The legend goes that the Prophet Muhammad came all the way to the walls of Damascus, saw the luscious landscape and refused to enter the city, uttering “you can only enter paradise once.” Once you make a decision to intervene in another country, it is a game changer. This applies to Turkey’s Syria policy.
The easiest answer to the question of what Turkey wants in Syria would be what any country wants from another: to cooperate with it and the region in a stable manner. Turkey and Syria already had a mutually beneficial friendship, to the point that Turks have decided to demand more benefits from this relationship. I am convinced that Turks want a Syria which would produce not more, but different benefits. Turkey is struggling to undo the damages of the Iraq war, hoping that if Iraq could be reversed from Sunni-minority rule to a Shia-dominant rule with strong influence from Iran in the post-US pullout, Syria could evolve from Alawite-minority rule to a Sunni-majority rule with a deep Turkish influence.
Put bluntly, the conditions for Turkish objectives to be realized in Syria are the elimination of the Assad regime, its replacement by an Ikhwan (Syrian Muslim Brotherhood)-dominated government, good separation if not a total break from Iranian influence and a commitment to an alliance with Turkish leadership in the region, which will make certain demands on not only Israel but also Iran. If these objectives are achieved, Turkish power will expand well into Syria. As promising as this may sound, it gets messy as soon as we start questioning the meaning of certain terms.
Let’s start with the first condition, the removal of the al-Assad regime. For the anti-Assad coalition, we can include the EU, the US, Jordan, Israel, Lebanon's March 14 Bloc and GCC countries, mostly Saudi and Qatar. Going into the third year of civil war, the regime has been much more persistent than many pundits predicted. A few crucial factors contribute to this: a strong and still-loyal army, the regime’s much ignored expertise in puppeteering different armed and non-armed groups, multiple countries involved with different goals and different degrees of support to the many factions. The Syrian regime still seems to have a better handle on intelligence gathering and analysis than others. I utilize the concept of factionalism, rather than sectarianism, for the opposition groups because divisions go beyond sectarian lines in Syria. Hence, overlooking these factions may indeed invite further escalation of the conflict. Hazem al-Amine has highlighted the fragility of the relationship between anti-Assad coalition and Syrian opposition very eloquently.
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