-Muslims peaked in 1955, when crowds of Turks targeted Armenian and Greek businesses and individuals on Istanbul’s famous Independence Avenue.
The 1980 military coup initiated what emerged as the Islamic approach to confronting Kurdish nationalist, communist and leftist tendencies. It served as a convenient basis for the use of the term neo-Ottomanism for the first time by Turgut Ozal, Turkey’s prime minister between 1983 and 1989, who put forward the slogan “from the Adriatic to the Wall of China.” Even before assuming a government position, Ahmet Davutoglu (who would later become the country’s foreign minister and then prime minister) referred to neo-Ottomanism as a political ideology. He believed that the root of the most critical problems in Turkish foreign policy was the failure to harmonize it with the Ottoman legacy and develop an ambitious new agenda.
Davutoglu’s pursuit of strategic depth essentially involved a restoration of historical and cultural ties between Turkey and the former regions of the Ottoman Empire. Turkish officials often referred to the country’s historic responsibilities toward the Middle East and North Africa. In 2009, Davutoglu said that Turkey has an enduring legacy from the Ottoman era and must pay attention to the countries of the region.
The Arab Spring uprisings presented an opportunity for the AKP to implement its neo-Ottoman project. From this perspective, then-Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan saw Syria as an internal Turkish issue. He emphasized that his government would not stay out of the conflict there and argued that the Turkish people were the custodians of Syrian ancestral land.
Turkish Demands
There are two main reasons behind Turkey’s desire to normalize relations with the Assad regime. First, Erdogan is determined to prevent the PKK from establishing a mini-state in northern Syria. Second, he is convinced that he needs Assad’s cooperation to bring as many Syrian refugees as possible back to Syria. With 3 million Syrians now living in Turkey, the situation has become untenable as a growing portion of Turkish society refuses to allow Syrian refugees to remain in their country. If Erdogan meets with Assad, he will ask him to secure their repatriation to Syria and expects the Syrian government to return their property to them.
Erdogan also wants Assad to take an unambiguous position on the Kurdish People’s Protection Units, or YPG, which the Turkish government views as indistinguishable from the PKK. The YPG operates under the banner of the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, which controls more than a third of Syrian territory and, according to Ankara, threatens Turkish national security. Turkey’s security doctrine seeks to fight terrorist groups in their strongholds before they reach the country, in part by establishing military bases in places like Syria and Iraq. What worries Turkey is that the Kurds in eastern Syria now have civil institutions and a functioning bureaucracy. They seem to believe that they are on the path to achieving their historical dream of establishing a state of their own, a possibility Turkey cannot tolerate.
Ankara is also now concerned that municipal elections set for next month in northeastern Syria’s Kurdish autonomous region will grant legitimacy to the YPG and its political wing, the Democratic Union Party. It’s also uneasy about the fact that these elections do not concern the Syrian government, which does not view the Kurds as an imminent threat.
Syrian Demands
Given Erdogan’s fickle foreign policy, Assad realizes how eager the Turkish president is to negotiate with him and wants to improve his bargaining position in partnership with Russia, which supports their potential rapprochement. The Syrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has said that any normalization of relations with Ankara would have to involve the withdrawal of Turkish forces from northern Syria and the cessation of Ankara’s support for Syrian opposition groups.
Despite their disagreement on several issues, there’s a high possibility that a meeting will take place. However, it’s unlikely to produce tangible results because Assad cannot change the realities in Syria, where the United States controls the main Kurdish militant groups and sympathizes with the Kurdish state project. In addition, when the uprising started in 2011, Syrian Sunnis overwhelmingly demanded Assad’s ouster. Now that he’s pursuing a policy that he has called “useful Syria,” an arrangement in which Sunnis would never again constitute a demographic majority in the country, it’s unlikely that he will allow Sunni Syrian refugees to return to their homes.
Assad is also unable to make certain decisions on his own. External powers like Iran and Russia could ultimately form an invisible front against Turkey, meaning that a meeting between Erdogan and Assad will not be enough to solidify a rapprochement. Turkey must therefore be ready for lengthy negotiations with other influential actors in the country. The pressing question is: What interests can help the two countries overcome their differences?
One issue on which they somewhat agree is the Kurdish question. Both classify the YPG as a terrorist group and heavily criticize its U.S.-backed military activity and the possibility of an independent Kurdish entity. It is in the interest of both parties to maintain security and have the Turkish and Syrian armies control their shared border, which stretches more than 560 miles.
However, Turkey’s primary motivation for normalizing relations with Damascus is the establishment of a buffer zone between Turkish territory and the Kurdish-led region in northern Syria. Some in Syria want to revive the Adana Agreement – a 1998 deal under which Syria agreed to stop supporting the PKK and expel its leader to avert war – provided that a new version includes radical Islamic armed opposition groups in Idlib, such as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. However, it is not yet clear that Turkey will accept confronting these factions before reaching a comprehensive agreement that ends the war in Syria and defines its postwar government and relationship with neighboring countries.
One proposal for dealing with the armed opposition factions in Idlib is to include the moderate ones under the so-called Fifth Corps of the Syrian army, tasked with defending the border. This includes the Turkish-backed Syrian national army patrolling segments of the Turkish-Syrian border. Both the Syrian Democratic Forces and the Syrian regime have indicated that they would accept the plan. As for Turkey, it is amenable to the redeployment of its forces in northern Syria and to the provision of guarantees that it will withdraw all of its troops upon restoring border security, provided that Kurdish forces stay away from it. Turkey has also expressed its openness to providing guarantees to Russia to withdraw from Syria when the conflict ends. Assad knows that a rapid withdrawal of Turkish forces from northern Syria will create a security vacuum that no one can fill. It will also lead to chaos in the north because Turkey controls the armed opposition there.
Assad does not believe that Iran will accept a Turkey-Syria rapprochement because it would weaken Iran's presence in his country, to Ankara’s benefit. However, Iran is preoccupied with its internal affairs and unrelenting Israeli airstrikes in Syria, and it doesn’t seem capable of stalling a reconciliation between Assad and Erdogan. Either way, serious negotiations between Turkey and Syria will have to wait until after the U.S. presidential election. It is Washington, after all, that ultimately pulls the strings in the Syrian conflict.
