turkey on syria

In 2011, Turkey broke with the government of Syria over the government of President Bashar al-Assad’s ruthless crackdown on protests. Over the next year, Turkey became an increasingly important base of support and refuge for the anti-Assad forces.
Tensions on the Syrian-Turkish border increased significantly in June 2012, when Syria downed a Turkish jet that it said had crossed into its airspace.
The 550-mile border has become a critical fault line and potential flash point, used by an increasingly sophisticated network of activists in southern Turkey smuggling crucial supplies into Syria including weapons, communications gear, field hospitals and even salaries for soldiers who defect. At the same, it has offered escape routes to tens of thousands of fugitive Syrian civilians and to increasingly high-ranking military defectors.
Mounting Concerns as Syria’s Conflict Goes On
By the summer of 2012, as Syria’s civil war degenerated into a bloody sectarian showdown between the government’s Alawite-dominated troops and the Sunni Muslim majority, tensions were increasing across the border between Turkey’s Alawite minority and the Sunni Muslim majority.
Many Turkish Alawites, estimated at 15 million to 20 million strong and one of the biggest minorities in this country, seem to be solidly behind Syria’s embattled strongman, President Bashar al-Assad, while Turkey’s government, and many Sunnis, supports the Syrian rebels.
The Alawites fear the sectarian violence spilling across the border. Already, the sweltering, teeming refugee camps along the frontier are fast becoming caldrons of anti-Alawite feelings.
Many Alawites in Turkey, especially in eastern Turkey where Alawites tend to speak Arabic and are closely connected to Alawites in Syria, are suspicious of the bigger geopolitics, and foreign policy analysts say they may have a point. The Turkish government is led by an Islamist-rooted party that is slowly but clearly trying to bring more religion, particularly Sunni Islam, into the public sphere, eschewing decades of purposefully secular rule. Alawites here find it deeply unsettling, and a bit hypocritical, that Turkey has teamed up with Saudi Arabia, one of the most repressive countries in the world, and Qatar, a religious monarchy, both Sunni, to bring democracy to Syria.
The Alawites point to the surge of foreign jihadists streaming into Turkey, en route to fight a holy war on Syria’s battlefields. Many jihadists are fixated on turning Syria, which under the Assad family’s rule has been one of the most secular countries in the Middle East, into a pure Islamist state.

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Alawites in Turkey are worried they could become easy targets. Historically, they have been viewed with suspicion across the Middle East by mainstream Muslims and often scorned as infidels. The Alawite sect was born in the ninth century and braids together religious beliefs, including reincarnation, from different faiths.
Many Alawites do not go to a mosque; they tend to worship at home or in Alawite temples that have been denied the same state support in Turkey that Sunni mosques get. Many Alawite women do not veil their faces or even cover their heads. The towns they dominate in eastern Turkey, where young women sport tank tops and tight jeans, feel totally different than religious Sunni towns just a few hours away, where it can be difficult even to find a woman in public.
Worry Over Syrian Kurds
In July, Turkey sent troops, armored personnel carriers and missile batteries to the border with Syria after chunks of Syria fell into the hands of Kurdish militias.
Turkish concerns are focused on the apparent ascendancy in the region of the Democratic Union Party (P.Y.D.), a Syrian Kurdish movement regarded as an offshoot of Turkey’s banned Kurdish Workers Party (P.K.K.).
The P.Y.D. has been playing a double game in the Syrian conflict. While the country’s marginalized Kurds were generally wary of being sucked into the expanding internal war, the P.Y.D. stood accused of siding with the Assad regime by cracking down on rival Kurdish movements.
In recent weeks, Syrian forces were reported to have withdrawn from areas of Syrian Kurdistan, effectively handing them over to P.Y.D. militias who proceeded to raise the flag of their P.K.K. ally.
Although the P.Y.D. in July formally turned its back on the Assad regime by entering an agreement with rival Kurdish opposition movements, suspicion is still rife within the Kurdish camp.
Charges of Rising Repression
Domestically, at a time when Washington and Europe are praising Turkey as a model of Muslim democracy for the Arab world, Turkish human rights advocates say Mr. Erdogan’s government has been showing an ominous trend toward repressing freedom of the press through a mixture of intimidation, arrests and financial machinations, including the sale in 2008 of a leading newspaper and a television station to a company linked to the prime minister’s son-in-law.
As of early January 2012, there were 97 members of the news media in jail in Turkey, including journalists, publishers and distributors, according to the Turkish Journalists’ Union, a figure that rights groups say exceeds the number detained in China. The Turkish government denies the figure and insists that with the exception of four cases, those arrested have all been charged with activities other than reporting.

The arrests threaten to darken the image of Mr. Erdogan, who is lionized in the Middle East as a powerful regional leader who can stand up to Israel and the West. Widely credited with taming Turkey’s military and forging a religiously conservative government that marries strong economic growth with democracy and religious tolerance, he has proved prickly and thin-skinned on more than one occasion. It is that sensitivity bordering on arrogance, human rights advocates say, that contributes to his animus against the news media.