Ep.10 Explainer: Turkey, Syria and the Death of al-Baghdadi
In the past week, a radical shift in the balance of an eight-year conflict has swung in favour of the Damascus regime. Assad’s blood-stained project to reclaim territory lost during the civil war is now near complete. As the world’s attention continues to obsess over ISIS and the death of al-Baghdadi, what gets little attention is how regional powers like Turkey and great powers like Russia and the United States, have in effect enabled Assad’s victory and in the process a revolution that once was the hope of the Muslim world now lies in shreds.
On October the 7th, President Trump surprised the world when he declared, through Twitter, he would withdraw American troops from northeastern Syria.
As expected, the Turkish government response was to send in troops. With the majority of US observer forces out of the way, Erdogan followed through on his intention to dismantle the Syrian Democratic Front forces from his border region, a largely Kurdish led militia dominated by the YPG.
What followed looked on the face of it a bewildering series of contradictory statements from the Whitehouse. After giving his tacit approval, Trump warned Turkey to not overstep the mark and threatened repercussions including no-less, by destroying the Turkish economy. Then follows a written letter to the Turkish President scolding him to “not be a tough guy” and dispatching Vice President Pence and Secretary of State Pompeo to broker a ceasefire between the two sides.
Whilst Turkey made considerable ground, the YPG called upon the Assad regime to come to its aid. Assad, with the US out of the picture and with SDF pleas, returns to virtually a third of Syria to its possession, reclaiming the land he had lost to the rebellion over five years earlier.
A Russian diplomatic effort gave Ankara what it wanted, the creation of a buffer zone and the evacuation of Kurdish forces 20 miles away from the border. The meeting and resulting agreement between Putin and Erdogan at Sochi serve to deescalate the conflict but results in Assad and its backer, Russia, consolidating northeastern Syria. With the United States withdrawal to the east and with ISIS all but defeated, victory, all be it a pyrrhic one is now Assad’s.
To understand how the Syrian regime has benefited from the current crisis one needs to grasp the territorial claims of the various parties. As of the beginning of October, Assad’s forces controlled two-thirds of Syria’s territory, some 70 per cent of the population, this includes the capital Damascus to the south, Aleppo to the north and the town of Deir el-Zour to the east. An achievement in large part through the support of one great power Russia and one regional power Iran and the militia it backs but also through the tacit approval of both the Obama and Trump administrations.
The remainder of the country, some 30 per cent, is divided into two zones, a Turkish zone in the northwestern region and YPG-Syrian Democratic Forces-held territory to the north-east.
The Turkish zone comprises control over the all-important city of Idlib, the last major pocket of rebellion to Assad. Idlib is occupied by a tapestry of rebel groups, most notably Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and the Turkish sponsored National Liberation Front. The Turkish military protects a ceasefire agreement signed in Sochi on September 2018. Brokered by Russia, the plan was to separate rebel-held territory on its western-edge from Assad’s forces. Turkey has maintained security posts across the province and has been tasked at deescalating the violence between the two sides by the power it asserts over the militant groups. Controlling the factions in Idlib gives Ankara leverage at the so-called Astana peace process, with Russia and Iran. It also enables it to influence the future of any Syrian Kurdish autonomous state, which Erdogan sees as an existential threat to Turkey. Turkey also controls the northern city of Afrin which it took from the YPG in March 2018 after a deal struck with Russia and through tacit US approval.
The northeastern part of Syria, as of the start of October, was controlled by the SDF forces. The Kurds had created an autonomous state, called ‘Rojava’, that was shaped from territory lost by ISIS. The SDF naively accepted to act as America’s infantry in its fight against the militant group in exchange for assurances over a Kurdish state with. With the help of American air cover, the SDF fought an effective ground offensive against ISIS. Such an autonomous state was never going to be tenable. Balanced against Turkish security demands, the US was always going to side with its NATO partner. Trump signalled his drawdown back in December and removed remaining US troops shortly after his 7th October announcement.
Erdogan has repeatedly pressed Trump to relinquish support for the YPG-SDF forces in northeastern Turkey, to create a buffer between Turkey and the Syrian Kurds. It claims the rebranded YPG is linked to the outlawed Turkish-Kurdish PKK, designated a terrorist entity by Ankara and much of the international community.
Erdogan told the UN General Assembly in September, he wanted to “establish a peace corridor with a depth of 30 kilometres and a length of 480 kilometres in Syria so that the international community can settle two million Syrians here”. The status of Syrian refugees has become an electoral liability for Erdogan, losing the key mayoralty of Istanbul to the opposition CHP, that campaigned on an anti-migrant ticket.
With the US out of the way, Turkey was quick to claim the land between Tal Abyad and Ras Al-Ayn, carving out a zone of influence on its border. The SDF, outgunned and deprived of US backing turned to the Syrian regime and Russia for support, inviting Asad’s forces onto its territory to prevent a complete Turkish takeover. For Asad this was a gift; a return of almost a third of its territory, with significant energy reserves, great agricultural wealth, and a population of nearly four million. Asad is the principal victor of Turkey’s actions and Erdogan would have known this. The government’s dominion for the first time since 2012 extends the length of the country.
Many have speculated about the role of the United States, with bi-partisan pressure against the President and Congress passing renewed sanctions against Ankara, Washington seemed to be in disarray over this past month. Undoubtedly there is disagreement over Trump’s Syria strategy, In December his announcement led to the resignation of Secretary of State Jim Mattis and US Special Envoy Brett McGurk, the latter wrote a scathing attack of Trump’s Syria policy in the Foreign Affairs Magazine. This disagreement, however, is largely over tactics than over aims; some believe Washington needs some form of leverage to determine a future Syrian political settlement. Put simply, leaving prematurely undercuts any power Washington may have in Syria. On fundamental strategy, however, the US has for some time conceded Syria to Assad and its guarantor Russia and accepted the regimes eventual integration of SDF territory. McGurk candidly spoke about this in his Foreign Affairs piece, suggesting the American’s were already working with the Russians to bring back “the partial return of Syrian state services, such as schools and hospitals, to SDF-controlled areas” and that “U.S. officials referred to this outcome as “the return of the state, not the return of the regime.”
He also confirmed that since Russia’s entry into the war in 2015, the US and Russia were coordinating Syria policy,
“Washington had been holding bilateral talks with Moscow on Syria since the beginning of Russia’s military intervention, in 2015.”
Far from having opposing policies and despite all the public rhetoric to the contrary, Moscow and Washington agree that the future of the Arab Spring cannot lead to Islamic governance and Arab and Muslim unity.
McGurk, long before the Turkish move, spoke of the administrations desire to leave northeastern Syria and to cede territory to the regime, he said,
“A major priority for American diplomats was to reach a settlement with the only other great power in Syria, Russia, about the ultimate disposition of territory in the U.S. zone of influence.”
The past two weeks may have seemed haphazard at times, but they serve a long term aim of the United States, and that is to put to bed a revolution whose outcome it could not control. The initial Bush administration’s dream of ‘democratising the Middle East’ was replaced by an Obama era caution against people power and this continues today. The Arab Spring gave success to Islamic parties, Egypt is the most significant example. America’s new blueprint for the Middle East is to back strongmen, dictators like Sisi and Mohammed Bin Salman, that promote superficial social and economic liberal reforms but keep politics off-limits. At the same time, militant groups like Al Qaeda and Isis ensure that any notion of a return to a sound Islamic polity would look to be an unachievable prospect. By stoking sectarian differences, America wishes to create a groundswell of support for a wholesale reform of Islam. This was recently echoed in a leaked policy report that elements within the Trump administration were looking to promote a reform movement within Islam.
The death of Baghdadi will dominate the news in the coming days, contributing to President Trump’s narrative that the defeat of Isis means the US should leave Syria, but it obfuscates the real reason why he is leaving, together with Russia and utilising Erdogan, Assad has returned and the revolution’s ideals of self-governance and liberation is now over.