Erdogan Gets His ‘Leader of the Muslim World’ Moment

Excerpt

Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has come full circle and then some on Syria. At the dawn of the Erdogan era, Turkey’s then-prime minister was Bashar al Assad’s patron—once even proposing that the Erdogan and Assad families vacation together. The two leaders fell out after Assad turned his military against the uprising that began in 2011, resulting in millions of refugees streaming into Turkey.

Erdogan could never convince President Barack Obama to invade Syria and overthrow the regime, so he kept his options open, putting together a rebel force dubbed the Syrian National Army (SNA) and tacitly supporting the jihadists that became Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). The SNA was primarily a tool Turkey used to fight Syrian Kurds who wanted to set up a state on Turkey’s doorstep. HTS was useful against the Russians and the regime, but Russian arms confined them to the Idlib province.

Steven A. Cook is a columnist at Foreign Policy and the Eni Enrico Mattei senior fellow for Middle East and Africa studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Sinan Ciddi is an associate professor of national security studies at Marine Corps University and a nonresident senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.