Turkish delights and the empire strikes back in Syria

Matein Khalid

The dramatic events of last week in Syria have only boosted President Erdogan’s role as the preeminent regional powerbroker in the heart of the Arab Levant as Turkish armed/financed Sunni militias engineered their collapse of the 54-year-old Assad dynastic tyranny in Damascus. Syria is once again a de facto Turkish protectorate, as it was in the five centuries since Sultan Selim Yavuz vanquished its Mamluk rulers and conquered Egypt, Syria and the Hijaz for the Ottoman sultanate. Selim deposed the titular Abbasid Caliph in Cairo and became Islam’s first Turkish Amir Al Momineen or Commander of the Faithful. The Ottoman caliphate lasted from 1517 to 1924 when Kemal Atatürk abolished it, which was supported by Jinnah but opposed by Gandhi (go figure!). Atatürk declared a secular Turkish Republic and purged the Turkish language of its Arabic alphabet and literary heritage.

No Turkish nationalist has ever been able to explain to me why none of the 32 Ottoman Sultan Caliphs who ruled the Middle East from Istanbul ever made the pilgrimage to Makkah between 1517 and 1924. So the rise of the AKP and now President Erdogan’s triumph in Syria, exactly a century after the last Ottoman Caliph went into exile to Paris only proves one thing to me, the Empire strikes back!

Turkey’s national security interest necessitates a stable Syria because Ankara wants 3.7 million Syrian refugees on its soil to return home. Yet if Trump withdraws the American combat units fighting the remnants of ISIS with Kurdish STF militia, there is no doubt that the Turkish military and its allies in Damascus will attack the PKK allied Kurdish statelet of Rojava. Erdogan has made it clear that the Syrian Kurds will not be allowed the autonomous status enjoyed by the Iraqi Kurds since the early 1990’s.

Can France, Russia, Iran or the US prevent the fall of the Syrian Kurd statelet, which now controls the oil and gas fields of Deir Ezzor that once produced 400,000 barrels a day and provided 40% of the Assad regime’s revenues before the civil war? I doubt it, even though Kurdish forces played a critical role in the defeat of ISIS’s terror state in Raqqa.

It is highly probable that Trump will outsource combat missions against ISIS in the Syrian Jezira to the Turkish military, the second biggest armed force in NATO and betray the Kurdish cause, a recurrent theme in the history of the world’s biggest ethnic group without a state of their own. After all, the last thing the West wants or needs is another catastrophic civil war in Syria at a time when 5 million Syrian migrants live in the EU states/Britain.

I remember being in Paris on Bastille Day in 2008 when President Sarkozy and the exquisite Carla Bruni hosted Dr. Bashar and Asma Akhras as chief guests, even though anyone who knew anything about Syria knew that the gentle eye doctor inherited a murderous Alawite dynastic dictatorship. The British even foisted a meeting with the despicable Assad on the late Queen at Buckingham Palace and Vogue ran a fawning fashion profile on the mass murderer’s wife, an ex-J.P. Morgan Banker from Acton. Even Erdogan courted the Assads and went on family vacations with the Syrian power couple who would not hesitate to butcher 650,000 people after the 2011 popular uprising. The world’s chancelleries must apologize to the Syrian people for the red-carpet treatment they accorded to this dictator who poisoned children. So must the Arab League which recently rehabilitated him just before he fled Syria. Hopefully the Assads will enjoy their long winter vacations with the Putins in his Moscow dacha.

The West, the Gulf and Turkey all have a strategic interest in the economic reconstruction of Syria, whose GDP is now a pitiful $6.2 billion, with a full one third of its economic output generated by the production/sale of Captagon. Yes Assad with its torture chambers and mass executions, also ran a narco state beyond Don Pablo Escobar’s wildest dreams.

Erdogan is the king maker in Damascus but he will also have to negotiate with Moscow on Russia’s air/naval bases in Tartus and Latakia as well as with Iran, which has its own restive Kurdish minority. Hezbollah, Hamas and Assad were all Iran’s proxy dominoes, who have all now fallen. The epicenter of these seismic events will now move to Iraq, where Erdogan has used the Turkish Air Force to bomb targets in the Qandil Mountains.

Turkish steel, cement and construction stocks have soared on the Borsa Istanbul. Mr. Market, obviously discounts Turkey as the midwife of Syria’s future economic rebirt