QAMISHLI, Syria (North Press) – Not a week after he was elected president for a second time, Recep Tayyip Erdogan has announced a major cabinet re-shuffle. Many top jobs have been handed to veterans of Turkey’s presence in Syria, as well as its war against Kurdish forces there, sparking speculations about the country’s increased importance to the president.
Erdogan’s Syria policy
Syria has been central to Erdogan’s two decades as Turkey’s leader. In the early days, when he took office as Prime Minister, the two countries were still getting acquainted with one another. Its new relationship was bound, above all, by a joint agreement to fight the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which Syria’s leadership had hosted until the late 1990s.
As revolution and then civil war sparked in Syria in the 2011s, Erdogan reinvented himself as the protector of the country’s Sunni Arab opposition to Bashar al-Assad. The rise of Kurdish groups in Syria’s north led to a breakdown of his government’s own peace talks with the PKK and a yet more intense fixation with Turkey’s southern neighbor. Between 2016 and 2020, Turkey invaded Syria thrice, killing at least 1,200 civilians and displacing hundreds of thousands, and repeatedly came to the aid of Islamist groups in Idlib.
Now, in the early 2020s, Syria’s frontlines are frozen but Damascus’ relation with the outside is thawing. Meanwhile, Turkey’s economy is in a downwards spiral, even as the government spends an estimated yearly $2 billion on its ongoing occupation of northern Syria, with little to show for it. Furthermore, Turkey’s hosting of roughly 3.8 million Syrians has become deeply unpopular with the electorate; Erdogan has promised to return them. If combined with a renewed invasion of northern Syria, displacing millions of Kurds living in the region and making way for its repopulation by Arab refugees, he could kill two birds with one stone.
Defense Minister Yasar Guler
Syria, then, remains as important as ever to Erdogan’s presidency. His new cabinet, announced yesterday, June 3, seems to reflect this reality. Among the many changes is the replacement of Hulusi Akar, Defense Minister since 2018, with Chief of General Staff Yasar Guler. Akar had been the first military officer to take up that post under a civilian government in Turkey. As Chief of General Staff, the job he held between 2015 and 2018, he directly oversaw Turkey’s 2016 invasion of Azaz, al-Bab and Jarablus (codenamed ‘Euphrates Shield’), as well as Kurdish-majority Afrin in 2018. As Defense Minister, he remained deeply involved in Syria.
His post will be given to Yasar Guler, Akar’s Land Forces Commander when he was Chief of General Staff and his successor in that post. Like his predecessor, Guler has been deeply implicated in the 2018 invasion of Afrin, as well as the 2019 invasion of Sere Kaniye (Ras al-Ain) and Tel Abyad (dubbed ‘Spring Shield’), both of whom were being held by the Kurdish-led Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES). Guler also oversaw Turkey’s war against the PKK in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. He is furthermore known for his crucial role in giving the go-ahead for a 2011 bombing targeting Kurdish smugglers near Roboski, in Turkey’s Sirnak province, which killed 34 civilians.
Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan
An additional critical post is that of Foreign Minister, which will be handed to former spy chief Hakan Fidan. Fidan was the subject of an inquiry for peace talks he held as intelligence chief with the PKK in 2012. He is also of Kurdish descent. But Kurds, especially those in Syria, will hardly be better off. The Turkish intelligence services (MIT) are essential to Turkey’s control over Kurdish regions in Syria. As Elizabeth Tsurkov, a researchers, writes, “All decisions, big and small, in the [Syrian] ‘National Army’ are made by the operations room run by Turkish intelligence.” Turkish intelligence has been deeply entrenched in Afrin, where some of its spies have been present during raids and even the torture of civilians. Fidan is unlikely to give up the wide-reaching security apparatus his agency built in Syria over the past half-decade.
On the contrary, he is likely to be even more hawkish on Syria than his predecessor. Talks with Damascus, which have been ongoing over the past few months, have stalled over al-Assad’s demands that Turkey withdraw its troops before the two heads of state sit down to talk. Fidan is less likely to give in, but more likely to get negotiations ahead.
Spy Chief Ibrahim Kalin
Another Syria hawk promoted this week is Ibrahim Kalin, a former presidential spokesperson, who will take up Fidan’s old post. In previous years, Kalin dealt with the Syrian government together with his predecessor. He has also repeatedly threatened Kurdish-held areas of northern Syria with another attack. In November 2022, Kalin said that a Turks land invasion “can begin tomorrow, next week, even later, at any time.”
Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya
Finally, Ali Yerlikaya will replace Suleyman Soylu as Interior Minister. Soylu was deeply involved in the civilian occupation of Afrin and other Syrian areas under Turkey’s tutelage. The outgoing minister oversaw ‘Turkification’ initiatives in these areas, large-scale settlement construction, as well as the entrenchment of Turkish utilities companies in occupied regions. Turkish civilian control over occupied areas also rested with the interior ministry through provincial Turkish governors, which are unelected presidential appointees. Yerlikaya was Gaziantep’s governor between 2015 and 2018, and thus oversaw these developments in the cities of al-Bab and Jarablus, home to around 380,000 Syrians.
Besides Gaziantep, Yerlikaya was governor of two more provinces with considerable Kurdish populations, Sirnak and Agri. Before his current post he was the governor of Istanbul province, where he banned a Kurdish-language play for containing “PKK propaganda.”
What does the future hold?
The new cabinet does not only feature more Syria experts, but is also more professional than the outgoing one, according to observers. Erdogan’s Syria policy is conflicting and far from popular even among Turkey’s own armed forces. Many generals resent the eye-watering costs of the occupation, the propping up of jihadist groups, and the lack of an exit plan.
The incoming cabinet can hardly be expected to solve these monumental contradictions, nor will it be any less brutal in its approach to Syria, particularly against the country’s Kurds. However, it seems Erdogan’s new Syria hawks are working on something the country has not had in a long time: a concrete plan for Syria.