Turkey’s longest border is its 911-kilometer [566 miles] one with Syria. A major segment of this border line is simply a railroad track on flat land. The flat terrain on the Syrian side that extends to Al Jazeera region abutting Iraqi Kurdistan and oil fields in Hassakeh province for the past two weeks has been the new battlefield pitting Kurds against al-Qaeda-derivative armed groups.

While Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is on the verge of securing Damascus and, even more important, is about to take back the country’s third-largest city, Homs — which controls a strategic junction — he isn’t moving a finger as far as the developments on the Turkish border in Syria’s northeast are concerned. Most likely he doesn’t want to spread his forces over a wide area far from the center. For him, the priority is to keep control of the coastal region with Latakia at its center and where his sectarian constituency dominates. This turns Syria’s north and northeast adjacent to Turkey into a battlefield between the Kurds, who are seeking a news status for themselves, and the Sunni groups either affiliated with al-Qaeda —  which aspires to set up a state that will also incorporate Iraq’s Sunni regions — or which are in a ideological-political relationship with al-Qaeda.

It is clear that Syria has become Lebanonized, reminiscent of its neighbor during the civil war there. There is no going back to the Syria of March 2010. In November 2012 at the Halifax Security Forum that I participated in as a speaker, Sen. John McCain was sitting right opposite me. The words he uttered while looking into my eyes, “Syria has ceased to exist as we have known it until now,” were not prophetic for me but it was nevertheless recorded as an important sound bite of the forum. The prospects a year later have not surprised me as a Turkish observer who has been trying to follow the developments as closely as possible, but they seem to have propelled Turkey into an impasse beyond any prediction.

The point we have reached is offering Turkey the option of having either Kurdistan as its long-border neighbor to its south or “Afghanistan of the Levant.”