At the beginning of his nearly 17-year reign, Erdogan was touted as a Turkish progressive, who was loosening the army’s anti-democratic grip while taking steps towards peace with the Kurds, and even hinting at a reconciliation with Armenia and recognition of the 1915 massacres. For nearly a decade, he and his country were heralded in the West.
Then everything started to go wrong. The uprisings that began in North Africa in late 2010 swelled Erdogan’s global ambitions, shifting his apparently liberal policies at home into reverse, and exposing the fault lines on which his relationship with the US had been built. Today, Turkey’s aspirations to join the European Union are all but over and its relationship with the US lies in ruins, while Erdogan has twisted his country’s democratic norms to forge a new populist blueprint. That, in large part, can be traced back to the war in Syria.
The first two years of the Arab uprisings were, in hindsight, the pinnacle of Erdogan’s golden era on the international stage. In Egypt and Tunisia, the quick overthrow of secular dictators made way for democratically elected governments with strong ties to the Muslim Brotherhood – and Erdogan, whose AK Party is cast in a similar mould to the Brotherhood, was quick to build ties with the new orders. It seemed that this was the opening that Erdogan and his foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, needed to fully realize their long-held ambition of building a Turkish sphere of influence within the old borders of the Ottoman Empire.
Syria, though, was different. Unlike Egypt and Tunisia, it shares a 500-mile border with Turkey. Before 2011, Erdogan had holidayed with Bashar al-Assad in Bodrum and declared him his ‘brother’ in an attempt to heal an old rift over the status of Hatay, a southern province of Turkey also claimed by Syria, and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, the PKK, which Syria had harboured for decades. After the rapprochement, ties flourished and visa requirements were scrapped.
As a result of all this, Erdogan hesitated when Washington started calling for Assad to step down. He and Davutoglu made several visits to Assad as the crackdown on Syrian protests intensified in early 2011, in a bid to nudge him towards reform and some kind of detente with the Muslim Brotherhood. It was only when it became clear Assad would not budge that Erdogan joined the US camp.
Once on board, the Turkish leader threw his weight behind the revolt against Assad, hosting the opposition-in-exile in Istanbul, and allowing armed rebel groups to use Turkey as a fallback position while crossing the border freely.
The fallout was immediate. Erdogan’s U-turn stirred up disquiet at home, especially among Turkey’s secularist opposition party, the CHP, which was wary about the rise of Islamism in the region, but also among AKP members and his cabinet. Even Abdullah Gul, founder of the AKP and president at the time, counselled that Turkey should maintain a more cautious position unless it was clear the US was willing to use force to dislodge Assad.
Next, the open frontier between Turkey and rebel-held Syria began to attract unwanted guests. Foreign extremists, angry at the spiralling slaughter of fellow Muslims in Syria, began taking cheap flights to Turkey, heading to its southern border and crossing into the war zone unimpeded. This continued for two years, swelling Al-Qaeda’s and later the Islamic State group’s ranks and fuelling rumours that Erdogan was actively supporting extremism.
Erdogan had taken a gamble which looked initially as though it might pay off. The Syrian rebels, galvanized by Turkey’s support, quickly seized swaths of rural Syria, while Assad’s army crumbled and the regime’s hold on power appeared to slip. By early 2013, however, the rebels’ progress had stalled. Assad was clinging on to the urban heartlands and refugees were pouring into Turkey as the front lines hardened and revolution turned into a war of attrition.
In May 2013, Erdogan travelled to Washington for a visit that would prove a turning point for both Syria and Turkey. Erdogan’s aim was to persuade Barack Obama, the US president, to offer full-blooded support to the rebels to speed Assad’s downfall and bring the war to an end. Such support should include a no-fly-zone close to the Turkish border. But Obama, always twitchy about the Syrian opposition, was now being briefed about the rise of the Islamic State group. Instead, he told Erdogan that he must cauterize the highway the jihadists had forged through Turkey and ruled out increasing support to the rebels while there were extremists in their midst. This left Erdogan angry and wondering whether the US might be plotting his downfall.
Back in Turkey, a rapid succession of events would galvanize his paranoia. First, in late May, came the Gezi Park protests, which metastasized from an environmentalist sit-in to mass revolts against Erdogan’s rule. His harsh response brought wide condemnation from the West.
Then in August, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood government was toppled by a military coup after only two years in power, eliminating one of Erdogan’s new regional allies. Finally, Assad launched a chemical attack on a rebel-held Damascus suburb, crossing Obama’s ‘red line’. The Syrian opposition hoped the outrage might spur the West to topple Assad and end their tragedy – but they were wrong. France, then Britain and finally the US all shied away. The US project that Erdogan had believed he was signing Turkey up for proved to be nothing more than words.
The Islamic State group, not Assad, now topped Washington’s agenda in Syria, and the American generals began building a coalition, using the YPG – a Syrian Kurdish militia linked to the PKK – as their ground force. Turkey might initially have been persuaded to work with the YPG, but in the summer of 2015 Erdogan’s peace talks with the PKK broke down, throwing Turkey into a new battle against Kurdish militancy of all stripes. Furthermore, the YPG’s leadership repeatedly refused Turkey’s requests to join the fight against Assad who, as far as Ankara was concerned, was primarily to blame for Syria’s chaos.
To the US generals, Erdogan had always seemed a slippery partner – even at the time US politicians and diplomats were courting him. Two weeks before he became prime minister in March 2003, Turkey voted against joining the Coalition of the Willing to topple Saddam Hussein, or allowing US troops to use Turkish soil to launch an invasion of northern Iraq. It was a betrayal the generals never forgot.
Meanwhile, the US diplomats who promoted Erdogan as Washington’s best Muslim ally knew even then that they were overselling him, but had little choice given their shortage of friends among the Sunni Muslim states of the Middle East. A decade on, those generals now cared little about Turkey’s indignation when they began arming and supporting the Syrian Kurds. Meanwhile, hapless US diplomats tried, and failed, to smooth over the growing crisis between the two Nato allies.
It is now five years since the US first started working with the Kurds in Syria. As their alliance became established, Washington tried every trick to make it more palatable to the Turks, including setting up a multi-ethnic alliance, the Syrian Democratic Forces, which is nonetheless dominated, militarily and politically, by the Kurds. None of this has placated Erdogan, who accuses the US of backing Kurdish terrorism and creating an existential threat to Turkey. Since 2016, he has launched two cross-border offensives into Syria that have brought Turkish troops into direct clashes with the YPG.
Meanwhile, the West has backed out of its early support for the Syrian rebels, scrapping almost all the train-and-equip schemes it set up with Turkey at the start of the war. Today, Erdogan is the last staunch backer of the Syrian opposition, continuing to support the rebels and co-opting them as Turkey’s allies in its own operations against the US-backed Kurds. Regionally, his backing for the Muslim Brotherhood has left Qatar as his only friend in the Arab world. He is also nurturing new relationships in Syria’s ashes. For nearly five years Russia and Turkey were unambiguous opponents in the conflict, with Putin backing Assad from the start. Their opposition turned to outright antagonism in November 2015, when Turkey shot down a Russian warplane close to the Syrian border, triggering a seven-month diplomatic crisis.
But Erdogan and Putin’s reconciliation, which came only a month before Turkey’s failed coup of July 2016, has opened the way for a growing accord between the two leaders, built on their mutual antipathy to the West. In Turkey’s case, that animus has mounted following the coup, which Erdogan accused some western leaders of celebrating.
Putin, sensing the opportunity to drive a wedge into the heart of the Nato alliance, has drawn Erdogan further into his orbit with Russia’s sale of its S-400 missile defence system to Turkey, thought to be a condition of their 2016 rapprochement.
With the S-400 delivery now underway, Turkey has been kicked out of Nato’s F35 fighter jet programme, a move that could prove the biggest blow yet to the relationship between Ankara and Washington. Further US sanctions would damage the staggering Turkish economy, giving Erdogan another reason to rail against America.
Had the Syrian war not happened, would Turkey have taken a different course, one that would have pleased his backers in the West? It is important not to discount the role of internal dynamics in the country’s descent, primarily Erdogan’s neutering of the army through mass court cases, and the alliance he built with Islamist preacher Fethullah Gulen, which would later turn toxic and explode into a personal war between the two men that is still being played out. The rerun of Istanbul’s mayoral elections in June 2019 was also to backfire as Erdogan’s AKP party tasted defeat.
But the breakdown of the Kurdish peace process, the expansion of Erdogan’s global ambitions and his rise to notoriety in European eyes, all of these have their roots on Syrian soil. Whatever he manages to salvage from the conflict as it enters its drawn-out endgame, it is far less than he might have hoped back in the summer of 2011.
Chatham House
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