How AKP supporters learned to live with Assad
Having vilified President Bashar al-Assad for years, President Erdogan and his supporters are backing off their previous threats against the Syrian president with the growth of Kurdish groups in Syria.
Many Turkish experts argued from the start that it was wrong for Ankara to turn against Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad the way it did after the Arab Spring. They said this policy disregarded ethnic and sectarian divisions in Syria, as well as the implications for Turkey if the central government lost its grip on the country.
Nevertheless, maintaining ties with Damascus was considered an abhorrent idea by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its staunchly Islamist supporters at that stage. Ahmet Davutoglu — who as foreign minister at the time was the main architect of Ankara’s “moralistic” Syria policy — believed the demise of the “brutal dictator who kills his own people” was imminent.
“This will not take years, but months or weeks,” he said in August 2012 — a remark that has haunted him since.
The simple expectation of the AKP and its Islamist supporters was that with Assad gone, Syria’s majority Sunnis would sweep into power in any free elections held and form a Muslim Brotherhood-led government friendly to Turkey.
