‘The Prophet said that we should follow jihad in Syria because that is where the angels will bestow their wings on Islam,’ Abu Mahjin said. ‘Our aim is to implement Sharia law in Syria and uphold the principles of the Islamic State. If that was not the aim then we wouldn’t have come from far afield to fight here; we would have left the Syrians to fight by themselves. The Syrian people don’t decide on this – it is the Prophet Muhammad who decided it.’
Isis had spread its tentacles across northern Syria well before it officially announced its existence. It had spies in every rebel-held town, reporting back on who was doing what. It had fighters from various Islamist rebel militias ready to swear their allegiance as soon as it was formally founded. In Manbij, the small town north of Aleppo where I had met Abu Mahjin, a local FSA leader told me how he was trying to mediate between Isis, which had recently set up a large headquarters there, and the town’s native rebel groups. His efforts were proving futile. That same morning, a crowd had pulled the local imam from the pulpit as he recited Friday prayers in Manbij’s main mosque, demanding that he be replaced with one of Isis’s hardline foreign preachers. The extremists had already arrested several of the town’s most corrupt FSA leaders, a popular move with anyone who had suffered their campaigns of extortion. On the morning I interviewed Abu Mahjin, I sat in a parked car and watched as a teenage motorbike gang circled Manbij’s town square, the pillion passengers standing and holding aloft black flags of Isis.
Crucially, Isis had a captive and suffering population that had grown cynical at the secular West, which preached one thing at meetings in New York and Geneva but did quite another in practice. Since the start of the uprising, almost every Western country and international institution had pleaded with Assad to stop slaughtering his own people. But the UN’s resolutions were repeatedly blocked by Russia, and what difference would they have made if they had been passed? The UN could send weapons inspectors and ceasefire monitors, but it couldn’t send in an army to fight back. The Syrian president had powerful friends in Moscow and Tehran, and that was what made his country different to Egypt, Libya and Tunisia. He could be sanctioned and he could be deplored, but for two years he carried on smashing dissent with missiles and bombs, growing ever more certain that no one would stop him. The US, UK and France joined with Turkey and Qatar to clandestinely train and equip selected rebels in southern Turkey and Jordan, but baulked at offering open and fully fledged support and airstrikes as they had in Libya. Every rebel leader I interviewed in Syria ordered that I publish his demands for heavy weaponry; one went so far as to take me to his makeshift ammunitions factory in the basement car park of an apartment block in rural Aleppo, combustible piles of explosives presided over by chain-smoking workers, which he then used as a backdrop for his tirade against Western inaction. Among Syria’s battered civilians I watched a growing tiredness, a swelling cynicism about the Western rhetoric on human rights that they had once believed was sincere. Almost unfailingly, everyone I interviewed was polite and kind – and horribly, searingly honest when they told me they were happy to welcome the fundamentalists, because what other choice did they have now it was clear that the West would not live up to its promises? I felt shame as I tried to explain the nuances of democratic party politics in Britain, the scar that the Iraq war had left on our collective psyche and the reasons why our politicians would not go against their people even when it was the right thing to do. My interviewees could trump all of my explanations with a single sentence: But we are dying here. And I had no comeback to that. Because what does nuance and party politics and parliamentary process and even democracy in a faraway land matter when bombs are falling on your head and your own president is trying to kill your children?
May 2013
Erdoğan goes to Washington
The wider world had not yet heard of Isis when Erdoğan went to Washington in May 2013 for talks with President Obama. His state visit was trimmed with honours aimed at preserving the relationship that Obama had spent his first tenure in the White House tending to. After assuming office in 2009, Obama had included Turkey on the itinerary of his first overseas trip, making it the first Muslim-majority country he visited as president. In Ankara, he had addressed the parliament. Obama’s overtures to Turkey and its prime minister meant that he was able to act as mediator when Erdoğan weighed into a row between the Muslim world and Denmark over the publication in a Danish newspaper of cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad.
In May 2013, Erdoğan, together with his foreign minister Davutoğlu and Hakan Fidan, head of the Turkish intelligence services, was greeted in Washington with full state honours and the rare gesture of dinner with Obama in the White House. Syria was only one item on a long agenda that also spanned trade, Palestine and Iran’s growing influence across the Middle East. But Erdoğan was hoping he could use the visit to persuade Obama to bump up support for the Syrian rebels so they could finally battle to Damascus and finish off Assad. There was mounting evidence that the Syrian regime was deploying chemical weapons against civilians – in that same month, I had visited Saraqeb, a town in Idlib province, where doctors showed me videos and medical reports of an airstrike that had left victims foaming at the mouth and retching. The double car-bombing in Reyhanlı five days before the visit, which Erdoğan blamed on Assad’s intelligence services, had now brought the war next door crashing across Turkey’s border. In Turkey, newspapers billed the meeting as ‘historic’, and as Erdoğan boarded his jet in Ankara he told reporters that it would ‘determine a new roadmap toward the Syrian crisis’. Analysts predicted that he would try to persuade Obama to lift the US veto on arming the rebels or even help establish a no-fly zone in northern Syria.
But Obama had other concerns. By now Western intelligence agencies were tracking the march of Isis’s black flag across northern Syria and briefings had reached the US president. Obama, lukewarm from the start about offering full backing to the insurgents, was perturbed by news that scores of committed, violent jihadis were travelling almost openly through Turkey and across the leaky border into Syria. Elsewhere, Obama was watching another Arab Spring uprising that the US had supported morph into a bloody blowback. In Libya, less than a year after a NATO intervention had dislodged Gaddafi, the US consul in the city of Benghazi was murdered by Islamist militants. Exactly one month before Erdoğan arrived in Washington, two pressure bombs planted by brothers of Kyrgyz origin and radicalised by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had exploded at the Boston Marathon, killing three. So, by the time the two presidents met, their views on Syria were already diverging – though the reporters gathered in the White House Rose Garden may not have realised it as they listened to the warm joint press conference that followed their opening meeting.
But that evening, over dinner in the White House, the two men and their entourages engaged in diplomatic battle. Erdoğan explained that the Syrian war, now dragging on into its second year, was beginning to cause huge problems for Turkey, thanks not only to the refugees it was hosting but also to the security problems it was throwing up. Erdoğan expected that the US, as a NATO ally and the country that had first corralled Turkey into supporting Assad’s overthrow, would take his side. He was wrong. Obama instead told Erdoğan that he had to cut off the extremists’ route into Syria and stop Turkey’s support for the more hardline armed rebel factions, and broke the news that the US would not be throwing any more support behind the rebels while the fundamentalists were there.
Erdoğan felt he had been betrayed by Obama – and, according to party insiders, began wondering whether there was a plot to overthrow him brewing in Washington. On his return to Turkey, a sudden challenge rising from the streets would, in his mind, prove him correct.
May–June 2013
Gezi uprising
Twelve days after Erdoğan met with Obama, a small group of environmentalists started a sit-in in Istanbul’s Gezi Park. The scrubby patch of grass in the middle of Taksim Square, a huge plaza in the heart of Istanbul, was litter-st
rewn and dangerous after dark, but in the midst of the city’s sprawl it was a small haven where office workers sat to eat their lunch and gay men cruised for lovers. When it was announced that the park was to be concreted over and turned into a shopping centre built in the style of an Ottoman barracks, it lit the touch paper on a discontent that had long been simmering unspoken among Turkey’s youth. After the police evicted the environmentalists and burned down their tents, others came to show their solidarity. Within days, the dreadlocked hippies among the trees had been joined by tens of thousands of protesters who occupied Taksim, calling for Erdoğan to resign.
Erdoğan, still smarting from Obama’s riposte over Syria, accused the demonstrators of acting on the orders of nefarious foreign powers, and sent the riot police in en masse. Aerial photographs of Taksim on the fiercest days of the protests show the whole huge plaza blanketed in tear gas. The crackdown drew condemnations from Europe and the US, deepening the paranoia that from now on would never leave Erdoğan. Meanwhile, his rhetoric against the Gezi protesters was at odds with other senior members of his party, including Abdullah Gül, the president, who urged a softer response from the state.
Two months later, with Gezi still rumbling, Erdoğan suffered another blow. Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood government – the same that had been anointed by Erdoğan during his visit there in 2011 – was overthrown by a military coup following two years of mismanagement and rising fundamentalism. The Egyptian people, once so happy to be shut of a secular dictator, now came on the streets to cheer the overthrow of the Islamist who had replaced him. Erdoğan had not only lost an ally in the region. He was also watching his own model of government, the Islamic democracy on which the West had poured such flattery only two years earlier, being dismantled and discredited.
A month later again, in August 2013, Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons against his own people, not for the first time but on a scale that was now impossible to ignore. Pictures of rows of dead children shrouded in sheets in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, and of others foaming at the mouth as they gasped for breath, stunned a world that was yet to grow desensitised to Syria’s slaughter. Fourteen hundred were dead from sarin gas, a nerve agent that kills by slow asphyxiation, and everyone expected a game-changing retaliation. US President Barack Obama had said the use of chemical weapons would be his red line. Analysts later argued that it had been an offhand remark, but that didn’t matter to the Syrians, who had been suffering for more than two years and had hung on to those words. The US, UK and France seemed to be moving into position to launch strikes on Damascus, and the Syrians living as refugees in Turkey were overjoyed.
‘I’ll be riding back home on top of a French tank!’ laughed my friend, Aboud, who had defected from Assad’s army and escaped to Turkey a year earlier. Within minutes of meeting him on the first day I arrived in the borderlands in 2013, I realised that his shaved head and imposing stature belied a huge heart and a great sense of humour. The Syrians had forcibly conscripted him and put him in the special forces, believing it to be the best place for him. In Turkey, he was translating for journalists, doing humanitarian work for the growing numbers of refugees and, with me, talking over beers about the day he would return home.
His hopes soon fell apart. After the UK parliament voted against taking action, the US and France backed down, too. The red line had been crossed, yet nothing was done. That was the turning point – the moment when Syria morphed into war without end.
The West changes course in Syria
There was an understanding in Ankara that defeating Isis must now be the first priority for the West. But there was also a growing chasm between the US and Turkey over the future of Bashar al-Assad. While deposing the Syrian dictator had all but fallen off the agenda in Washington, in Ankara it was still seen as the necessary bedrock for future stability in the region. Meanwhile, the Pentagon was increasingly taking the lead on Syria policy instead of the White House – and the generals cared only about defeating Isis, not about maintaining the relationship between the US and Turkey.
‘I had the sense that the Turks were looking for American leadership on how to deal with Isis. However, this was not the only thing they were concerned about,’ says a US official involved in negotiations to build an anti-Isis coalition in 2014. ‘Turkey wanted to support the steps to bolster the capabilities of the Iraqi security apparatus to fight against Isis and other enemies. They seemed to be in favour of the steps in Syria to destroy Isis. But [they were also asking] what is the strategy for Assad? What will be the strategy when Isis gets defeated? What comes next? They continued to insist on an answer. Our answer in 2014 was to focus on defeating Isis. The Turks were willing to buy that. But they wanted to know the strategy in regards to Syria. It was never resolved, and it is still at the core of the problem in the relationship. In 2014 there was no one at a senior level in CENTCOM’ – US Central Command, overseeing the military operations against Isis – ‘interested in or willing to work on the US–Turkey relationship. They see Turkey as the problem. They would prefer not to deal with it at all.’
Behind the scenes, there were also growing tensions between the two men who had moulded Turkey’s Syria policy. In October 2014, when Erdoğan was voted in as president, he promoted his foreign secretary, Davutoğlu, to prime minister. Davutoğlu was determined to keep control over the Syria file. Erdoğan had other ideas.
‘When Davutoğlu was made prime minister, and especially as the Isis stuff unfolded, there was, almost immediately, tension between him and Erdoğan,’ says a former Western diplomat. ‘What foreigners could see was that Davutoğlu was becoming less and less involved in foreign affairs by the day. One time he had come back from some factory tours and he seemed delighted to get back into a conversation with [then US Secretary of State] John Kerry [but] it was clear that he was not entirely speaking for the government … It was bound up in this broader phenomenon of Erdoğan dominating the landscape. Erdoğan and the people around him did not want Davutoğlu playing that role any more … [and] Erdoğan was showing very little flexibility or interest in working together in ways to solve these problems. He was not adding to the problems, but he was not very cooperative. Erdoğan was saying what Turkey needed and what the US should do. It comes back to his confidence or arrogance. It was different from the Erdoğan that I had experienced before, who would actually have a conversation about what to do. Before, there would be a genuine give and take.’
As the politicians squabbled and the war metastasised, Syrians began pouring into Turkey – not only because some of the worst fighting was close to the frontier, or because Ankara had kept the border crossings open, but because Turkey was by far the best host. Instead of forcing refugees to live in decrepit camps, as was happening in Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq, Turkey allowed them to rent apartments and live freely. For the poorest, it provided high-quality camps, many with homes made of shipping containers rather than canvas. And, although it didn’t officially recognise Syrians as refugees due to a technicality in the Geneva Convention, after April 2013 it provided them with ‘Temporary Protection’ status, which gave them access to free healthcare, and allowed them to send their children to school and be hired for jobs Turks did not want.
Ankara’s generosity meant that Syrians were soon also arriving from third countries. Many of the 300,000 Syrians who had initially fled to Egypt relocated to Turkey after the 2013 coup as the once-welcoming mood turned against them. Others who had been living and working in the Gulf before the conflict broke out found that their residence permits were being cancelled, so they too went to Turkey. Increasingly, those who had been escaping into Lebanon and Jordan from fighting in the south of Syria moved straight on to Turkey if they could afford it. The numbers soared. In 2013, there were 225,000 Syrians in Turkey; a year later, there were more than six times that number. The number has risen every year since, and there are now between three and four million Syrians living in Turkey. Many of them see Erdoğan as their champion – the only leader
who has stuck by them as the rest of the world has broken its promises or lost interest. But although the West had turned its back on the Syrians, it would not be able to ignore them for long.
6
THE EXODUS
February 2015
Mersin
Abu Laith flung open his arms with a camp flourish and planted a kiss on both my cheeks.
‘You get more beautiful every time I see you!’ he exclaimed. ‘Come on, I’m taking you out.’
The worst guys are often the most charming. This was the fourth time I had met Abu Laith, one of a crop of businessmen cashing in on the people-smuggling industry that was flourishing in the underbelly of Turkey’s holiday resorts in early 2015. Short and blue-eyed, dressed in chinos and a loud summer shirt, he could have passed for a tourist in Mersin, a gaudy city on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast. But as we drove along the seafront to the fish restaurant he kept an eye open for places where he might peddle his business in the black of night.
Erdogan Rising Page 13