As soon as the Hezbollah operation, which was launched by Israel with a great psychological operation, ended in failure, the jihadist terrorist organizations that have been hiding in the Idlib region of Syria for years suddenly sprang into action. It was reported that the advance of HTS (Hayat Tahrir al-Sham) and its affiliates, which has caused a serious stir among political Islamist groups in Turkey, had taken control of Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, and was heading south towards Hama, only to be stopped there for the time being by the Syrian army.
The Turkish media and political Islamists, who at the beginning of the Israeli attack on Hezbollah (17-18 September) had headlined “Hezbollah is finished, Israel has done a great job” after Israel blew up the pagers and radios used by the organization and killed its leadership, including Hassan Nasrullah, were hinting at a new Syrian operation centered on Idlib. So, Hezbollah was finished, and it was only a matter of time before Israel crushed Lebanon. From both Lebanon and the Golan, it would quickly cross into Syria and pounce on the forces they called the Assad ‘regime’. There was another detail to this scenario. The jihadist terrorist organizations led by HTS, which were based in Idlib on our border, would also mobilize from the north and finish off Syria.
Even an opening was planned on the basis of this scenario. Since Israel would unleash the PKK/PYD forces in Syria on us on the way to our border, we had to embrace the ‘Kurds’ by making an opening to them first. In this way, we would take the ‘Kurds’, in fact the PKK/PYD, away from Israel. Of course, in return, we would have to change our constitution into a federal one and form a confederation with these ‘Kurds’, which was not such a big deal. After all, wasn’t the state of the Republic of Turkey wrongly founded on national-unitary principles? In other words, while Israel was trying to establish a federal or autonomous Kurdistan in the Middle East, we were going to establish this project ourselves and applaud it as a success.
Your mind/brain is burnt, isn’t it? Yes, this was indeed the great opening that was unimaginable. If we put aside the words of the opening and focus on the Syrian issue again, the answer to the words ‘Israel will come from the south towards our borders and threaten us with the PKK/PYD’, which was actually used as a justification for the opening, was clear. If Israel was going to come from the south and try to establish a Kurdistan by threatening Turkey together with the PKK/PYD, we should have fought against this project by normalizing our relations with Syria, which was against this project, instead of doing what Israel wanted to do, which was to establish a Kurdistan.
That was the way of reason. There would have been no point in proposing a series of crazy opening projects, as if to say to Israel ‘don’t bother, we are ready to create Kurdistan and we are preparing its infrastructure’; but all these discussions have now changed their content. Although the capture of Aleppo by the HTS and the continuation of its attacks southwards towards Damascus seem to have delighted a significant part of the media, which thinks that a victory has been achieved, it seems certain that when this party ends and the facts start to emerge, we will start talking about other things.
Possible outcomes
Let us first ask the question: Can Russia and Iran leave Syria completely alone? From Russia’s point of view, the answer to this question is clearly ‘no’, because for Russia Syria is its most solid military base in the Middle East. This has been the case since the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. Syria participated in that war (Yom Kippur War) together with Egypt, but later, when Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat made a compromise with the U.S. and Israel and turned to a policy of reclaiming the territories lost to Israel in 1967 in a peace treaty, Cairo’s military relations with the Soviet Union were almost nil. And Syria, under Hafez al-Assad, became the Soviet Union’s biggest military ally from the mid-1970s.
From those years until the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, Moscow provided Damascus with an abundant supply of advanced air defense weapons, surface-to-surface ballistic missiles, and conventional weapons. Military ties between Moscow and Damascus continued, albeit at a slower pace, under Yeltsin, who ruled the Russian Federation from the collapse of the Soviet Union until the early 2000s, when Putin took over the Kremlin. By the time of the dirty war launched by the US and its allies (2011), military relations between Moscow and Damascus seemed to have reached a strategic level again, and this level was more or less maintained throughout the war.
Abandoning Syria is not an option for Russia. Such a situation would mean a serious loss of prestige for Russia, which is waging a de facto war against the collective West in Ukraine, and it would have to dismantle its military bases in Syria. Given that its relations with the Greek Cypriots and Greece have become hostile, Russia would have great difficulty even sailing ships in the eastern Mediterranean.
Iran cannot leave Syria either. Iran cannot support Hezbollah in Lebanon if it leaves Syria completely to political Islamist and PKK/PYD groups. In fact, the strategic relations between Tehran and Damascus began with the establishment of an anti-imperialist, anti-American and anti-Israeli regime after the Islamic Revolution in Iran. When the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, believing that the Iranian armed forces had lost considerable power during the revolution, declared war on Iran, all Arab states except Syria sided with Saddam Hussein, while Hafez al-Assad established close relations with the Iranian government.
These relations, which gradually turned into strategic military cooperation, continued uninterrupted and Syria played the role of a strategic bridge between Iran and Hezbollah for years… In fact, it can be said that one of the main reasons for attacking Syria was to break this link, and the 2011 dirty war was aimed at breaking this anti-Israeli bloc. Today, if Iran leaves Syria alone, it will also leave Hezbollah alone. It cannot do this because in such a case Iran, which has created outposts against Israel by taking advantage of the strategic mistakes made by the U.S. since the invasion of Iraq, could be quickly dismantled from these points and confined to its own borders, and in such a case there should be no doubt that efforts to destroy the Iranian regime from within will be accelerated.
What kind of a Syria?
Military support from Russia and Iran may be slow and limited, but it is certain that at some point these two states will take action against the jihadist terrorist groups in Syria. What they will do at that point is an important question mark. Because if we see the current HTS attacks, as Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan put it, as the result of the internal dynamics and the refusal of the Assad regime, which we always see as guilty and responsible, to listen to the just and legitimate demands of the people (! ), which erupted as a result of the Assad regime’s refusal to listen to the just and legitimate demands of the people (!) – this is what Fidan said after his meeting with his Iranian colleague – what are we going to do if Russia, Iran, and Syria gain the military upper hand on the ground against these groups? Especially after the publications of the pro-government media, which give Syrian cities number plates…
Moreover, if our policy, which has nothing to do with our national interests and which we are pursuing only to harm Assad, succeeds and HTS manages to hold the areas it controls, including Aleppo, this will lead to the emergence of two Terrorist Territories on our southern borders. One controlled by HTS and its affiliates and the other by the PKK/PYD region east of the Euphrates… Have we thought how this would benefit Turkey? Or if Assad fulfils the instructions we are now giving in a patronizing way – to take Syria out of its national-unitary structure and turn it into a federation – and if federated/autonomous parts such as the HTS region and the PKK/PYD region with their own military power are formed within this country, what benefit will this bring to Turkey?
On the other hand, we know from the refugees and terrorist organizations we face that this policy has placed an enormous burden and strategic cost on our country. None of this existed before 2011. With the current policy, it is quite possible to fall out with Russia, Iran and even China. Arab countries may also oppose us and demand that we leave Arab lands immediately. Could this damage our relations with Egypt, for example, which is very sensitive to all these radical Islamist organizations? Can we destroy the Astana platform with our own hands and convince our partners there – Russia and Iran – that we have nothing to do with all these events?
On the other hand, are we aware that by contributing to such a mess in Syria, we are destroying Trump’s option to withdraw from Syria? And that we are playing into the hands of Israel and the U.S. deep state, which is determined to create a Kurdistan… In my opinion, our foreign policy has returned to the factory settings of 2011 and things are not going to go well. I hope I am wrong.
