Erdogan's Syrian Gambit
by Burak Bekdil • December 28, 2022 at 5:00 am
Since the violence resumed, Erdogan has threatened to launch a full-scale military incursion into Syria's Kurdish areas — which would be the fourth such major Turkish incursion since 2016.
Erdogan most likely calculates that fresh epic tales of military heroism would further consolidate his nationalistic voting base [before June 2023 presidential elections], especially at a time when most Turks are struggling to survive after their incomes have severely eroded under a year-on-year inflation rate of 84%.
A Turkish military incursion would be a fight in a land that already looks like hell.
An estimated 15.3 million Syrians (out of a population of 22.1 million) will require humanitarian assistance in 2023, compared to 14.6 million people in 2022, according to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. — Washington Post, December 12, 2022.
The report also cited... [that] at least 25% of children under the age of five in some [Syrian] districts are stunted and at risk of irreversible damage to their physical and cognitive development as well as "repeated infection, developmental delay, disabilities and death." — Washington Post, December 12, 2022.
In the predominantly Kurdish northeast Syria, the number of malnourished children has surged by over 150% just in the past six months. — UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, November 8, 2022.
"Washington... is urging Turkey in ever stronger terms not to launch an operation. The Turks do not appear to be heeding Washington's call, in part because they heard the same tune before their 2018 incursion against the SDF in Afrin, Syria, and didn't suffer any long-term consequences for ignoring it that time." — James Jeffrey, Chair of the Middle East program at the Wilson Center and former U.S. ambassador to Ankara, Foreign Policy, December 9, 2022.
The only advantage of a Turkish military incursion might be for Erdogan, who may well be using a war in Syria to distract potential voters from the wretched economy he gave them.
The northernmost region of Syria, which has a 910-kilometer border with Turkey, offers one of the world's most complex war theaters. That is so not only because of the countless number of state and non-state actors operating in this third-world land with limited hydrocarbons, but also because of shifting alliances, conflicts with conventional and asymmetrical warfare tactics, and the surreal bedfellows that these factors often create.
The actors include countless radical jihadist groups and their 3.5 million civilian supporters; not-as-radical jihadist groups supported by Turkey, as well as Turkish, American, Russian and Syrian forces, and of course Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
Peace in this area often means just a short interval between outbreaks of war. Recently, violence was more or less in the background until a bomb exploded -- not in northern Syria, but some 1,300 km away.
