The Western Condition - St Antony's College - University of Oxford

The Western Condition: Turkey, the US and the EU in the New Middle East
tens of thousands of Syrian members of the Brotherhood were killed by the government of Hafez
al-Assad, Bashar’s father. Thus their common realignment along a Sunni axis is clearly grounded in
the kind of socio-religious identity which drives the new leadership of both countries.
And geostrategic calculations overlay sectarian tensions in complex patterns. For Turkey, for
example, the Syrian conflict is intimately tied to the AKP’s leadership ambitions in the region: it
was in no small part the premature assumption that the Assad regime would meet the same
speedy fate as the North African dictators, and be replaced by a Sunni Islamist-dominated
government that would look to Turkey as a close ally and model, that led the AKP leaders to
abandon their erstwhile friend Bashar al-Assad around mid-2011. The same goes for the decision
to take on a proactive role in supporting the political and armed factions of the Syrian
opposition, namely the Syrian National Council (SNC) and the Free Syrian Army (FSA). But as
the Syrian uprising morphed into protracted civil war, Turkey has found it difficult to avoid
being dragged into the crisis, facing a bulging refugee influx, growing Salafist and jihadist
influence within the Syrian opposition, 10 and a delicate military stand-off with the Syrian army
along the 800 km-long border between the two countries. In addition to these, and arguably
most ominously, violent attacks since 2011 against government and civilian targets inside Turkey
by the separatist Kurdistan Workers Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan, PKK) were energised by
the prospect of political autonomy in Syria and reportedly supported by the Syrian and Iranian
regimes. There is little doubt that this has exacerbated existing societal tensions within Turkey and
put its internal stability in jeopardy.
The Arab uprisings have also presented the Sunni Gulf Arab monarchies, Saudi Arabia in
particular, with a geopolitical calculus between hegemony and survival. The urban-based mass
demonstrations of 2011 in Yemen and Bahrain, both home to Saudi-backed Sunni governments
as well as substantial Shia populations, and the unrest among Saudi Arabia’s own Shia minority
in the oil-rich Eastern province have threatened both the Saudi regime’s internal security and its
peninsular hegemony vis-à-vis Iran. 11 But by framing these uprisings as driven purely by religious
communities that practice a heterodox strand of Islam, combining elements of Sufi mysticism, Shi’a beliefs and
Anatolian folk traditions. There is a relatively small minority of Alawites in Turkey, estimates varying between
750,000 people to 1 million, mostly based in the Arabic speaking province of Hatay on the border with Syria, as well
as in the Cilician plains, i.e. in the provinces of Adana and Mersin. Turkey’s Alevi minority is much larger (estimated
between 10 – 15 million) and spread across the country. Until recently, there has been only little contact between the
two communities, even though this seems to be changing given the prominence of Alawites in the Syrian conflict.
10 The claim, made from the outset of the Syrian uprising by the Assad regime, that it was fighting a mainly jihadist
opposition, has increasingly become a concern for the Turkish and the US governments, with the revelation that
most of the arm shipments to the Syrian opposition, particularly coming from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, were going
into the hands of Salafi groups or jihadists, which could turn against the US and its ‘moderate’ allies in the aftermath
of the Syrian conflict. David Sanger, ‘Rebel Arms Flow Is Said To Benefit Jihadists in Syria’, New York Times, 14
October 2012.
11 The Shia unrest in Saudi Arabia has received little media coverage within the Sunni bloc or in the West, while it
has been extensively covered in Iran and Russia. Although largely suppressed by the Saudi government, periodic
episodes of violence continue to flare up in the region. See Amena Bakr, ‘Saudi Arabia boosts security in Eastern
region fearing riots’, Reuters, 12 July 2012.
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