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President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had long worked with the rebels who overtook Damascus. His influence over Syria is now likely to grow.
Carlotta Gall reported from Istanbul and Antakya in Turkey. A senior international correspondent, she worked as bureau chief in Istanbul for five years from 2017.
In the messy aftermath of the fall of the Assad regime in Syria, many questions remain about the country’s future, but one thing is clear: Turkey has emerged as a winner, with more influence than ever over the rebels who now control most of Syria.
Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, had long worked with and supported the Syrian rebels who marched on Damascus this month and forced President Bashar al-Assad to flee.
That carefully cultivated relationship opens up “an incredibly big domain for economic and political influence,” said Asli Aydintasbas, a visiting fellow at Brookings Institution in Washington with a particular focus on Turkey.
“Syria may not have a smooth transition, and there may be renewed fighting between factions,” she added. “But what is uncontestable is that Turkey’s influence will only grow, economically and politically.”
In the process, Turkey appears to have also weakened the regional influence of Russia, which along with Iran was a key backer of the Syrian president, she said. It is unclear whether Russia will be able to retain the military bases it has on Syria’s Mediterranean coast.
Initially, Turkey did not say much when the rebels swept across northern Syria, seizing two important cities in a few days. But when Mr. Erdogan finally did speak, he was quietly confident.
“The target is of course Damascus,” he said last Friday. “Our hope is for this march in Syria to proceed without incidents.”
Two days later, the rebels delivered a personal vindication for Mr. Erdogan by storming into Damascus and taking control. Within a few days, Turkey was making plans to reopen its embassy, which has been closed for almost 13 years, and a senior Turkish official, Ibrahim Kalin, the head of the national intelligence agency, was seen in the Syrian capital in footage showed on Turkish television.
On Thursday, Turkey assigned a temporary chargé d’affaires to Damascus, a Turkish official said, asking for anonymity under diplomatic protocol. Appointing a chargé d’affairs rather than an ambassador is a way for Turkey to keep diplomatic channels open without getting into the debate of whether it is recognizing the largest rebel force, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which led the offensive and has already set up a transitional government in Damascus. Turkey has considered the group a terrorist organization since 2018.
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Mr. Erdogan’s relationship with Mr. al-Assad was not always tense. Early in the Turkish leader’s presidency, 20 years ago, Mr. Erdogan cultivated closer ties with Syria. It paid off then, and Mr. al-Assad made a historic trip to Ankara, the Turkish capital, in 2004, the first visit there by a Syrian president.
Trade flourished in the aftermath, with visa-free travel between Syria and Turkey, and the two presidents became firm friends. Mr. Erdogan and his wife even hosted the Syrian first couple for a vacation on the Turkish coast. Relations blossomed, and so did economic benefits for both countries.
The relationship turned sour with the Arab Spring protests of 2011. Mr. al-Assad chose to impose harsh repression against Mr. Erdogan’s advice, a former Turkish presidential aide said. Affronted, the Turkish leader helped arm part of the opposition over the course of Syria’s civil war, and excoriated his Syrian counterpart in speeches.
He took in more than three million Syrian refugees and committed Turkish troops to secure a buffer zone inside Syria for millions more displaced people who took refuge there. And he funded and trained a Turkish-backed rebel force, the Syrian National Army, which provided security for Turkish military bases in northern Syria and helped Ankara fight Kurdish forces that Turkey viewed as a threat.
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Turkey also became the main interlocutor with H.T.S. The group is designated a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States and European nations because of its history of Islamist extremism, but the Turks found a way to work with them and now have enormous leverage through that connection.
“Out of all the region’s major players, Ankara has the strongest channels of communication and history of working with the Islamist group now in charge in Damascus, positioning it to reap the benefits of the Assad regime’s demise,” Gonul Tol, the director of the Middle East Institute’s Turkish program, wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine on Thursday.
Turkey has provided indirect assistance to the group, Ms. Tol wrote, by shielding it from Syrian government attacks through the presence of Turkish troops in Idlib Province. It also channeled humanitarian aid and trade into the region, which helped H.T.S. gain legitimacy among the people of the region. “All this has given Turkey influence over H.T.S.,” she wrote.
A Syrian rebel commander, interviewed on Friday, said the rebels had set up a joint command to coordinate rebel group operations. Turkey was aware of the planning of the offensive and ongoing operations, he said.
Ms. Aydintasbas, who is in touch with Turkish officials in Ankara, said she believed Ankara would have given at least tacit approval for the offensive. “They never thought it would be widely successful,” she said.
Ms. Aydintasbas also credited Turkey, along with international aid organizations working in northwestern Syria, with pushing H.T.S., a former Qaeda affiliate, to moderate its extremism.
Turkey’s mentoring of the group could be seen in the early statements of the H.T.S. leader Ahmed al-Shara, who used the nom de guerre Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, as he reassured Syria’s minorities that there would be no repression and ordered restraint from his soldiers.
“There has been a lot of hand-holding,” Ms. Aydintasbas said of Turkey’s relationship with the group.
Turkey has also started to raise its voice internationally on behalf of Syria. In a statement, Turkey’s foreign ministry voiced strong support for Syria’s sovereignty, political unity and territorial integrity, and condemned Israel for breaking a longstanding disengagement agreement by “entering the Israel-Syria zone and its continuing advance into Syrian territory.”
(Since Mr. al-Assad’s ouster on Sunday, Israel has conducted hundreds of aerial strikes on military targets in Syria.)
Turkey has been conducting its own military operations, including airstrikes, in northern Syria against Kurdish militants whom it considers a terrorist threat to Turkey.
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One of Turkey’s most powerful politicians has also floated an offer to release the long-imprisoned Kurdish militant leader, Abdallah Ocalan, if he agrees to renounce militancy and disband his armed movement, a gesture that suggested a new openness in the Turkish government to the possibility of revived peace talks between the longtime adversaries.
Turkey’s foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, has urged swift international assistance for Syria. “Syria has reached a stage where the Syrian people will shape the future of their own country,” he said after a meeting in Doha, Qatar, among Turkey, Russia and Iran, Mr. al-Assad’s other main backer. “Today, there is hope. The Syrian people cannot achieve this alone. The international community must support the Syrian people.”
Ms. Aydintasbas said the primary concern of Turkey and H.T.S. was “to prevent an utter state collapse, and so they have been doing all the right things, trying to preserve institutions and even the bureaucracy inside institutions, even ministries.”
Safak Timur contributed reporting from Istanbul, and Ruhullah Khapalwak from Vancouver, Canada.
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