As Christians around the world celebrate Christmas, there is no joy among the ancient Christian community of Syria. There have been Christians there longer than anywhere. Antioch, located just across the Turkish border from northwest Syria, is where the disciples of Jesus were first called Christians. How much longer Syria’s Christian community can survive, after two thousand years, is in doubt.
The sudden fall of Bashar Assad and his regime at the beginning of this month has been greeted enthusiastically by many. Certainly, the collapse of a repressive dictatorship that ran Syria as a familial fiefdom with an iron fist for 45 years is cause for celebration. And the geostrategic implications of Assad’s fall include several positives for the West. Regime change is a profound blow to Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose military intervention in Syria’s civil war in 2015 bought the Assad regime almost another decade in power. Now, with Russia’s military bogged down in Ukraine, Putin had minimal aid to offer its friend in Damascus. Instead, Assad and his retinue fled to Moscow.
Iran’s mullah regime took Assad’s implosion similarly hard. Syria, under the old regime, was as important a lynchpin for Tehran’s regional strategy as it was for Moscow’s. Without their Syrian bases, it will be difficult for Tehran and its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to maintain their proxy war against Israel. Anti-regime forces in Iran are taunting the mullahs that they will share the same fate as their protégé Assad.
Israel is one big winner in Assad’s sudden demise. Certainly, there’s celebration in Israeli security circles, watching their old nemesis, the Assad dynasty, evaporate. Under the Assads, Syria fought Israel twice directly, in 1973 in the Golan and in 1982 in Lebanon, both big wins for Israel, while Assad-backed terrorists continued the fight against Israel to the regime’s end. However, it’s an open question how much Israel’s long-term security posture will be improved by removing Assad. More than most places, the Middle East abounds with devils you know.
Still, the big winner from Syria’s regime change isn’t Israel, it’s Turkey.
Collapsing the Assad dynasty was the achievement of Turkey, above all, plus a personal triumph for President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. He has run Turkey since 2003, growing his country into a major regional power. During more than two decades of rule by his Justice and Development Party, Erdoğan has transformed Turkey into an increasingly Islamist state with mounting restrictions on press, political, and religious freedom, all while being a NATO member and U.S. ally, at least formally.
This push into authoritarianism has increased since the country’s abortive 2016 coup, a murky affair that’s never been fully explained. Erdoğan claims that the revolt was staged by a prominent Muslim cleric and one-time ally who took up refuge in the 1990s in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania and recently died in exile. Regardless of the reality, Erdoğan used the coup to consolidate his power, particularly inside Turkey’s security structures.
Especially important has been the political rise of Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization, known as MIT, which is charged with regime protection at home and abroad. Under the leadership of Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan from 2010 to 2023, MIT grew in size and stature, becoming Erdoğan’s personal force. Fidan, who’s widely considered to be Erdoğan’s likely successor, employed MIT outside Turkey in a manner never previously seen. MIT crushed internal opposition, real and imagined, then took its clandestine fight against the shadowy FETÖ terrorist organization, reputedly run by that Poconos imam.
Since the 2016 coup, MIT has abducted dozens of supposed terrorists, including several in Europe, to face justice in Turkey. This global kidnapping campaign touched American politics when Turkish operatives reportedly offered Michael Flynn, who briefly served as national security adviser early in President-elect Donald Trump’s first term, several million dollars to help Ankara grab alleged FETÖ members in the United States.
MIT has played a pivotal role in Syria’s civil war. While the Turkish military regularly operated across the border in northern Syria, Ankara’s intelligence apparatus was deeply involved in supporting Sunni extremists inside Syria. MIT operatives were coordinating ammunition and logistics flows to pro-Ankara jihadists, while even supplying them with real-time intelligence to support their attacks on Syrian regime forces.
Most importantly, in 2017, Ankara united most of its local militias and proxies inside Syria, a gaggle of Sunni militants, into the Syrian National Army. The SNA operated as an extension of the Turkish military, enjoying lavish logistical and intelligence support from Ankara, including air strikes by the Turkish air force. Wounded SNA fighters were evacuated for medical treatment in Turkey, while some SNA fighters even wore Turkish military uniforms. MIT made minimal effort to hide that the SNA is a stand-in for the Turkish military.
This matters because the SNA played a leading role in the campaign to topple the Assad regime. If there’s further fighting inside Syria to gain dominance in 2025, filling the post-Assad power vacuum, the SNA is well positioned, given its lavish support from neighboring Turkey. MIT supports other militants inside Syria, including Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, the jihadist group that’s found itself in control of large swathes of Syria this month. Ankara’s relationship with HTS has been bumpy over the years, but MIT has close links with many HTS higher-ups, including several who have just been named top ministers in the Syrian government. Western debate in recent weeks has focused on whether HTS, as a jihadist group designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the U.S. State Department, has truly moderated its views, as its leadership has claimed. It’s just as important to ponder how close HTS bigwigs are with Turkish intelligence and Ankara.
A sure sign of where Syria is headed came with the visit of Ibrahim Kalin, the MIT boss, to Damascus just days after the fall of the Assad regime, to parley with HTS leaders who now run much of Syria. This was the first visit by a foreign VIP to the new regime. Unusually for a spy junket, this was a publicized visit, showing who the real boss in Damascus is now. That point was driven home two weeks later with the high-profile visit to Damascus by Fidan, the ex-MIT director and Erdoğan’s right-hand man, who stated during his parley with HTS leadership that Turkey “will continue to stand by your side. … Hopefully, the darkest days of Syria are behind, [and] better days await us.”
It’s becoming increasingly clear that Syria is turning into a Turkish protectorate, under the patronage of Ankara’s spies. It’s hiding in plain sight. Trump, who has the knack of pithily saying the unsayable, stated that “Turkey did an unfriendly takeover” by overthrowing Assad. He’s correct. This may be a subtle form of neocolonialism with MIT-approved Syrians running parallel shadow structures on Ankara’s behalf. Already, Ankara-backed jihad-friendly Islamist NGOs have increased their operations inside Syria, to benefit Sunni extremists. Turkey gave us the Deep State concept, after all.
Moreover, Turkey’s neocolonial experiment in Syria is no accident but rather a design. Throughout his rule, Erdoğan has displayed affection for the Ottoman Empire, which collapsed following the First World War, after ruling over the Middle East for most of a millennium. This atavism plays poorly with most of the countries that were under Ottoman rule, yet Erdoğan embraces it all the same. It tracks with his politicized Sunni faith and desire to see Turkey as the leading power in its region, which, to neo-Ottomans, is simply the natural state of affairs.
Erdoğan’s never hidden his neo-Ottoman vision for Turkey, but few in the West have paid attention. There have been strange stunts, such as his 2018 election rally in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo. In 2020, he expressed that “Jerusalem is our city,” because it was occupied by the Ottomans for four centuries. Sometimes he states his views plainly, such as in 2020, when he boasted that conquest by the Ottomans was good: “In our civilization, conquest is not occupation or looting. It is establishing the dominance of the justice that Allah commanded in the [conquered] region. … Our nation removed the oppression from the areas that it conquered. It established justice. This is why our civilization is one of conquest. … Turkey will take what is its right in the Mediterranean Sea, in the Aegean Sea, and in the Black Sea.”
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The idea that Assad’s fall represents the birth of applied neo-Ottomanism sounds odd, but that’s what is happening. There were signs along the way, for instance, the fact that SNA units that were especially favored by Turkey bore the names of historical Ottoman sultans.
The real question now is: Does Erdoğan’s neo-Ottoman ideology-as-policy extend beyond Syria?
John R. Schindler served with the National Security Agency as a senior intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer.
