By Patricia H. Kushlis
I’ve thought for some time that if there is to be effective international pressure on the Assad government in Syria to get it to stop its Alawite storm troopers from continuing to murder the country’s unarmed, mostly Sunni, citizens it would need to come from Ankara.
Since April when the demonstrations began, both the Turks and the Saudis have been patient – likely too patient with this out of control government.
The Saudis, of course, have fewer quivers in their arsenal than the Turks. First, Saudi Arabia is no paragon of virtue itself – after all “people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.” Second, the Saudis are known for paying off friends and enemies alike – and if they’ve been paying off Assad, it obviously hasn’t changed his behavior.
And third, just plain geography.
Look at the map: Turkey neighbors Syria on the north and the Turkish government could, and likely pretty easily, send in the troops to stop the mayhem in Syria’s north if it so decided. It could also mount a sea offensive to protect Syrian cities along the coast.
After all, Syria was an Ottoman province for centuries before the Empire’s demise after World War I. Do Assad and his security forces really want to take on the Turkish army too if it were to come to that? I don’t think so.
Assad: Listen Up
Here’s what Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu reportedly said at a news conference after six hours of apparently fruitless talks last week in Damascus:
“This is our final word to the Syrian authorities: our first expectation is that these operations stop immediately and unconditionally. If the operations do not end, there would be nothing more to discuss about steps that would be taken.”
Now, regardless of the apparent open-ended ambiguity – or veiled threat – of Davutoglu’s public statement, if I were an advisor to Assad, the first thing I would remind him of is Cyprus July 20, 1974.
The good news was that the much hated Greek military junta collapsed almost immediately as a result of the junta’s provoked Turkish invasion of the island, democracy and Karamanlis returned to Greece and the junta members themselves spent the rest of their lives in jail.
The bad news was that lots of Greek Cypriots lost property, some lost lives, some are still missing, the US was blamed by Greeks for the Turkish military invasion of the northern part of the island and UN troops still patrol the “Green Line.”
Read the Turkish coffee grounds: Enough means enough
The second thing I would warn Assad is that Turks may well be slow to boil – but when they’ve had enough, enough means enough. There is, after all, only a land border between the two countries and I very much doubt Syrian forces could withstand the Turkish military for very long if Erdogan orders the troops to cross it. After all, Turkey now has to deal with more and more Syrian refugees who have fled the country in recent months to escape the Assad pogroms so the Turks have more to cope with than simply a heinous neighboring regime.
Tweaking, therefore, the Turkish elephant’s tail is never a good idea and despite Iran’s quiet military support for Assad and his wayward Shiite sect, Iran has enough problems at home to think five times before going further. And as for China and Russia – these regime supporters on the sly – are simply too far away to make a real difference and, after all, whatever happens in Damascus just isn’t that important in their over all scheme of things.