It is hard to pin down the moment when Erdoğan’s ambitions swelled beyond his borders. In the first years of his era, as he battled against the Kemalists and the army, he was too weak at home to contemplate intervention overseas. But the Arab Spring offered Erdoğan an opportunity to clinch a bigger global position, at the exact moment that the Gülenists’ defeat of the army enabled him to do so. Erdoğan’s response to the cataclysm that has rocked his neighbourhood has turned him into one of the most divisive leaders in the world today – a champion of the oppressed to some and a byword for Islamist authoritarianism to others. The roots stretch back to the very start of his era, when the Turkish parliament voted against joining the US ‘Coalition of the Willing’ in Iraq in 2003. That was the beginning of a rift between Erdoğan’s Turkey and America’s generals that would never fully heal, even in the years when political relations were good. Eventually, it would crack open into a raw wound that has dragged Turkey’s relations with Washington down to their lowest point in decades and repeatedly brought the two NATO allies to the brink of armed standoff.
In the years after that 2003 vote, Erdoğan and Ahmet Davutoğlu, a foreign policy adviser who would later become foreign minister, quietly set to work building new relations in old Ottoman lands. Turkey had long neglected its Muslim neighbours, focusing instead on strengthening ties with Israel and Europe. But Erdoğan and Davutoğlu forged friendships with Muslim-majority nations from the Balkans to the Arab Middle East and large parts of Africa, opening their diplomatic pitches with expressions of their shared faith and history and sealing them with investments, visa-free travel and soft-power outreach, primarily through the Gülenist networks.
Davutoğlu, like Erdoğan, was a pious man from the provinces. But unlike his street-fighter boss, he was an academic who had taken his Ph.D. in political science from the prestigious Bosphorus University before teaching in Malaysia and Turkey. He had joined the AKP as an adviser before being promoted to the top of the foreign ministry, where he became the engineer of the party’s world plans. He based the AKP’s foreign policy project on his 2001 book, Strategic Depth, in which he argued that Turkey should pursue proactive foreign outreach in the old Ottoman territories, with the aim of becoming the world’s Muslim superpower.
‘Davutoğlu had the full sophisticated foreign policy strategy,’ says one foreign diplomat. ‘He had his ideology around Ottoman power and strength. He was more of a democrat [than Erdoğan]. His desire was not for an authoritarian Ottoman empire. But it was for a highly powerful Turkey exerting this power through democratic means rather than through authoritarian means.’
Domestic observers schooled in the old way of Turkish foreign politics were less forgiving in their assessment of Davutoğlu and his new direction. ‘In contrast to Erdoğan, Davutoğlu is a hardened ideologue entrenched by his academic side,’ said Faruk Loğoğlu, Turkey’s ambassador to the US when the AKP first won the parliament in 2002. ‘He lived in the world of his own constructs, all of them rooted in an Islamist ideology and governed by theoretical absurdities … You could judge that his mind does not work very well by the fact that when you meet him he talks incessantly, without stopping; it is not a product of a thoughtful mind. Davutoğlu’s ideological commitment to the Muslim Brotherhood and to Sunni access was reflected in both domestic and foreign policy.’
Davutoğlu’s ideas appealed to Erdoğan because they promised to propel him to the top tier of the world’s Sunni Muslim leaders. The AKP’s early democratising reforms, driven by a roaring economy, had turned Turkey into the richest and most open Muslim-majority state in the region. In the West, leaders started to talk of Turkey as a model for Islamic democracy. Davutoğlu summed up his foreign policy with two catchphrases: ‘zero problems with the neighbours’ and ‘less enemies, more friends’. And at that time Erdoğan had no better friend than another apparent reformer – the young Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad.
Assad had inherited Syria from his father, Hafez, in 2000, when he was just thirty-four years old. He seemed to be in power reluctantly; after all, he had not been brought up to expect it. It had been Bashar’s older brother, Basel, who was groomed for the job while Bashar, the shy second son, planned to lead a life out of the spotlight. He studied hard, largely shunned the luxurious trappings of his position, and went to London to enjoy a life of relative obscurity as a trainee eye doctor.
But in 1994 Basel was killed in a car crash. Bashar, now the heir apparent, was forced to abandon his medical studies and returned to Damascus to begin his political apprenticeship. When Hafez died six years later in June 2000, Bashar stood uncontested for the presidency: Syrians could vote yes or no for Bashar, but they weren’t offered any alternative. And with the mukhbarat – the feared Syrian secret police – eyeing voters as they dropped their slips into the ballot box, few were inclined to vote no. Bashar was sworn in with a 97 per cent mandate.
Soon after, he married his beautiful and stylish British-raised fiancée. Asma al-Assad, from a powerful Sunni family from the central city of Homs, had attended a Church of England primary school, studied computer science at King’s College London and worked as an investment banker at JP Morgan. Bashar, with his educated wife by his side, also seemed to be in tune with what Syria’s upcoming generation wanted. He was technologically savvy; one of the first things he did when he came to power was allow access to the internet – albeit heavily restricted and monitored – and he became head of the Syrian Computer Society. He was a nerd who seemed to eschew the ostentatious trappings of wealth that had so beguiled the Middle East’s other dictators, such as Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi with his snakeskin shoes and satin robes. Bashar took pride in the fact that he drove himself and his family around the streets of the capital, Damascus, in an unarmoured car and without bodyguards.
In Bashar’s early years as president, Syrians dared to believe that their country might be changing. He gave lip service to allowing other political parties into parliament, though they would never have been given a chance to form a government. He permitted civil societies and discussion groups to open in the public sphere. Many political prisoners were released, Damascus got a stock exchange, and Syrians were at last given access to mobile phones. The first two years of Bashar’s tenure came to be known as the Damascus Spring – artists, intellectuals, campaigners and ordinary citizens breathed a collective sigh of relief as their regime’s iron grip on the country seemed to relax.
It didn’t last. In 2002 the Damascus Spring screeched to a devastating halt. The thinkers and dissidents who had taken advantage of the past two years’ new freedoms were rounded up and thrown into prison. The fledgling civil society sector was cut down. Syrians realised that their new communication tools simply gave the regime more options for spying on them, and the fear and loathing swelled until the spring of 2011, when the nascent wave of Arab revolution washed into Syria and Bashar al-Assad’s people rose up against him. His reaction was quick and brutal – within six months, the protests had morphed into all-out civil war.
Erdoğan and his wife, Emine, had holidayed with the Assads in the fashionable Turkish resort of Bodrum in 2008, just three summers before the revolt. After their getaway, Erdoğan started referring to Assad as his ‘brother’, and trade ties between the two countries flourished. But with the onset of the Arab Spring uprisings in late 2010, Erdoğan saw that he could grab an even bigger role for himself in the region. Old secular dictators were being overthrown, and Islamist parties were increasingly dominating the opposition. Erdoğan had visited Egypt in the wake of its revolution, taking the stage in front of an ecstatic crowd chanting ‘Turkey and Egypt are one hand’. He went on to Tunisia and Libya, where similar scenes awaited him. All three countries voted in new leaders with strong links to the Muslim Brotherhood.
Erdoğan was initially more hesitant to back the Syrian opposition – Assad was his neighbour and professed friend, not a faraway pariah like Mubarak or Gaddafi. But in the US there was growing determination that the Syrian strongman should go. And so it turned to its regular Muslim ally, Turkey, for support.
‘From mid-2011Washington put increasing pressure on governments around the world to break with Assad and to call for his ouster,’ says a US diplomat based in Turkey at the time. ‘Ankara was reluctant. Some, including Davutoğlu, still believed that Assad could be weaned away from Iran and toward reform. Davutoğlu and Erdoğan made a couple of efforts, including at least one trip to Damascus, and got some promises to change that Assad did not keep. After several such go-rounds, the Turks realised that the effort was pointless, broke with Assad, and joined US calls for him to step down. One very senior Turk told me that Ankara thought it would be joining onto a US strategy for getting rid of Assad and was later dismayed to learn we had none.’
Inside Turkey, the opposition was disquieted when Erdoğan and Davutoğlu did an about-turn on Assad. The CHP, with its secular zeal, was horrified at the thought that the Syrian president, brutal as he was, might be overthrown and replaced with an Islamist government. The party’s stance was at least partly swayed by the large Alevi bloc in its voter base; the Turkish Alevis, followers of a branch of Shia Islam, are loosely linked to Assad’s own Alawite sect, and are similarly terrified by the prospect of a fundamentalist Sunni resurgence in the Middle East.
The CHP sent a delegation to meet Assad in October 2011, a month after Erdoğan cut ties. Faruk Loğoğlu, who had by then retired from the diplomatic service and rejoined his party, was part of it: ‘Assad told us his version of the events. At the beginning Turkey and Syria enjoyed a very good and positive relationship. The Turkish side was offering advice to the Syrian banking sector, and counselling Assad as to how he could soften his presence in the lives of the people. Assad did not mind this brotherly approach from our elders. But then a point in time came in which this advice and counsels offered were not from one equal to another but more of a command. Assad did not mind the tone but it was not appropriate to the head of a state. He told us that what broke the camel’s back was the Turkish government’s insistence that he incorporate the Muslim Brotherhood into the Syrian government.’
Abdullah Gül, president of Turkey at the time the Syrian crisis erupted, also counselled both his government and the US to be cautious. ‘I told the Americans that the rhetoric was too high. If there was not going to be force, it was a dangerous thing. Later on, we discovered that they were not going to put force,’ Gül said.
As the bloodshed escalated in north-western Syria in late 2011, Turkey opened its borders to fleeing civilians and provided a safe fallback position for both the political and armed opposition. Erdoğan and Davutoğlu were now building their Syria policy on the reckoning that Assad could be toppled quickly as Mubarak, Ben Ali and Gaddafi had been in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, and so they openly supported his opponents. Unease swelled inside Erdoğan’s government.
‘Until 2011 Syria had very good relations with Turkey,’ says Ertuğrul Günay. ‘We held joint meetings of the cabinet. We had established joint tourism destinations. Afterwards I suppose Erdoğan thought that Assad would fall quickly, and he wanted to have a say in the new [Syrian] administration. As a member of his cabinet I had tried to explain to him that this would not be possible. He believed the Syrian question would be resolved in six months.’
Others say that, in retrospect, Erdoğan’s turn against Assad in 2011 marked a bigger moment, when the prime minister began pursuing an openly Islamist agenda both in foreign policy and at home.
‘Erdoğan is ideologically in line with the Muslim Brotherhood, representing the Turkish version of it. He wants Turkey to be in leading position among the Islamic countries, especially within Turkey’s historical hinterland,’ says former AKP deputy Haluk Özdalga. ‘The Muslim Brotherhood agenda is the best way to understand the foreign policy the AKP has been conducting. Only under the light of such an agenda would Ankara’s international policy, full of zigzags, otherwise difficult to explain, make sense in its whole – just look at the policies followed in relation to Syria, Egypt, Sudan, Qatar, UAE, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Palestine, et cetera, and even vis-à-vis the West. The crisis in Syria has turned out to be long and defining in many respects for the AKP and Erdoğan.’
Had the rebels managed to unseat Assad in the early years of the war, Syria would almost certainly have been taken over by a Brotherhood-led government and become another Arab state in which Erdoğan could wield huge influence. But that is not how it panned out. After the rebels stormed into Aleppo in the summer of 2012 – aided by the sanctuary and training they were receiving in Turkey and the weapons supplies coming through the border – the uprising turned into a bloody war of attrition. The front lines barely moved for three years, while Assad used his air power to punish the civilian population with endless airstrikes. Donors from the Gulf began co-opting rebel groups, offering them huge wads of cash on the condition that they change their name to something Islam-inspired, fight in the name of Allah and implement Sharia law. Soon, Islamic fundamentalists from outside Syria also moved in to plant their flag in the rubble. Many Syrians welcomed them at first, not so much for their religious ideas as for their strict code of law and order – a welcome break from the anarchy of rebel rule.
On each trip I made back into the war zone over the spring and summer of 2013, I saw that the war’s paradigm had shifted a little more. The fundamentalists had always been there to varying degrees, although in the early days it was fairly easy to avoid them. But signs of their presence and growing influence were piling up. Young rebel fighters who had once overloaded on hair gel and pulled on tight jeans and knock-off designer T-shirts now started growing their hair straggly-long and shaving their top lips clean while leaving their beards intact, a homage to the Prophet Muhammad. One stinking hot August day I spotted a badly transliterated piece of teenage graffiti on an Aleppo backstreet: Ben Laden, scrawled in red spray paint on an un-rendered wall. The hardliners fought harder, played smarter and paid more, and the troops voted with their feet. I interviewed an Al-Qaeda fighter who had once worked in the alcohol department of the duty-free store at Aleppo airport but had now decided that Islamism was the best path, and, somehow, managed to convince another that I was not an atheist by reciting the Lord’s Prayer, the lines swimming back to me across two decades from primary school assemblies.
‘I’m not saying you should be a Muslim, but you have to believe in God!’ he’d beseeched me. ‘Because you’re a nice person, and I don’t want you to burn in hellfire.’
The irony was that, as the extremists grew in power, so newspaper readers back in the West cared less about what Assad was inflicting on his people and more about the threat that these black-clad young men might soon pose to their own lives and societies. And that, in turn, powered Al-Qaeda all the more, because it could claim, with increasing validity, that no one in the West cared when Muslims were dying. One teenager I had got to know in Aleppo, a seventeen-year-old called Molham who spent at least fifteen minutes each morning styling his hair and stopped to do top-ups in car mirrors throughout the day, knocked me speechless as we were eating shawarma.
‘Hannah, I’m going to join Al-Qaeda,’ he said. ‘All my friends are dying and they are the only ones doing anything about it.’
I stared back at him, my mouth full of chicken and mayonnaise. He flashed a wad of hundred-dollar bills that he said the group had given him as his joining-up fee. Once I had gulped down my food, I offered him the only pallid discouragement I could think of: ‘Please don’t.’
Some of the more hardcore rebels took to wearing suicide belts full time, in what I initially took as a swaggering statement of fashion more than intent. But then I interviewed the father of a fighter who had gone the whole hog and detonated his belt at a regime checkpoint. The father could not wipe the smile from his face as he talked about his first-born, dead for less than a week.
‘Are you upset?’ I asked him.
‘Of course not!’ the father replied. ‘He took at least ten of Assad’s men with him. He’s a martyr.’
I asked whether the family had held a funeral for him. The father’s expression shifted from pleasure to one of the pain reserved for an idiot.
‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘Nothing to bury. He was kebab meat.’
Then, Syria got even darker.
‘There is a new group,’ my fixer Mohammed told me as I prepared for my next trip into Aleppo in April 2013. ‘It has come from Iraq and it is called Isis.’
It was hard to weigh the danger at first – Syria’s sands were always shifting in those months, sometimes swallowing rebel groups and sometimes spitting out new ones. I asked all my contacts whether Isis would talk. Difficult, I was told, they don’t like journalists. But eventually, I was taken to meet a skinny young man called Abu Mahjin, who was dressed in shalwar kameez and showed only kohl-lined eyes through his balaclava. He had brought his Kalashnikov along even though I had requested no weapons in the room. His condition was that I cover my head and wear an abaya, and so we sat opposite each other, both looking ridiculous – a mujahid in make-up and a sweaty white woman wearing a tent. The scene grew more surreal when the woman whose house we were doing the interview in brought in two bowls of vanilla ice cream and set them in front of us, an impeccable Syrian host to the last. He couldn’t eat his without removing his face mask and I didn’t want to offend him by eating mine, so they melted as he told me how he believed Syria’s chaos had been foretold in the prophecies.
‘The Prophet said that we should follow jihad in Syria because that is where the angels will bestow their wings on Islam,’ Abu Mahjin said. ‘Our aim is to implement Sharia law in Syria and uphold the principles of the Islamic State. If that was not the aim then we wouldn’t have come from far afield to fight here; we would have left the Syrians to fight by themselves. The Syrian people don’t decide on this – it is the Prophet Muhammad who decided it.’
Isis had spread its tentacles across northern Syria well before it officially announced its existence. It had spies in every rebel-held town, reporting back on who was doing what. It had fighters from various Islamist rebel militias ready to swear their allegiance as soon as it was formally founded. In Manbij, the small town north of Aleppo where I had met Abu Mahjin, a local FSA leader told me how he was trying to mediate between Isis, which had recently set up a large headquarters there, and the town’s native rebel groups. His efforts were proving futile. That same morning, a crowd had pulled the local imam from the pulpit as he recited Friday prayers in Manbij’s main mosque, demanding that he be replaced with one of Isis’s hardline foreign preachers. The extremists had already arrested several of the town’s most corrupt FSA leaders, a popular move with anyone who had suffered their campaigns of extortion. On the morning I interviewed Abu Mahjin, I sat in a parked car and watched as a teenage motorbike gang circled Manbij’s town square, the pillion passengers standing and holding aloft black flags of Isis.
Crucially, Isis had a captive and suffering population that had grown cynical at the secular West, which preached one thing at meetings in New York and Geneva but did quite another in practice. Since the start of the uprising, almost every Western country and international institution had pleaded with Assad to stop slaughtering his own people. But the UN’s resolutions were repeatedly blocked by Russia, and what difference would they have made if they had been passed? The UN could send weapons inspectors and ceasefire monitors, but it couldn’t send in an army to fight back. The Syrian president had powerful friends in Moscow and Tehran, and that was what made his country different to Egypt, Libya and Tunisia. He could be sanctioned and he could be deplored, but for two years he carried on smashing dissent with missiles and bombs, growing ever more certain that no one would stop him. The US, UK and France joined with Turkey and Qatar to clandestinely train and equip selected rebels in southern Turkey and Jordan, but baulked at offering open and fully fledged support and airstrikes as they had in Libya. Every rebel leader I interviewed in Syria ordered that I publish his demands for heavy weaponry; one went so far as to take me to his makeshift ammunitions factory in the basement car park of an apartment block in rural Aleppo, combustible piles of explosives presided over by chain-smoking workers, which he then used as a backdrop for his tirade against Western inaction. Among Syria’s battered civilians I watched a growing tiredness, a swelling cynicism about the Western rhetoric on human rights that they had once believed was sincere. Almost unfailingly, everyone I interviewed was polite and kind – and horribly, searingly honest when they told me they were happy to welcome the fundamentalists, because what other choice did they have now it was clear that the West would not live up to its promises? I felt shame as I tried to explain the nuances of democratic party politics in Britain, the scar that the Iraq war had left on our collective psyche and the reasons why our politicians would not go against their people even when it was the right thing to do. My interviewees could trump all of my explanations with a single sentence: But we are dying here. And I had no comeback to that. Because what does nuance and party politics and parliamentary process and even democracy in a faraway land matter when bombs are falling on your head and your own president is trying to kill your children?
The wider world had not yet heard of Isis when Erdoğan went to Washington in May 2013 for talks with President Obama. His state visit was trimmed with honours aimed at preserving the relationship that Obama had spent his first tenure in the White House tending to. After assuming office in 2009, Obama had included Turkey on the itinerary of his first overseas trip, making it the first Muslim-majority country he visited as president. In Ankara, he had addressed the parliament. Obama’s overtures to Turkey and its prime minister meant that he was able to act as mediator when Erdoğan weighed into a row between the Muslim world and Denmark over the publication in a Danish newspaper of cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad.
In May 2013, Erdoğan, together with his foreign minister Davutoğlu and Hakan Fidan, head of the Turkish intelligence services, was greeted in Washington with full state honours and the rare gesture of dinner with Obama in the White House. Syria was only one item on a long agenda that also spanned trade, Palestine and Iran’s growing influence across the Middle East. But Erdoğan was hoping he could use the visit to persuade Obama to bump up support for the Syrian rebels so they could finally battle to Damascus and finish off Assad. There was mounting evidence that the Syrian regime was deploying chemical weapons against civilians – in that same month, I had visited Saraqeb, a town in Idlib province, where doctors showed me videos and medical reports of an airstrike that had left victims foaming at the mouth and retching. The double car-bombing in Reyhanlı five days before the visit, which Erdoğan blamed on Assad’s intelligence services, had now brought the war next door crashing across Turkey’s border. In Turkey, newspapers billed the meeting as ‘historic’, and as Erdoğan boarded his jet in Ankara he told reporters that it would ‘determine a new roadmap toward the Syrian crisis’. Analysts predicted that he would try to persuade Obama to lift the US veto on arming the rebels or even help establish a no-fly zone in northern Syria.
But Obama had other concerns. By now Western intelligence agencies were tracking the march of Isis’s black flag across northern Syria and briefings had reached the US president. Obama, lukewarm from the start about offering full backing to the insurgents, was perturbed by news that scores of committed, violent jihadis were travelling almost openly through Turkey and across the leaky border into Syria. Elsewhere, Obama was watching another Arab Spring uprising that the US had supported morph into a bloody blowback. In Libya, less than a year after a NATO intervention had dislodged Gaddafi, the US consul in the city of Benghazi was murdered by Islamist militants. Exactly one month before Erdoğan arrived in Washington, two pressure bombs planted by brothers of Kyrgyz origin and radicalised by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had exploded at the Boston Marathon, killing three. So, by the time the two presidents met, their views on Syria were already diverging – though the reporters gathered in the White House Rose Garden may not have realised it as they listened to the warm joint press conference that followed their opening meeting.
But that evening, over dinner in the White House, the two men and their entourages engaged in diplomatic battle. Erdoğan explained that the Syrian war, now dragging on into its second year, was beginning to cause huge problems for Turkey, thanks not only to the refugees it was hosting but also to the security problems it was throwing up. Erdoğan expected that the US, as a NATO ally and the country that had first corralled Turkey into supporting Assad’s overthrow, would take his side. He was wrong. Obama instead told Erdoğan that he had to cut off the extremists’ route into Syria and stop Turkey’s support for the more hardline armed rebel factions, and broke the news that the US would not be throwing any more support behind the rebels while the fundamentalists were there.
Erdoğan felt he had been betrayed by Obama – and, according to party insiders, began wondering whether there was a plot to overthrow him brewing in Washington. On his return to Turkey, a sudden challenge rising from the streets would, in his mind, prove him correct.
Twelve days after Erdoğan met with Obama, a small group of environmentalists started a sit-in in Istanbul’s Gezi Park. The scrubby patch of grass in the middle of Taksim Square, a huge plaza in the heart of Istanbul, was litter-strewn and dangerous after dark, but in the midst of the city’s sprawl it was a small haven where office workers sat to eat their lunch and gay men cruised for lovers. When it was announced that the park was to be concreted over and turned into a shopping centre built in the style of an Ottoman barracks, it lit the touch paper on a discontent that had long been simmering unspoken among Turkey’s youth. After the police evicted the environmentalists and burned down their tents, others came to show their solidarity. Within days, the dreadlocked hippies among the trees had been joined by tens of thousands of protesters who occupied Taksim, calling for Erdoğan to resign.
Erdoğan, still smarting from Obama’s riposte over Syria, accused the demonstrators of acting on the orders of nefarious foreign powers, and sent the riot police in en masse. Aerial photographs of Taksim on the fiercest days of the protests show the whole huge plaza blanketed in tear gas. The crackdown drew condemnations from Europe and the US, deepening the paranoia that from now on would never leave Erdoğan. Meanwhile, his rhetoric against the Gezi protesters was at odds with other senior members of his party, including Abdullah Gül, the president, who urged a softer response from the state.
Two months later, with Gezi still rumbling, Erdoğan suffered another blow. Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood government – the same that had been anointed by Erdoğan during his visit there in 2011 – was overthrown by a military coup following two years of mismanagement and rising fundamentalism. The Egyptian people, once so happy to be shut of a secular dictator, now came on the streets to cheer the overthrow of the Islamist who had replaced him. Erdoğan had not only lost an ally in the region. He was also watching his own model of government, the Islamic democracy on which the West had poured such flattery only two years earlier, being dismantled and discredited.
A month later again, in August 2013, Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons against his own people, not for the first time but on a scale that was now impossible to ignore. Pictures of rows of dead children shrouded in sheets in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, and of others foaming at the mouth as they gasped for breath, stunned a world that was yet to grow desensitised to Syria’s slaughter. Fourteen hundred were dead from sarin gas, a nerve agent that kills by slow asphyxiation, and everyone expected a game-changing retaliation. US President Barack Obama had said the use of chemical weapons would be his red line. Analysts later argued that it had been an offhand remark, but that didn’t matter to the Syrians, who had been suffering for more than two years and had hung on to those words. The US, UK and France seemed to be moving into position to launch strikes on Damascus, and the Syrians living as refugees in Turkey were overjoyed.
‘I’ll be riding back home on top of a French tank!’ laughed my friend, Aboud, who had defected from Assad’s army and escaped to Turkey a year earlier. Within minutes of meeting him on the first day I arrived in the borderlands in 2013, I realised that his shaved head and imposing stature belied a huge heart and a great sense of humour. The Syrians had forcibly conscripted him and put him in the special forces, believing it to be the best place for him. In Turkey, he was translating for journalists, doing humanitarian work for the growing numbers of refugees and, with me, talking over beers about the day he would return home.
His hopes soon fell apart. After the UK parliament voted against taking action, the US and France backed down, too. The red line had been crossed, yet nothing was done. That was the turning point – the moment when Syria morphed into war without end.
There was an understanding in Ankara that defeating Isis must now be the first priority for the West. But there was also a growing chasm between the US and Turkey over the future of Bashar al-Assad. While deposing the Syrian dictator had all but fallen off the agenda in Washington, in Ankara it was still seen as the necessary bedrock for future stability in the region. Meanwhile, the Pentagon was increasingly taking the lead on Syria policy instead of the White House – and the generals cared only about defeating Isis, not about maintaining the relationship between the US and Turkey.
‘I had the sense that the Turks were looking for American leadership on how to deal with Isis. However, this was not the only thing they were concerned about,’ says a US official involved in negotiations to build an anti-Isis coalition in 2014. ‘Turkey wanted to support the steps to bolster the capabilities of the Iraqi security apparatus to fight against Isis and other enemies. They seemed to be in favour of the steps in Syria to destroy Isis. But [they were also asking] what is the strategy for Assad? What will be the strategy when Isis gets defeated? What comes next? They continued to insist on an answer. Our answer in 2014 was to focus on defeating Isis. The Turks were willing to buy that. But they wanted to know the strategy in regards to Syria. It was never resolved, and it is still at the core of the problem in the relationship. In 2014 there was no one at a senior level in CENTCOM’ – US Central Command, overseeing the military operations against Isis – ‘interested in or willing to work on the US–Turkey relationship. They see Turkey as the problem. They would prefer not to deal with it at all.’
Behind the scenes, there were also growing tensions between the two men who had moulded Turkey’s Syria policy. In October 2014, when Erdoğan was voted in as president, he promoted his foreign secretary, Davutoğlu, to prime minister. Davutoğlu was determined to keep control over the Syria file. Erdoğan had other ideas.
‘When Davutoğlu was made prime minister, and especially as the Isis stuff unfolded, there was, almost immediately, tension between him and Erdoğan,’ says a former Western diplomat. ‘What foreigners could see was that Davutoğlu was becoming less and less involved in foreign affairs by the day. One time he had come back from some factory tours and he seemed delighted to get back into a conversation with [then US Secretary of State] John Kerry [but] it was clear that he was not entirely speaking for the government … It was bound up in this broader phenomenon of Erdoğan dominating the landscape. Erdoğan and the people around him did not want Davutoğlu playing that role any more … [and] Erdoğan was showing very little flexibility or interest in working together in ways to solve these problems. He was not adding to the problems, but he was not very cooperative. Erdoğan was saying what Turkey needed and what the US should do. It comes back to his confidence or arrogance. It was different from the Erdoğan that I had experienced before, who would actually have a conversation about what to do. Before, there would be a genuine give and take.’
As the politicians squabbled and the war metastasised, Syrians began pouring into Turkey – not only because some of the worst fighting was close to the frontier, or because Ankara had kept the border crossings open, but because Turkey was by far the best host. Instead of forcing refugees to live in decrepit camps, as was happening in Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq, Turkey allowed them to rent apartments and live freely. For the poorest, it provided high-quality camps, many with homes made of shipping containers rather than canvas. And, although it didn’t officially recognise Syrians as refugees due to a technicality in the Geneva Convention, after April 2013 it provided them with ‘Temporary Protection’ status, which gave them access to free healthcare, and allowed them to send their children to school and be hired for jobs Turks did not want.
Ankara’s generosity meant that Syrians were soon also arriving from third countries. Many of the 300,000 Syrians who had initially fled to Egypt relocated to Turkey after the 2013 coup as the once-welcoming mood turned against them. Others who had been living and working in the Gulf before the conflict broke out found that their residence permits were being cancelled, so they too went to Turkey. Increasingly, those who had been escaping into Lebanon and Jordan from fighting in the south of Syria moved straight on to Turkey if they could afford it. The numbers soared. In 2013, there were 225,000 Syrians in Turkey; a year later, there were more than six times that number. The number has risen every year since, and there are now between three and four million Syrians living in Turkey. Many of them see Erdoğan as their champion – the only leader who has stuck by them as the rest of the world has broken its promises or lost interest. But although the West had turned its back on the Syrians, it would not be able to ignore them for long.