Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is pushing for his regime to benefit the most from the overthrow of the Bashar al-Assad dictatorship in Syria, calling it “a historic window of opportunity.” Erdogan is also urging the more than 3 million Syrian refugees in Turkey to return home.
Turkey shares a 565-mile-long border with Syria. Erdogan’s government was the first to meet with Ahmad al-Sharaa, the central leader of the new Syrian government, who the Turkish rulers worked with when he was the head of rebel forces in Idlib before Assad’s fall.
As the fight against the Syrian dictatorship unfolded in the wake of Assad’s murderous assault on mass protests in 2011, the capitalist government in Turkey created the Syrian National Army, one of dozens of armed groups operating there.
Turkish troops occupy a narrow swath of northern Syria, aimed at pushing back the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces.
As the Assad regime got weaker, the SDF took control of the largely Kurdish region in the northern part of the country. Collaborating with hundreds of U.S. troops stationed in the area, it helped defeat Islamic State fighters, who had moved in amid the chaos.
Kurds, an oppressed nationality
There are some 30 million Kurds — the largest nationality without its own country in the world — in Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey. The Turkish government charges that the SDF has ties to the Turkey-based Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which Ankara calls a terrorist group. Its real fear is that any advance for Kurds in Syria will strengthen the struggle for national rights and self-determination by Kurds in Turkey.
Ankara faces competition from its capitalist rivals in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Qatar, United Arab Emirates and elsewhere, for influence and lucrative contracts to rebuild Syria’s devastated towns and factories.
Turkey’s capitalist class has other interests in Syria. Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) have sought to take advantage of Turkey’s historic ties in Syria going back to the days of the Ottoman Empire, which stretched across Syria to parts of Africa, into Europe, Ukraine, Caucasia, parts of Iran and Iraq. The bourgeois Islamist AKP has been in a long-term rivalry with the Saudi monarchy over who will be the voice of Sunni Muslims in the region.
But the Turkish rulers’ rivalry with the Shiite Muslim-based bourgeois clerical regime in Iran is even sharper. The regime in Tehran has tried to extend its reactionary power throughout the region, ever since it cemented its rule by consolidating a counterrevolution against the 1979 popular revolution in Iran that overthrew the U.S.-backed shah.
Tehran put together proxy forces aiming to destroy Israel and expel or kill the Jews. It relied on these armed groups in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen to get its way.
The ruling class in Turkey — which rules over a modern capitalist nation — furthers its economic and political goals by presenting itself as the “neutral” arbiter between competing powers, while building up its own military might.
Turkey is a member of U.S.-led NATO and hosts U.S. military forces at its Incirlik Air Base. At the same time, the Turkish military buys significant weaponry from Russia, even though it was on opposite sides to Moscow in the war in Syria.
In 2024 Ankara began a rapprochement with the Egyptian government, which had overthrown the previous government of Mohamed Morsi in 2013, despite Erdogan’s historic ties with Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood.
While Tehran was arming and sending troops and Hezbollah fighters to Syria to shore up the Assad regime, Ankara was aiding the armed opposition. Yet Iran remains the second largest supplier of natural gas to Turkey
Turkey’s army 2nd largest in NATO
The Turkish army is the second largest in NATO. It has 700 modern battle tanks, more than Germany and France combined. To advance its interests in the eastern Mediterranean’s vast gas fields, Ankara is building up its naval force, adding a destroyer equipped with anti-aircraft missiles and its first aircraft carrier.
Ankara is producing its own stealth fighter planes and advanced submarines.
The government of Turkey first established diplomatic relations with Israel in 1949. It maintains those relations despite heated clashes over Israeli actions against Hamas.
It was Israel’s devastating attacks on Hezbollah, which had propped up the Assad dictatorship, that was key for paving the way to Assad’s overthrow. The Israeli government is closely watching the actions taken by the victorious Syrian rebels.
Sharaa, the main leader of the rebel coalition, has his origins in Islamic State and al-Qaeda. He says he wants a single Syrian state and for all armed groups to dissolve themselves into a new Syrian army.
Concerns about the threat of a Turkish-influenced Syria are being debated in Israel. According to the Jewish News Service, the Israeli government favors the division of Syria “into cantons with varying levels of autonomy.” That would leave Kurdish forces in control of the north and Druze organizations in the south.
Whatever the outcome, working people in Syria, Turkey and beyond have more space today to press for their interests, following the overthrow of Assad. “We didn’t stand in the squares so that we could get rid of one dictator and replace him with another,” Hisham al-Jawhari, a Druze leader in Suweida, told Syria Direct, referring to years of protests there. If that were to happen, he said, “We might return to the squares.”