Robert Ellis
Once upon a time, Turkey’s then-prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, hosted Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, for a family holiday in Turkey and planned a Middle East Union together with Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan. But the Arab Spring changed all of that. Assad ruled with a savagery that surpassed that of his father, Hafez, until his downfall at the hands of an opposition led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) last weekend.
Later, Assad became “the murderer al-Assad,” and now President Erdogan declared he would soon pray in the Ummayad mosque in Damascus. This, however, has taken longer than he expected. To replace Assad’s Alawite-led regime and substitute it with Sunni rule, Erdogan has employed both subterfuge and an alliance with a motley band of jihadis.
In a gaffe at Harvard University in 2014, then-Vice President Joe Biden, in a Q&A, stated that America’s allies in the region, Turkey, the Saudis, and the Emirates, were the largest problem in Syria.
“They were so determined to take down Assad, and essentially have a proxy Sunni-Shia war, what did they do? They poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad—except that the people who were being supplied, were al-Nusra and al-Qaeda, and the extremist elements of jihadis who were coming from other parts of the world.”
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