“When I was a child, Turkish soldiers guarding the Tomb of Suleiman Shah in the foothills of Jabel Fortress used to carry their water from the Euphrates River on donkey back to their base. They were putting the water in tin cans without lids. We used to throw pebbles at the donkeys. Startled, they jumped about and spilled their water and we laughed. The soldiers did not react too much. One day when we were throwing pebbles with three of my cousins, my father caught us. I was punished by two days' confinement to the house.”

This is a flashback of Saad Abdunnur abu Basil’s childhood around the Tomb of Suleiman Shah, the only sovereign Turkish territory inside Syria. The tomb, put under Turkish custody as stipulated by the 1921 Treaty of Ankara with the French, is on the agenda as a potential pretext for Turkey to mount a cross-border operation into Syria. The case of the video recording of a threat by the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham [ISIS] was circulated on the Internet. The Internet message said: “We are giving you three days [to evacuate] the soldiers in this tomb which is on the Islamic land of Aleppo. Or, we will raze the tomb.”

Three days passed and there was no attack, but Turkey remained focused on that threat. There was much speculation that the AKP government would use the threat as an excuse to enter Syria and as a distraction from the corruption allegations it faces.

Fine, but what does the story of Abu Basil have to do with the current crisis? Simple: Even in the most turbulent times between Turkey and Syria, the tomb had never become a topic of discord and conflict. Even those “undesirable” people deported or who had escaped from Turkey were at peace with the tomb that represented the Turkish state and flew the Turkish flag. In the tomb, guarded by Turkish soldiers since 1938, there are the graves of Suleiman Shah, the grandfather of Osman Ghazi, the founder of the Ottoman Empire and his two bodyguards. In 1973, because the tomb and the soldiers’ quarters were to be flooded by the new Assad Dam Reservoir, they were relocated to the nearby village of Karakozak in Aleppo province.