A month on from Turkish troops crossing the border and attacking the Syrian town of Afrin, the skirmish is rapidly approaching a turning point. In the past two weeks, two unexpected and barely remarked events have taken place on both sides of the border – events that may well result in the Turkish operation restoring something that was long ago destroyed in Syria: the status quo.
A week after the assault began, Kurdish fighters in northern Syria, feeling outgunned, required reinforcements. With the US only urging “restraint” from Turkey and accepting its “legitimate security concerns,” help was unlikely to come from that quarter. That left two options: other Kurdish fighters in Syria’s northeast (Afrin is in the northwest of Syria, but the two Kurdish-held areas are separated by large territory controlled by the Syrian rebels) or the Assad regime’s forces to the south.
In an extraordinary move, the Kurds, despite having clashed with Bashar Al Assad’s forces, asked Damascus for help. “We call on the Syrian state…to deploy its armed forces to secure the borders of the Afrin area,” said a statement from Afrin’s executive council. In the last two weeks, the Assad regime has quietly responded. So far, it does not appear to have sent troops, but is allowing Kurdish fighters from the northeast to cross through regime territory to Afrin. More recently, a senior Kurdish official has gone so far as to claim that Syrian soldiers could enter the Afrin region within days. Damascus is silent on this. For now, a spokesman for the Kurdish militants admitted the regime was allowing them through, and James Mattis, the US defense secretary, confirmed to Congress that Kurdish troops were shifting to Afrin.
Then, at the beginning of February, the leader of Turkey’s main opposition group declared that the time had come for his country to restore relations with Damascus.
Taken together, the two events amount to Assad’s regime being thrown an unexpected lifeline.
The call by Syria’s Kurds for protection from the regime may seem small, but it is politically explosive. It is also, for the regime, a small opening for normalization – one that Damascus will be certain to exploit.
The Assad regime does not want Syrian Kurds to carve out a homeland in northern Syria, but it does not, yet, have the military capacity to fight a hard war far from Damascus. It can accept Kurdish rule in the north temporarily, if only because it fears Turkish rule more.
So the attack on Afrin has opened an opportunity for cooperation with the Kurds. The regime is likely to see a chance: let a few Kurdish fighters through but not too many, and that way it can bog down both the Turks and the Kurds in Afrin. The longer the Kurds are besieged there, the more there will be a chance that they will seek cooperation with the regime and allow regime troops in – from where they will never leave.
But it is the call by Turkey’s opposition for normalization with Damascus that is more consequential.
Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the leader of the Republican People’s Party is no fool. His party trails Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party badly (the AKP has nearly three times as many parliamentarians). Turkey’s presidential and parliamentary elections are due next year, but Turkey’s opposition parties are predicting Erdogan will call snap elections, perhaps as early as this summer. Kilicdaroglu knows that Syria’s refugees are an immense source of political difficulty for Ankara, and thus a political opportunity for him.
Turkey has taken in more than 3 million Syrian refugees – more than any single Arab country and more than the whole of Europe combined. Two years ago, Turkey allowed refugees to receive work permits and took steps to spread the refugees across the country. The impact is still being studied, but one paper out of a Turkish university concluded that Syrians had set up thousands of businesses, employing tens of thousands of Turkish citizens – but that they had also increased unemployment in some regions. Yet the impact – and contribution to jobs and taxes – is not as easy to explain to the public as the expense, which Erdogan last year put at $30 billion.
What Kilicdaroglu has done is open a conversation that Turks have been having for a long time. The refugee crisis and the war next door have taken a considerable toll on Turkish society. Kilicdaroglu knows that by opening the conversation he can damage Erdogan (who has set his face against Assad), gain votes and pose as a real patriot, putting the interests of ordinary Turks above international relations.
He is placing Erdogan in a bind. The outcome Turkey’s president hoped for at the start of the Syrian uprising – that Assad would go and Ankara, having shepherded in a new government, would hold immense power in Damascus and regionally – has not happened. The president has maintained his stance is moral, and responded to Kilicdaroglu by incredulously asking if he wanted Turks to “get together with a man who caused the death of a million people.”
Yet as it becomes clearer that the Assad regime is going nowhere (even Turkey’s prime minister has admitted “the regime is a reality”) and contacts between the two capitals expand (Turkey admitted it had informed Damascus of its intentions against Afrin) it will become harder to maintain the fiction that Assad must go. Voices like Kilicdaroglu’s will only get louder.
The cumulative effect of these two moves has been to offer Bashar Al Assad a lifeline he has not had for many years. He has gained influence again with Syria’s Kurds without firing a shot. He has forced Ankara’s politicians to accept him as a reality. By simply clinging on to power, he has managed to become relevant again.
Both the Kurds and Turkey will most likely seek to keep the regime at arms-length, dealing with it when expedient, and attacking it rhetorically. For both, that will look like a strategic, cold peace with Damascus. To Assad, it will look like a victory.
Faisal Al Yafai is currently writing a book on the Middle East and is a frequent commentator on international TV news networks. He has worked for news outlets such as The Guardian and the BBC, and reported on the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa.
AFP PHOTO / George OURFALIAN
