Turkish Foreign Minister Delivers Warning To Syria
Bashar al-Assad and Ahmet Davutoglu
Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu met on Tuesday with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad in Damascus, in a scheduled visit where a message was to be relayed from Turkey about the increased crackdown of the Syrian authorities on their own people in cities of the country.
The army intensified its operations in the Idlib province, killing two civilians and wounding several more, even as Davutoglu was conveying his message from the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who had affirmed last week that Turkey’s patience toward Syria has run out.
The towns of Binnish and Sirmeen were stormed with ten armored vehicles and soldiers that raided houses and made arbitrary arrests. These towns had joined the rallies after the Ramadan prayer.
Tanks were deployed at Idlib, as the town join demonstrations against the regime in Syria. According to human rights activists at least five were killed during the Tuesday raids of the army in the city of Hama, the epicenter of fight against the regime and the city that had had the largest number of casualties since the unrest began five months ago.
The city of Deir ez-Zor, situation to the east of the country, was also under siege, with at least a neighborhood shelled by the Syrian troops.
Al-Hawiqa district is heavily attacked by the army with heavy weaponry too, Reuters agency reports. 65 people were killed since Sunday, when the troops entered the capital of the province.
All these figures should give the Turkish Prime Minister Bashar al-Assad’s answer he said he was waiting for after Davutoglu’s mission in Damascus.
Turkey and Syria used to be close partners but the situation deteriorated increasingly over the last years, and now the regime in Ankara is looking for an excuse to settle some unfinished business with Syria.
As the regimes in the Arab and in the Muslim world are collapsing one by one, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iran are asserting themselves as the powers that are to be taken into account whenever it comes to Arabs or Muslims.
There is a real competition between the Sunni Turkey and Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran for dominance in this part of the world.
The Iranian authorities visited Egypt on Monday, as means of establishing a relation with the new regime, after the ties were cut by the harboring of former emperor of Iran, Reza Pahlavi by Egypt in 1979.
Though Egypt has a Sunni majority, the strategic importance of a relation between Iran and Egypt concerns Israel, considered by the regime of ayatollah in Tehran the worst enemy of Islam.
Syria and Iran had very close ties before this rebellion began in the Arab world, and a military Iranian base at Mediterranean sea was planned by the two sides.
For those reasons Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Bahrain recalled their ambassadors from Damascus on Monday, while Turkey, Brazil and South Africa sent emissaries to the same regime to convince them to put a stop to genocide.
The same warning was conveyed by Russia, too, whose president Dmitry Medvedev warned Bashar al-Assad of the “sad fate” that awaits him if he doesn’t stop.
Bashar al-Assad seems however determined not to stop, even if Russian diplomat Dmitry Rogozin alluded to the fact that a ground invasion is being planned by the West.
Not even Davutoglu’s message, which, if you take into account what Erdogan said a few days ago, would contain an explicit threat with some sort of military intervention seems to produce no effect on al-Assad.
Maybe he is pressing on with the crackdown in hopes that in the end he can contain the situation before the Americans and the Europeans debark their first troops in Syria.
Syria Unrest
Maybe he knows that the economic situation in the world is so difficult that the nations which are about to be hit by a new devastating crisis wave have better things to do than to intervene in Syria.
Maybe he has reached a point of no return, and does not want to share Mubarak’s fate, or maybe he’s thinking that he cannot be worse than his father, who in his own time crushed a rebellion in Hama.
If he is contemplating that historical event, then he is no doubt mistaken, because his father was protected by the famous Iron Curtain that maintained the power balance in the world for decades. He does not have such a privilege.
As he grows more and more isolated and risks a “Saddam-like” isolation and possible even fate, Assad’s regime is confident in something. His Baath Party is expecting Turkey and the Arab League to “correct their position on Syria.”
While waiting for Davutoglu’s outcome, Erdogan held a security council on Monday to discuss the kind of response Turkey will deliver Syria after the warning. Erdogan spoke last week about Syria as an “internal matter,” reminding of 850 km of common border, of kinship, cultural ties and many other things in common since the days of the Ottoman Empire.
U.S. Mideast envoy Fred Hof came to Ankara to talk to the Turkish officials in an attempt to find a common way of reacting to what is going on in Syria.
Davutoglu went to Damascus to tell al-Assad that Turkey demands of his regime that the crackdown stop, that a date be fixed for free and democratic elections, and that prisoners be released.
It is not clear exactly how far Turkey is ready to go in the Syrian case, but one thing was made clear: no intervention in Syria can be made without consultations with Turkey.
Officials in Ankara described the status of relations with Syria as moving from a decade-long white page toward the grey page today with the prospect of a red page tomorrow.
The same officials assure that what is going on in Libya cannot happen in Syria, and consider that the highest extent of action could be imposing an embargo or a buffer zone inside Syria, around the city of Aleppo, if the riots move to the city where three million people live, the largest in the country.
The humanitarian crisis that could be created at 26 miles from Turkish border could create an excuse for such an intervention. Will Bashar al-Assad allow a part of his country to be run by Turkey?
