REYHANLI, Turkey — As President Barack Obama intensifies his lobbying efforts to win congressional support to launch a US military strike in Syria, I thought the place to be today was nowhere else but Reyhanli in Hatay province. This is because many of its residents believe they were the first to pay the price of the policy of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government of siding with the Syrian opposition and calling for the toppling of President Bashar al-Assad.
Erdogan is now asking the US not to confine itself to a limited strike but to actually make it a large-scale one that will end the Assad era.