The Syrian crisis has turned into the bane of Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu’s life, defying all his predictions and plans for the region. In August 2012, when he was still foreign minister, he confidently announced during a television interview that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had only a few months to go, if not weeks. That prediction turned out to be woefully wrong, of course.

Davutoglu is maintaining that he received strong signals from President Barack Obama indicating that Washington was preparing to change tack on Syria, and to line up with Ankara’s position by making the Assad regime the priority target, while relegating the fight against the Islamic State (IS) to a secondary position.

Statements from the highest echelons of the US administration, including from Obama, however, appear to contradict Davutoglu, raising serious questions once again about his ability to read international situations of grave importance to Turkey.

After meeting with Obama on Nov. 15 on the sidelines of the G-20 summit in Brisbane, Davutoglu told senior Turkish editors and journalists that Ankara and Washington did not have substantial differences over Syria, but only differences in term of “synchronization” and “timing.”