![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/08\/Erdogan-and-Assad.jpg\" "\\"Erdogan")
IN A small caf\u00e9 outside Istanbul\u2019s Fatih mosque, a slight bearded man lifts his shirt to reveal two deep bullet wounds. \u201cAssad\u2019s soldiers did this to me,\u201d says Motee Albatee, who served as an imam at a Sunni mosque in the besieged Syrian town of Deraa until he fled the country several weeks ago. Mr Albatee is among a growing number of Syrian dissidents who have found sanctuary in Turkey, many of them in refugee camps near the border. Some are angry over the reluctance of Turkey\u2019s government to get tougher with Bashar Assad, Syria\u2019s president. \u201cTurkey must set up a buffer zone [inside Syria]\u201d <\/strong>to protect more refugees from the fighting, insists Yayha Bedir, a <\/span>member of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood<\/strong><\/em>. Like many seated around the table, he believes only drastic action will force the Syrian army to defect en masse<\/strong><\/em>, bringing down Mr Assad\u2019s brutal regime.<\/span><\/p>\n Such talk is particularly loud online, where Syrian tweeters have voiced disdain for Turkey\u2019s attempts to get Mr Assad to end the bloodshed. Their fury grew earlier this month when Turkey\u2019s foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, flew to Damascus to deliver what Turkish officials tautologically called a final ultimatum. \u201cWe are at the end of our tether,\u201d roared Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey\u2019s prime minister.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n Mr Assad\u2019s response was to intensify his assaults against unarmed civilians, notably in the Mediterranean port of Latakia (see <\/span>article<\/span>). This prompted Mr Davutoglu to issue yet another warning: Turkey would not, he said, \u201cremain indifferent\u201d to continuing massacres. Yet he also ruled out intervening to create a buffer zone. So what leverage does Turkey actually have over its erstwhile Ottoman dominion?<\/span><\/p>\n None whatsoever, say critics of Mr Davutoglu\u2019s much-vaunted \u201czero problems with the neighbours\u201d policy. That is unfair. But as Soli Ozel, a political scientist, puts it, the Syrian crisis has revealed that \u201cTurkey isn\u2019t as influential as it thought.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n The last time Turkey got tough with its southern neighbour was in 1998, when it threatened to invade unless Syria booted out Abdullah Ocalan, leader of Turkey\u2019s outlawed rebel Kurdistan Workers\u2019 Party (PKK). The Syrians caved in, and relations between the two countries have flourished since. Trade has more than tripled in the eight years of Mr Erdogan\u2019s Justice and Development (AK) government, visas have been abolished and ministerial meetings have been held amid much fanfare. (Mr Davutoglu says he has made over 60 visits to Syria.) Crucially, Syria has ended its patronage of the PKK.<\/span><\/p>\n Turkey\u2019s Western allies are not about to mount an invasion of Syria. But they are turning the diplomatic screws, and are eager for AK to sever political and trade links with Mr Assad. But a bigger prize would be to drive a wedge between Turkey and Iran. <\/em><\/strong>Turkey\u2019s mollycoddling of the mullahs has angered America, most recently when Mr Erdogan\u2019s government voted against imposing further sanctions on Iran at the United Nations last year. Turkey has since sought to make amends. It has agreed to NATO plans for a nuclear-defence missile shield that is clearly aimed at Iran. And after some dithering, it is co-operating with the alliance\u2019s military operations in Libya.<\/p>\n Yet Turkey is understandably wary of openly confronting Iran, one of its main sources of natural gas and the primary transit route for Turkish exports to Central Asia. Iran has also helped Turkey in its battle against the PKK\u2014<\/strong>though it continues to flirt with hardliners who oppose any deal with the Turkish government. Lately the PKK has been stepping up the fight\u2014some 30 Turkish soldiers have been killed in the past month. On August 17th, in a bid to quell mounting public anger, Mr Erdogan authorised the bombing of hundreds of PKK targets inside Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq. But such actions have failed in the past and the last thing Turkey needs is a hostile Iran.<\/strong><\/p>\n Besides, many of AK\u2019s pious constituents see the unrest in Syria as yet another America-backed Zionist plot to pit Turkey against Iran. The ultimate goal, their thinking goes, is to cut Turkey down to size. Disappointingly<\/em>, the same line is parroted by the main opposition Republican People\u2019s Party, for all its claims of change under its new leader, Kemal Kilicdaroglu.<\/strong><\/p>\n So what are Turkey\u2019s options? It can withdraw its ambassador from Damascus, continue to intercept the flow of weapons to Syria and impose economic sanctions. Other than that, as Mr Ozel suggests, it should desist from promising any more than it can deliver.<\/p>\n www.economist.com,\u00a0Aug 20th 2011<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Turkey\u2019s tough talk on Syria is unlikely to be\u00a0matched by action Aug 20th 2011 IN A small caf\u00e9 outside Istanbul\u2019s Fatih mosque, a slight bearded man lifts his shirt to reveal two deep bullet wounds. \u201cAssad\u2019s soldiers did this to me,\u201d says Motee Albatee, who served as an imam at a Sunni mosque in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":38642,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,56,89],"tags":[1089],"class_list":["post-38641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-iran_","category-syria","category-turkey","tag-pjak"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38641","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38641"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38641\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/08\/Map.gif\" "\\"Map\\"")
Rapprochement with Syria has also allowed Turkey to play a bigger regional role. The government came close to brokering a peace deal between Syria and Israel before the plan was scuppered by Israel\u2019s attack on Gaza. Some Turks hoped that engagement with Syria would eventually yank Mr Assad out of the orbit of Iran, his biggest patron, and set him on a path towards reform. (His alleged involvement in the 2005 car-bomb assassination of Rafik Hariri, the Lebanese president, was quietly ignored.) All the more reason for Turkey\u2019s feelings of betrayal.<\/p>\n