Event Date: Fall 2025
Syria’s civil war broke out in March 2011, in reaction to the brutal crackdown by the regime of Bashar al-Assad of popular protests that were part of the wider Arab Spring.
In supporting the Syrian rebels, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan initially used the language of humanitarian intervention, claiming to protect civilians from the Assad regime’s repression. But it soon became clear that Erdoğan was also seeking regime change, motivated by an ideological goal: replacing Assad’s secular Arab nationalist regime with an Islamist government. This new Syria would then support Turkey’s leadership of a new Sunni Muslim order in the Levant.
Early in the conflict, Erdoğan and then-Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu declared that Turkey could not stand idly by while Assad’s regime silenced the cries of freedom of Syria’s Sunni majority. Publicly, they urged Assad to implement democratic reforms. Privately, Davutoğlu assured Erdoğan that Assad’s fall was imminent, either through internal collapse or Western intervention, as had occurred in Libya and Egypt.
But Turkey lacked the capacity to orchestrate regime change in its southern neighbor. What it possessed was a growing willingness to support jihadist elements in the Syrian opposition.
Support for Jihadists
By mid-2011, Turkey transitioned from diplomatic pressure to active support of the rebels. Ankara allowed the Syrian opposition to organize on Turkish soil, enabling the formation of groups like the “Friends of Syria” and the Free Syrian Army. Foreign fighters traveled to Turkey to join the anti-Assad ranks. Turkey became a hub for Syria’s rebellion.
Turkey, led by the AKP, cast itself as the model Sunni democracy – exporting this “Turkish Model” to Arab Spring nations.
In October 2011, Turkey helped launch the Syrian National Council in Istanbul. Though intended as a broad opposition umbrella, it became dominated by the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. At a 2012 State Department meeting, Syrian Kurdish representatives complained that “with the support of Turkey,” the Brotherhood had sidelined other opposition voices. One US official summarized Ankara’s vision as “a centralized Islamist government backed by a constitution.”
When Turkey convened the Syrian opposition in Antalya in December 2012 to form a new command structure, nearly two-thirds of the delegates invited were Muslim Brotherhood members. Turkey’s vision for Syria was now plainly visible: a Brotherhood-led regime beholden to Ankara.
But Assad did not fall. As the civil war dragged on, Turkey doubled down, providing covert aid to rebel groups. Hakan Fidan, head of Turkey’s intelligence agency MIT, directed this support. According to The Wall Street Journal, MIT became a “traffic cop” coordinating weapons shipments and directing convoys across the 565-mile Turkish-Syrian border.
By early 2012, the insurgency had changed. Extremist factions, initially peripheral, began to dominate, including Jabhat al-Nusra [al-Nusra Front]. It established cells across Syria, in Aleppo, Idlib, Deir al-Zor, and Dera’a. Another Islamist group, Ahrar al-Sham, formed in January 2012. By the end of the year, it joined ten other militias to create the Syrian Islamic Front. In 2013, it evolved into Harakat Ahrar al-Sham al-Islamiyya and collaborated with jihadist and US-backed groups alike.
All these groups benefited from Turkey’s open-door policy. One US official described Turkey’s border approach as a revolving door: “They more or less let all kinds of people in – al-Nusra was among them.” Turkish border guards “looked the other way,” allowing jihadists to cross with impunity. In December 2012, the US designated al-Nusra as a foreign terrorist organization highlighting its ties to al-Qai’da.
By May 2013, the White House was alarmed. President Obama reportedly warned Erdoğan that Turkey was “letting arms and fighters flow into Syria indiscriminately and sometimes to the wrong rebels, including anti-Western jihadists.” US officials pressed Ankara to “tightly control the arms flow.”
The Jihadi Highway
Turkey was the central artery of what analysts dubbed the “jihadi highway.” Norwegian terrorism expert Thomas Heghammer noted, “Turkey is to Syria now what Pakistan was to Afghanistan in the 1990s. Antakya is the Peshawar of Syria.” Fighters flowed in from across the world. Turkish border towns became staging grounds for Islamist militias. Local shops sold smartphones and supplies to jihadists. Hospitals treated wounded fighters from both ISIS and al-Nusra. Mehmet Ali Ediboğlu, a Turkish member of parliament from the opposition CHP, told The Wall Street Journal that he personally tracked “a convoy of more than 50 buses carrying radical fighters” to the border, escorted by Turkish police.
Weapons also streamed across the border. Reuters reported in 2012 that Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar had established a secret operations center near the border to coordinate arms and communications for Syrian rebels. Washington was complicit. Francis Ricciardone, former US ambassador to Turkey, said in 2014 that Ankara “worked with groups for a period, including al-Nusra,” and hoped to “moderate” them.
When Davutoğlu was pressed about al-Nusra’s links to al-Qaeda, he merely admitted, “declaring them [al-Nusra] a terrorist organization has resulted in more harm than good.”
Erdoğan and Davutoğlu’s pursuit of regime change was not a defensive reaction to Assad’s brutality. It was an effort to remake the region in the AKP’s Islamist image. And in that reckless endeavor, they opened the gates to forces far beyond their control, including the terrorist ISIS caliphate.
The Collapse and the Rise
When Bashar al-Assad’s regime abruptly collapsed in December 2024, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan saw more than just a regional upheaval. He saw a long-awaited opportunity.
With Iran’s influence waning and Russia distracted by internal instability and foreign entanglements, a rare power vacuum emerged in Syria. Erdoğan moved swiftly. For over a decade, Ankara had supported Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the al-Qaeda offshoot that ultimately toppled Assad’s regime, under the leadership of Muhammad al-Jolani (who would drop this nom de guerre in 2025 and re-assume his birth name, Ahmed al-Shara’a). HTS was just one of several Sunni Islamist factions that Turkey had backed since the earliest days of Syria’s civil war, beginning in 2011.
For Erdoğan, the war in Syria was never simply about toppling a brutal dictatorship. It was a generational chance to reshape the Middle East, fulfilling a vision rooted in establishing a neo-Ottoman regional order with Turkey at its helm.
Beginning in 2012, Ankara openly aligned itself with the Syrian opposition, betting that Assad’s days were numbered, much like the authoritarian regimes that had fallen in Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia during the Arab Spring. Erdoğan miscalculated. Assad endured, thanks to backing from Tehran and Moscow.
It would take another twelve years for Erdoğan’s vision to find traction. By March 2025, a new interim government led by Ahmed al-Shara’a had taken charge in Damascus. This political outcome was the culmination of Turkey’s long-standing efforts to influence Syria’s post-Assad trajectory. And yet, this strategy marked a profound evolution in Erdoğan’s approach to Damascus. Before the civil war, between 2004 and 2011, he had in fact pursued a pragmatic detente with Assad, signaling a very different strategic calculus.
The notion that Erdoğan and Assad once embraced as allies may now seem surreal, but it reflects a brief window of diplomatic realignment. To understand that moment, one must consider the deeper ideological fault lines that have long defined Turkish-Syrian relations.
Ideological Fault Lines
Turkey’s hostility toward the Assad regime predates Erdoğan. Ideologically, it is rooted in the worldview of the National View Movement, the Turkish Islamist tradition from which Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) arose. Since the rule of Hafiz al-Assad (1971–2000), these Turkish Sunni Islamists regarded Syria’s Alawite-dominated Ba’athist regime with suspicion and disdain, as secular socialists who were dangerously close to the Soviet Union. They supported the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, especially after the Ba’athists banned the group in 1964.
Among the most vocal critics of the Syrian Ba’ath was Necmettin Erbakan, founder of the Islamist Welfare Party and Erdoğan’s political mentor. Erbakan deeply resented the Ba’athist crackdown on Sunni Islamist forces and privately cheered the Brotherhood’s calls for jihad against Damascus. Although he refrained from open confrontation with the Syrian state, Erbakan’s ideological hostility was clear. Following this line, Erdoğan and his foreign policy architect Ahmet Davutoğlu, saw the Assad regime as secular tyrants and, in the words of one Turkish analyst, as “illegitimate elites of a minority sect that had done more damage to Islam as a religion than had the West.”
That historical resentment fueled Turkey’s antagonistic posture during the Cold War, when Ankara and Damascus frequently found themselves on opposite sides of geopolitical and ideological divides. Most explosively, Syria served as a patron for the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), offering sanctuary to its leader, Abdullah Ocalan, and providing logistical support for the group’s separatist campaign inside Turkey. The PKK’s operations from Syrian soil brought the two countries to the brink of war in 1998, a confrontation only defused when Damascus expelled Ocalan under Turkish pressure. As a result, it is worth pointing out that Turkish elites’ suspicion of Syria was not limited only to the Islamist camp: it was shared across Turkey’s political spectrum.
Erdogan’s Rise
Yet when Erdoğan assumed office as prime minister in 2003, he temporarily shelved those long-standing grievances in favor of a pragmatic reorientation. Early in his tenure, Erdoğan cultivated a reputation in Western capitals as a capable leader willing to sideline ideology for realpolitik. This image was embodied in the “zero problems with neighbors” doctrine, a cornerstone of Davutoğlu’s foreign policy vision. Its aim was to normalize relations with regional adversaries, including Syria.
Erdoğan’s pivot toward Damascus was also driven by his deepening disillusionment with Europe. After the European Union effectively stalled Turkey’s accession process in 2007, Ankara’s foreign policy began to shift decisively toward the Middle East. The 2008 global financial crisis further weakened Turkey’s economic alignment with Europe, accelerating Erdoğan’s pursuit of new trade and political alliances in the Arab world, with Syria at the center of this new orientation.
Between 2004 and 2010, bilateral relations between Turkey and Syria improved dramatically. The two countries formed a high-level Strategic Cooperation Council and signed a series of free trade and visa liberalization agreements. Trade volume more than doubled – from $800 million in 2003 to $1.8 billion in 2010. Syrian tourists flocked to Turkish cities such as Gaziantep, spurring local economic booms and the construction of shopping malls tailored to Syrian consumers. For a brief moment, Syria served as a critical land bridge for Turkish truckers bringing goods to Jordan and the Gulf, an economic artery that gave substance to the improving relations.
The warm rapport between Erdoğan and the Assad family during this period led some observers to question whether ideologically committed Islamist leaders like Erdoğan could, in fact, evolve into pragmatic statesmen once in power. Until 2012, there was reason to believe that Erdoğan might subordinate ideology to the imperatives of national interest.
So, what changed?
The Civil War
The answer lies not only in the outbreak of the Syrian civil war, but in Erdoğan’s strategic recalibration. By 2011, the Arab Spring had dramatically altered the political landscape across the region. Erdoğan, emboldened by the downfall of Arab autocrats, assumed Assad’s regime would follow suit. His support for oppositionist forces, including jihadist groups like HTS, was less about democracy and more about engineering a Sunni realignment in Syria that would align with Ankara’s regional ambitions.
The Syrian war became, for Erdoğan, both a proxy conflict and a proving ground for a new Turkish sphere of influence. The fall of Assad in 2024 vindicated a long and risky bet. The rise of Ahmed al-Shara’a, a former jihadist handpicked and mentored by Ankara, now in power in Damascus, signals the culmination of a strategy that began not with the first shots of civil war, but with decades of ideological suspicion and a fairly brief, ill-fated experiment in pragmatism.
In the end, Erdoğan preferred a Syria that would be closely aligned with his Islamist worldview, rather than one that was merely aligned with Turkey’s national interests. He would spend over a decade attempting to overthrow Assad in pursuit of this goal. Since the founding of Turkey as a republic in 1923, no Turkish leader had ever engaged in a process of regime change in a foreign country. Erdoğan would defy this trend. When Assad eventually fell, Erdoğan did not merely react to Syria’s collapse. He had prepared for it, waited for it, and helped shape it.
Sinan Ciddi, Ph.D., is a senior fellow at The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) and director of the Turkey program. This article is reprinted by permission of the Jerusalem Strategic Tribune.
