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Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan poses with Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud and Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed following a press conference in Ankara, Turkey, December 11, 2024.
Turkey mediates key agreement to defuse Ethiopia-Somalia conflict
Ethiopian President Abiy Ahmed and Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud announced a critical agreement to end a yearlong dispute over Ethiopia’s access to the Arabian Sea. The leaders announced the deal in Ankara after marathon talks mediated by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, whois increasingly emerging as a key player in the Horn of Africa.
What’s the conflict all about? Ethiopia has been the most populous landlocked country in the world since Eritrea broke away in 1993, and the lack of a major seaport has held back development. In January, Ethiopia signed a deal to lease a port from a breakaway region in Somalia, Somaliland, in exchange for recognizing its independence. In response, Somalia threatened to expel Ethiopian troops that are in the country to fight al-Shabab terrorists, and some feared the conflict could escalate into an echo of the devastating 1977-78 Ogaden War.
Why is Turkey involved? Ankara has deep ties to both sides in the conflict and an abiding interest in keeping the peace between them. Turkey’s largest overseas military base is in Somalia, where Turkish troops have trained thousands of their Somali peers. Turkey also backed the Ethiopian government during the 2020-22 Tigray war by providing feared Bayraktar drones.
“The agreement will help make Turkey into an even more relevant power in the region, with Ankara pitching itself as a security partner for African countries,” says Eurasia Group expert Emre Peker.
Turkish businesses have invested over $2 billion in Ethiopia as well, a figure surpassed only by China.
“Aside from expanding its diplomatic and political clout in Africa, the deal will also help Turkey build more commercial inroads in the region,” says Peker. “Ethiopian access to Somali ports could facilitate more trade, and Turkish businesses will benefit from potential preferential treatment on marquee infrastructure projects.”
What now? Representatives will meet again in February for “technical talks” that are meant to hammer out the details of port access.Syrians living in Turkey, holding a picture of Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, celebrate after Syrian rebels announced that they have ousted President Bashar al-Assad in Syria, in Istanbul, Turkey, December 8, 2024.
Four reasons why Turkey is excited about the fall of Assad.
No one is sure what the end of the Assad regime in Syria will bring, but few in the region are happier about it than Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. For years, Erdogan, whose Islamist AKP party has governed Turkey since 2003, had sought the ouster of Assad, a secular despot backed by Shia Iran, a regional rival.
In the end, the jihadist militants of Hayat Tahrir el-Sham, or HTS, a group supported in part by Turkey, led the campaign that ended the 54 year reign of the Assads.
But why was Erdogan in particular so interested in seeing that happen?
Here are four big reasons:
- The refugee problem. Nearly 4 million Syrian refugees have arrived in Turkey since the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011. Ankara has gotten some 9 billion Euros from the EU to support them and keep them from traveling onward to Europe, but their presence in Turkey has generated a social backlash. With Assad out of power, Erdogan sees an opportunity to send them home.
- The regional power play. The Sunni Islamist government of Erdogan has always seen Shia revolutionary Iran as a regional rival. Assad, supported by Tehran, was the keystone of Iran’s arc of regional power, enabling Iran to project power via proxy groups into neighboring Lebanon, Iraq, and the Palestinian territories. With that keystone removed, the arc has fallen, and now a Turkey-friendly Sunni Islamist group is in a position to pick up the pieces in Syria. That, says Emre Peker, lead Turkey analyst at Eurasia Group, gives Ankara a chance to “engage in a massive way in the reconstruction of Syria and expand influence and clout throughout the region.”
- The Kurdish complication. For decades, Ankara has faced separatist militancy from Kurdish groups based in southeastern Turkey and is hostile to Syrian Kurdish groups that have carved out autonomous zones of their own during the Syrian civil war. The post-Assad uncertainty has already given Erdogan an opportunity to move more forcefully against the Syrian Kurds. Still, he will have to maneuver carefully in order to avoid a spat with the US, which has backed Syrian Kurds as proxies in the fight against the Islamic State. Incoming US president Donald Trump has called for “staying out of” Syria, which Erdogan would welcome, but it remains to be seen whether that plays out.
- And lastly, the domestic angle. Turkey is in the grip of a huge cost of living crisis, with inflation near 50%. “At a time when everyone is upset about inflation,” says Peker, “the Syria situation is a godsend because now Erdogan can strut his stuff and be the global leader he always wants to be, and people will love him for it in Turkey.”
What could go wrong? Lots. Much of the upside for Erdogan depends on HTS being able to establish order, bring rivals and competing factions to heel, and above all, shape a society that most Syrians will want to live in – or go back to.
But if minority groups feel threatened by HTS rule, there could be a fresh exodus of refugees. Even worse, if HTS’s attempt to hold power collapses altogether, the country could plunge back into chaos and open civil war altogether.
Syrian refugees in Ankara, Turkey, celebrate the fall of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on Dec. 8, 2024.
With Assad out, will migrants move as well?
In Turkey, which hosts approximately 3.2 million Syrian refugees, celebrations erupted following Assad’s ouster, with many people talking aboutreturning home. Syrian refugees in Britain and Germany also held jubilant public celebrations, expressingexcitement about going back.
Regime change in Damascus could also pave the way for the repatriation of Syrian refugees from some parts of Europe. The Netherlands was already considering policiesto send asylum-seekers back, while other EU countrieswere discussing voluntary repatriation before Assad’s fall. Countries could close the door to new arrivals on the basis that Syrian migrants no longer face persecution at home. Closer to home,Jordan is also discussing the possible return of Syrian refugees.
But the feasibility of large-scale repatriation hinges on Syria’s economic stability, the shape of its future government, and reconstruction efforts. A Jihadist regime might not be appealing to refugees seeking to return. And on X, the UNHCR posted “Any refugee return must be voluntary, dignified and safe. UNHCR has been working with all stakeholders to address what refugees identify as obstacles to their return to end their displacement.”
Could the return of refugees dampen support for populist anti-immigration parties in the West? Without a crisis on their doorsteps, politicians like Giorgia Meloni and Geert Wilders would have one less drum to beat – at least when it comes to refugees from Syria.
Ian Bremmer on Assad's fall
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take:
A Quick Take over the weekend. Yet again, because there is entirely too much blowing up around the world. Here, I want to focus on Syria where just a few hours ago Bashar Assad, the dictator, forced out, overthrown by a large number of militarily strong opposition forces led by the radical Islamist group HTS.
A lot to talk about here. This whole thing lasted less than two weeks, and initially the Russians and the Iranians provided military support for Assad, but his complete inability of his army to fight and offer resistance, and the distraction that the Russians have, they're stretched-thin from their fighting in Ukraine, from the Iranians providing support to resistance forces that are doing very badly against Israel, particularly Hezbollah and Lebanon, meant there wasn't all that much capacity, or even that much political will, to provide support. And so, Assad has been overthrown.
By itself that's good news, in the sense that this has been an incredibly repressive regime fighting initially a war against their own people. The pro-democracy movement that came out of the Arab Spring and has led to over 500,000 Syrians dead over the last decade, over 200,000 of them civilians, and some 6 million refugees, both fleeing into neighboring Arab states but also into Europe, into Turkey, and of course in Germany, which is part of the reason that Merkel ended up leaving her terms in ignominy. That is the initial background.
And there has been a lot of support for various opposition groups in Syria, from Turkey, most notably from the UAE, from Saudi Arabia, and from the United States, while the Assad government was being supported principally by the Russians in terms of air support, some intelligence, some cyber capabilities, and from the Iranians on the ground, particularly the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. And that was largely enough through the majority of this war. The rebel groups by 2018 had retreated into the northwest, this Idlib region. And by that point, the rebels that were left were mostly led by ISIS, and that meant a common enemy on the part of the United States.
And Turkey had turned from Assad to the proximate Syrian part of the war on terror. And if that had failed, it had the potential to turn Syria and neighboring Iraq into a terrorist state. ISIS lost that battle. Assad consolidated most of Syria under his regime. And then about four years ago, Turkey and Russia brokered a ceasefire in Idlib, which was at that point under opposition control.
That brings us to today, and to HTS, which stands for Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham. It's a former Al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria that has since formally cut their ties with the terrorists, but they're still called a terrorist organization, labeled one by the United States and its allies in NATO. And they are the de facto leader of the armed opposition and led the now ouster of Assad. Now, they've become kind of Hezbollah-like in the sense that they're providing a lot of Syrian citizens with government services. They've managed to coordinate rebels and eliminate infighting underneath that, and they've also promised to protect Syrian Christians and Muslim Alawites and have gotten the tacit support of the Turkish Erdoğan government, who basically gave them at least a blinking yellow if not a green light to go ahead and launch this war against Assad two weeks ago.
Now, having said all of that, the likelihood that they're going to run as a secular government, Syria, seems unlikely to me. This is, we're going from Assad to what is probably going to be a radical Islamist government that'll be repressive and that'll be deeply challenging. And so I don't think that is in any way, at least at this point, something that we can call a transition that's good news or that we shouldn't feel anxiety about. But what is clear is that the Iranians and Russians have lost. So the axis of resistance is not looking like much of an axis and it's not putting up very much resistance. The Russians, Putin has said nothing about this. He's not made a public statement, and that's not surprising. Frequently when he is surprised and he faces sudden embarrassing losses, he doesn't say anything about it to his people. And if you look at Russian state media, they've been talking about France, and South Korea, and Trump, and all those things, but almost no coverage of Syria, where the Russians have lost an ally and they've lost a military base that's important to them in Tartus and they've not been able to put up much of a fight.
Now, the good news there is that if you're Putin, you should be more cognizant of the fact that there are major costs of continuing to fight an incredibly bloody war in Ukraine where you're making some gains, territorially, but you're losing huge numbers of Russian citizens. And so if Trump is coming in and says he wants to cut a deal, Putin should be more incented to do that. There's also good news on the Iranian front in the sense that Syria falling means that they no longer have a corridor to provide military support for Hezbollah. And that means that the two-month ceasefire, which has been announced by the Israelis and by the Lebanese government, is more likely to hold.
Now, if you put those two things together, kind of interesting. Looks more likely that Trump gets inaugurated, and he is indeed able to announce that the temporary ceasefire becomes a permanent end of the war between Israel and Hezbollah, and that he's able to negotiate a ceasefire between the Russians and Ukrainians that does not give up the store to Putin. The former is an easier bet than the latter, but both of them certainly look more likely on the back of Assad being ousted.
The bad news? More challenges, more humanitarian degradation for the Syrian people on the ground. Could easily see another million refugees on the back of the fighting that we've had, depending on what happens with governance going forward. There are very few hospitals that are presently functioning. There is very limited humanitarian aid on the ground, that's necessary in very short order. And it's hard to say that fighting isn't going to break out amongst the various factions that have held together in fighting a common enemy, if that's going to lead to coherent governance going forward, it depends so much on what happens when HTS becomes not the leader of a rebel group but suddenly is responsible for governance on the ground in Syria. And your guess is as good as anyone as to what is going to happen there.
So, that is the best I can tell where we are right now. It's a fascinating issue and a temporary expansion of the war in the Middle East, but hopefully one that we can see bringing a little bit of stability to some other conflicts that are happening in the region and more broadly. That's it for me, and I'll talk to you all real soon.
- Podcast: Syria, The Rise and Fallout of the House of Assad with Sam Dagher ›
- Syrian rebels reignite war, make advances in Aleppo ›
- Once frozen out, Bashar Assad is back in ›
- Do strikes on Syria signal a bolder Netanyahu? ›
- The Graphic Truth: How a decade of war has crushed Syria ›
- Tragedy upon tragedy in war-torn Syria ›
Rebel forces seized Mengh Airbase and the city of Tel Rifaat in the Aleppo countryside on December 1, 2024, following clashes with the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and Syrian regime forces.
Syrian rebels clash with Kurds as Assad’s backers spring into action
In case anyone has forgotten just how complicated Syria’s civil war always was, the recent drama around Aleppo escalated on Monday as the Syrian National Army, a group backed by Turkey, attacked US-backed Kurdish groups near the city.
Meanwhile, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, the formerly al-Qaida-linked Islamist group at the forefront of the recent rebel offensive in Aleppo, has reportedly ordered Kurdish militias to leave the area altogether and go eastward to Rojava, a de facto autonomous Kurdish area in northeastern Syria.
Aren’t the Kurds against the Assad regime, too? Yes, but that’s not the beef. HTS works with the Turkish proxies and relies on Ankara for political support in high-level negotiations to end the war. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is angling for an advantageous position on the war’s aftermath and said his “greatest wish” was “for the instability that has been going on for 13 years to end.”
For Turkey, that means both weakening Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and cutting the Kurds down to size, as it has long-standing problems with Kurdish separatists at home.
Don’t forget, Turkey is also a US ally — a NATO member, in fact — so urging its proxies to fight US proxies in a theatre where Russian forces also actively operate causes headaches in Washington. Russian warplanes bombed rebel-held areas of Aleppo on Monday, not far from where Turkish F-16s shot down a Russian Su-24 that strayed over the border in 2015. Quite an explosive position for a lame-duck US president.
Speaking of proxies… Iran-backed militias crossed into Syria from Iraq to help shore up Assad’s counterattack as well. Assad will be glad for that help as the Lebanon-based Iranian proxy group Hezbollah, once a major pillar of support for Assad’s regime, said Monday it would not deploy fighters to Syria right now. The group is still regrouping after getting mauled by Israel and is warily watching as last week’s ceasefire in that conflict appears to be breaking down already.
Where is the US in all this? Washington had reportedly held talks before the Aleppo offensive with the UAE about lifting sanctions on Syria in exchange for Assad distancing himself from Iran and Russia. That seems unlikely now that Assad’s back is against the wall and he needs all the help he can get. Beyond milquetoast calls for de-escalation, Washington has thus far kept its cards close to its vest.
Rebel factions successfully seized control of the city of Aleppo, Syria, on November 30, 2024, after intense clashes and fierce battles with Assad regime forces.
Syrian rebels reignite war, make advances in Aleppo
Anti-government forces opposed to Syrian President Bashar Assad launched a shock attack on the largest city, Aleppo, on Saturday. Amid the ongoing fighting, rebels have seized the city’s airport and military academy and struck the entrance of Aleppo University Hospital,killing 12 civilians and injuring 23 others. Led by the Salafi jihadi group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham — a terrorist organization with past ties to al-Qaida, now often but not always backed by Turkey – insurgents claim to control territory across Hama, Idlib, and Aleppo provinces. They are demanding that US-aligned Kurdish forces retreat from neighborhoods they hold in Aleppo.
Assad has ordered his forces to counterattack and met with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi in Damascus on Sunday. Russia also expressed support for its ally and claimed its forces in Syria had engaged with the rebels.
Why now? Israel’s destruction of Hezbollah in Lebanon seems to have helped tip the balance, according to Eurasia Group expert Emre Peker.
“HTS has been observing the shifting regional dynamics and agitating to take advantage of Assad’s relative weakness for months. With Russia preoccupied with Ukraine and Iran and its proxies effectively targeted by Israel, HTS felt the time was ripe to strike,” he said.
Peker elaborated that Ankara will back the rebels as long as their offensive also serves Turkish interests, whileRussia has lent what military support it can to Assad. “Erdogan will not want to oust Assad, rather to weaken him to both normalize Turkey-Syria relations and pave the way for a settlement to the 13-year-old Syrian civil war,” he said.
What about the US? The conflict creates a dilemma for Washington which under President Barack Obama supported rebel groups fighting Assad’s brutal dictatorship, but HTS’s fundamentalist roots are cause for concern. Asli Aydintasbas, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, noted the quandary: “Should [the US] be cheering the opposition taking over Syria’s second-largest city Aleppo, or should they actually worry about the city falling under Islamist rule?”
So far,the Biden administration has distanced itself from the offensive, calling for de-escalation and a political solution – but we’re watching how long Washington can stay on the sidelines if the conflict escalates.
Syrian rebel forces take Aleppo
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take:
Hi everybody. Ian Bremmer here and a Quick Take, post-run, on a Sunday because the news does not wait for us to get back from our extended Thanksgiving weekend.
I want to talk about a new front in the Middle East war that has just opened up in Syria, a country that is far from stable and not really a country, really a patchwork of different controls in the best of times. But now we have active war fighting, a new front opening up with lots of territory being taken from Bashar al-Assad, his dictatorial regime from Syria Rebels, particularly a group called HTS, which is the most powerful of the military opposition groups in the country. They have swept, in a matter of hours, through the country, taking over Aleppo, the major city, and moving towards Hama. There is lots of humanitarian concern here. Not a surprise. You don't have hospitals functioning in Aleppo. You've got all sorts, thousands and thousands of people fleeing and nowhere obvious to go.
This should not be an enormous surprise in the sense that HTS has been agitating the Turkish government who support them to march on Aleppo for months. And in the same way that the Iranians had been green-lighting support for all of their proxies across the region to engage in strikes against the United States, against Israel, against shipping, all of that, Turkey did not want to do that. They didn't want to back and offensive. They were pretty split on it. The hawks inside Erdogan's government in Turkey, like the idea in order to expand opposition, put more pressure on a side, facilitate the return of more Syrian refugees from Turkey back into Syria, and also strengthen Erdogan's hand in bringing Assad back to the negotiating table for a normalization of ties under Turkey's terms. But a lot of people inside Turkey were saying that Russia would carpet bomb Turkish-backed forces and Turkish forces on the ground in Syria, of which there are thousands, which would humiliate Erdogan and cause broader tension with Russia that could well have major economic implications. We've seen that before, and this is a time when Turkey doesn't really want to afford that. They're trying to rebuild their economy from what has been a lot of damage.
It looks like now Ankara has given the go ahead to these militants in Syria, in part because the geopolitics of the region is changing. The Russians, of course, are themselves very distracted, not just with an ongoing war in Ukraine, which has been happening for three years now, but specifically because they've got two months to take as much land as possible, put the Ukrainians in the worst possible position before Trump is president and says he wants to end that war. So in other words, everything they have, they're really now putting into that fight against Ukraine.
Meanwhile, the Iranian-supported proxies across the region are getting utterly hammered, as we've seen from the United States, and more importantly from Israel and the successful war against Hezbollah in Lebanon. So in that regard, the changing of the geopolitics has really given the upper hands of the hawks in Turkey to tell HTS, "Go for it. This is an opportunity, unique time to improve your position." Still, they're not fully backing the offensive. They're not backing it directly militarily, nor are they fully backing it diplomatically as they did, for example, with the Free Syrian Army, the FSA, with number of cross border operations in Northern Syria in the past decade.
Now, Russia has been humiliated on the ground. These Syrian troops in Aleppo folded and ran away immediately. The Russians have sacked senior soldiers in charge of operations on the ground, and it looks like they are preparing to send troops into Syria directly in the next 24 to 48 hours to shore up Assad. There's a lot of land that HTS would have to take before they were a direct threat to regime. Hard to imagine they're going to be able to overthrow him. Also, the Iranians are providing support. We already see that Islamic Revolutionary Guard Core, aligned militias across the region, are saying they will enter Syria to engage in the fight against HTS in favor of the Assad regime. I expect you'll see significant numbers of actual IRGC advisors showing up as well.
So it doesn't look like this is the end of Assad, and frankly, it's hard to imagine that Turkey itself even wants to have Assad out because filling the void completely left by a weakened Iran would be challenging for Turkey and would also lead to more conflict with the Russians, rather, who importantly have a military base, a port in Tartus that is very important for them having influence in the Mediterranean. Rather, Turkey is trying to use this space to try to shape regional events to their benefits. It's very positive what's happened so far in the last 48 hours for Turkey. It weakens Assad, makes him more open to a bad deal with Turkey than he has been before, and further, HTS is also moving farther away from Turkey's border, which is a good thing because Ankara doesn't have full control over them. Again, like Iran with its proxies, a lot of weapons, a lot of diplomatic support, but that's very different from operational control on the ground. And I expect that Erdogan sees this as an opportunity for Trump where he says, "We'll, cut a deal with you. You, Trump, get to exit Syria." Still with American troops on the ground there, yet one more place you can say that the Americans don't need to be, don't need to fight and have an America First policy and one more war that you get to formally not be a part of. And we, Turkey will make sure that there's no ISIS-affiliated organizations on the ground, that the region is more stable, that Iranian influences curtailed, and the Shia crescent is severed."
So if it works, one stone, lots of birds for Erdogan. The danger of course is that it doesn't work and that the war expands and that we end up with Russia versus Turkey in a proxy war that can become direct between the two. Wouldn't be the first time that we've seen that kind of confrontation. That'd be a lot more problematic. But at this point, the one thing I can say is that this is much more about the proxies fighting in a vacuum with a changing geopolitical balance than it is about the likelihood that Assad is about to be out. He wasn't out when Obama said, "Assad must go." He's not likely to be out right now.
Okay, that's it for me. We'll keep following this and I'll talk to you all real soon.
Islamic preacher Fethullah Gulen is pictured at his residence in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania in this December 28, 2004 file photo.
Turkish president’s nemesis dies in the US
An exiled Turkish cleric who founded a global Islamic movement and was an adversary rival of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan died Sunday in the United States.
Fethullah Gülen rose from small-town preacher to global leader of a movement built around a moderate, civically engaged vision of Islam, which built schools and other social institutions across Turkey and more than a hundred other countries.
“Gülenists” had a strong, if secretive, presence in the Turkish bureaucracy. But Gülen himself had lived in the US since 1999, when he fled repression by the ultra-secular Turkish government of the time.
The politics: Gülen was once close with Erdogan, whose Justice and Development party in 2002 became the first Islamist party to win power in Turkey. But by the mid-2010s, the two men had begun to clash.
The break was complete in 2016, when Erdogan accused Gülen of orchestrating a failed coup against him. Turkey arrested thousands of alleged Gülenist “terrorists” in government and forced dozens of countries to extradite Gülen’s followers.
That significantly weakened Gülenism. Whether Gülen’s death will hasten further decline remains to be seen. In the short term, his passing removes a sore spot in US-Turkey relations: Washington had repeatedly denied Ankara’s requests to extradite him.