London, Beirut: Turkey’s incursion into Syria reflects a shift away from its insistence that President Bashar Al Assad be removed from power in any settlement there and may start to close the gap between the international coalitions that have helped keep the country’s civil war raging, analysts and diplomats say.
In recent months, Turkey has indicated a readiness to accept a transitional role for Al Assad in any political solution, something Unal Cevikoz, a retired senior Turkish diplomat, called a major change.
“Turkey has realised there are more important challenges than removing Al Assad,” said Cevikoz, and that in turn has opened the door to improvements in Ankara’s relationships with Russia and Iran, Al Assad’s main backers. Turkey would not have launched “Operation Euphrates Shield” on Wednesday without a green light from Russia, he said.
Outside powers involved in Syria’s conflict have divided sharply over the fate of Al Assad. Turkey and the Gulf states insisted he must step down before any settlement, while Russia and Iran demanded that he stay in power. The US has carved out a middle position open to a transitional role for him.
The challenges Ankara is now prioritising over Al Assad include fighting Daesh, which has stepped up its terrorist campaign inside Turkey, and — even more importantly — stopping the advance of Kurdish forces along the Syrian-Turkish border. Turkey sees the Kurdish militia in Syria as a branch of the Kurdish Workers’ Party, or PKK, an insurgent force it is trying to crush inside its borders.
Wednesday’s incursion plunges Turkey into an intractable conflict that has already sucked in Russia and Iran, lasting longer and claiming more victims than the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia. Since Turkey already hosts 2.5 million Syrian refugees, the chaos across its border poses still another growing challenge.
Turkish tanks and special forces accompanied the Free Syrian Army across the border early in the morning, headed for the Daesh-held town of Jarablus, just west of the Euphrates. Turkish officials said the operation would also target Kurdish forces, which recently seized Manbij, about 20 miles south of Jarablus.
The focus on Kurdish militias risked further tension with the US, at a low point in their relations, given that Syria’s Kurds are key US allies in the fight against Daesh. Instead, the operation appears to have provided ground for cooperation there as well.
The US not only said it supports the Turkish operation, but on a visit to Ankara on Wednesday, Vice-President Joe Biden backed a Turkish demand that the Kurdish forces retreat east of the Euphrates river. That would mean giving up Manbij, seized from Daesh on August 12, with US participation.
“The capture of Manbij has changed things dramatically,” said Joshua Landis, director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma, who has run an influential Syria commentary forum for much of the war. “American special forces helped the Kurds to capture a swathe of territory that put them in reach of building a Kurdish state. That clearly terrified the Turks.”
Robert Ford, former US ambassador to Syria, said in a phone interview from the US that after creating tensions with Turkey by supporting the Kurdish YPG, or People’s Protection Units, “the Americans are choosing not to resist.”
Turkey has been agitating for years to create a buffer zone along its border with Syria to prevent Syria’s Kurds from connecting the two areas they hold and establishing their own state, which they have named Rojava. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey previously failed to convince the US to help with the buffer zone, however, and was unwilling to act alone. He would have faced opposition from the Al Assad regime as well as its Russian and Iranian backers. That calculation now appears to have changed.
“The interesting thing is that there has been basically no Russian reaction” to the Turkish incursion, said Dmitri Trenin, director of the Moscow bureau of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Russians understand Turkey’s legitimate interest on the Kurdish issue, and it looks like Russia may have agreed not to object to a limited operation, in exchange for Turkey being more cooperative on a political settlement with Al Assad.”
Attitudes towards the Kurds appear also to be changing more widely, as the YPG fighters have moved from taking territory populated mainly by ethnic Kurds, to predominantly Arab lands. Syria’s military, which had previously treated the Kurds as neutrals if not allies, recently bombed YPG positions, risking a clash with the US.
“There’s increasingly an alignment on containing the Kurds in Syria,” said Ayham Kamel, Middle East and North Africa director at Eurasia Group. “The Syrian regime, Russia, Iran and Turkey are all interested in containing the Kurds in Syria and are for the first time willing to move towards concrete steps to make that happen.”
Turkey may also have learnt from Putin’s entrance into the Syrian war last year, which has given him a strong voice at the diplomatic table. “This action inevitably gives Turkey a place in the peace process,” said Ilter Turan, professor of political science at Istanbul’s Bilgi University.
That doesn’t necessarily leave the US out in the cold, so long as it can prevent a clash between its Kurdish and Turkish allies, according to Ozgur Unluhisarcikli, who runs the Ankara office of the German Marshall Fund, a think tank. He said Turkey’s shift in its policy to Al Assad is helping a new international approach to take shape.
“Now it seems everyone is converging around the US position, which is that we need a solution but Al Assad cannot remain in power permanently, though he can be part of a transition,” said Unluhisarcikli.
