Ankara’s acknowledgment of intelligence contacts with Damascus had raised expectations of a shift in its Syria policy, but recent Turkish moves suggest that such a prospect remains distant and Ankara remains bent on cementing its grip on Syrian territories under its military control.

Last week, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan decreed the establishment of two educational facilities in al-Rai, a small northern Syrian town just across the border. The town — home mostly to ethnic Turks known as Turkmens — is called Cobanbey in Turkish. The Cobanbey Medical Faculty and the Cobanbey Vocational School of Health Services would operate as branches of the Istanbul-based University of Health Sciences, Erdogan said in the Feb. 5 decree.

The planned colleges are the latest addition to a multifaceted structure that Turkey has been shaping in the Syrian regions it controls, reinforcing suspicions that it is there to stay despite its stated commitment to Syria’s sovereignty and territorial integrity in the Astana process. Turkish statements greeting the new project carried a sense of conquest and Ottoman nostalgia typical to the regional vision of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP).

Cevdet Erdol, the rector of the University of Health Sciences and a former AKP deputy, hailed the project as a “blessed step” by a “Great Turkey” that knows no boundaries but those “of the globe.” Turkey, he said, is working to spread the legacy of Abdulhamid II, the Ottoman sultan who founded the empire’s first medical school in 1903. The building that housed the imperial school is now used by Erdol’s five-year-old university.