As the smoke settles on the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria and its replacement by Islamist leadership under Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), it is clear that Turkey’s far-right governing bloc has emerged from the tumult strong and emboldened. What is less clear is whether this will mean that Recep Tayyip Erdoğan will be able to project influence across the region without constraint.
To many observers and government propagandists, HTS’s victory in Syria was a product of Erdoğan’s strategic genius. But while the fall of Assad may have emboldened those elements of the Turkish elite happy to entertain neo-Ottomanist imperial dreams, it has not yet changed the fact of Kurdish presence in Syria’s north or definitively altered the complex balance of power between regional players like Saudi Arabia, Israel, Iran, and Russia.
Turkey’s old establishment — made up of figures from the center-rightist and Kemalists, two loose class coalitions led respectively by the bourgeoisie and the bureaucracy — prioritized the integrity of the postwar state system. Keeping Syria intact was an unquestioned part of this balancing act, which Turkey maintained even as tensions mounted between it and its southern neighbor due to disputes over water, Islamist insurgency, and Kurdish guerrilla camps.
Turkey has long desired to see more conservative Sunni rule in Syria and has gone as far as to back the country’s branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, an alliance that culminated in the 1982 Hama uprising, which the Syrian army eventually quashed after a twenty-seven-day siege of the city and tens of thousands of casualties. Assad, in turn, housed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) training camps, ignoring his own troubled relations with Syria’s Kurds.
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Auteur: Cihan Tuğal
