Turkey and Syria

Kerem Oktem

As former Foreign Minister of Turkey and founding member of the ruling Justice and Development Party, Yasar Yakis is probably one of the most insightful commentators on Turkey’s foreign policy. Before his entry into politics in 2002, Mr Yakis went through a distinguished diplomatic career, which brought him to the most important capitals of the Arab world. Serving as counsellor in the Turkish Embassy in Damascus in the late 1970s, he represented Turkey as Ambassador in Riyadh and Cairo in the 1990s. Considering this CV, one would expect that few people would be more qualified to speak about the current relations between Turkey and Syria. And indeed, this was also the audience’s impression, which filled up the European Studies Centre for a special lunchtime lecture on April the 25th.

Mr Yakis began with a brief overview of the Syrian conflict and drew attention to Turkey’s intensive mediation efforts well into June 2011. The turning point was probably the Turkish proposal to Bashar Al Assad to remove from power his widely-feared brother Maher. For Mr Yakis, this was a ‘probably unwise move’, with which the Turkish government burned the bridges and lost all channels of communication with the regime in Damascus. While Mr Yakis acknowledged that Turkey initially showed the right reaction in siding with the oppressed people of Syria, he also stressed that the government was slow in responding to the changes in the regional security environment. While the West also supported the uprising, the US realised early on that the weapons supplied mostly by US allies Qatar and Saudia Arabia were falling into the hands of radical groups like the Jabhat-al-Nusra, which has recently declared itself as part of Al Qaeda in Iraq. Turkey continued its support to the Free Syrian Army and its associates nevertheless, which put it temporarily at odds with its Western allies, while it also led to the loss of a major land trading route to Turkey’s crucial Arab export markets. In the end, Turkey did realign with the US on Iraq, but it has now lost much of its leverage in Syria.

Considering the current stalemate between the regime and the rebels, Mr Yakis argued that both sides were aware that no outright victory was possible, and both sides felt that a negotiated settlement was necessary, but they preferred to negotiate from a position of strength. This, he suggested, is also true for the outside players, for which Syria has become the theatre of a proxy war.

Roy Allison, an Expert on Russian politics of St Antony's College’s Russian and East European Studies Centre commented on Mr Yakis’ talk by taking up the ‘regional proxy war’ argument and by detailing the position of Russia as a key example of these outside players. He remarked that the current play of affairs was reminiscent of cold war dynamics, where the United States, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey are on one side of the divide, and Russia, Iran and Syria on the other. Only that this time, the divide seems to be between an American-led ‘Sunni’ and a Russian-supported ‘Shia’ axis. He emphasized that Russia perceives the latter to be a more secular grouping, while it sees the Sunni axis as one linked to Islamist terrorism, also closer to home in its Caucasian territories and particularly in Chechnya. Dr Alison also drew attention to the hardening position of Russia in the UN Security Council vis-à-vis the idea of intervention in Syria.

Both speakers agreed that the use of chemical weapons would be a game changer and galvanise the US government into military action. Until that point, however, the proxy war in Syria will continue to claim the lives of tens of thousands, and will turn hundreds of thousands more into refugees seeking for asylum in Turkey and other neighbouring crises.