Ottoman Caliph Abdul Majid II.the last Caliph and 37th head of the Ottoman Imperial House. On a wedding day in Paris.
The two major forces in the history of Islam have been Arabia and Turkey. Islam arose in Arabia, in less than a decade conquered a world bigger than the Roman Empire and centuries later was deposed by the Turks. The succession of the prophet, the appointment of a Caliph as leader of Islam, moved from Arabs hands to the Turks’. With the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the conquest of the Turks by the allies in WWI and the overthrow of the Caliph by the Turks’ own leader Ataturk, the last Caliph was deposed.
Today, much of the talk about Islam centers on Iran (a non Arab state) and Saudi Arabia. Turkey, since Ataturk, has been largely a secular state, never vying for Islamic leadership. The battlefield between Saudi Arabia and Iran has been Turkey’s neighbor … Syria.
Turkey was eager to see Assad replaced by a more democratic regime. Turkey’s proximity and long porous border with Syria meant that it would be threatened by the inevitable fall of Assad’s unstable rule. The Turkish Premier, Erdogan, was willing to support a radical Islamist alliance. He did not anticipate that Iran’s influence as a supporter of Assad or the emergence of radical Sunni groups devoted to overthrow of all forms of Islam not compliant with their radical Islam.
This was a dangerous game. Erdogan did not commit his own forces while allowing rebels to use Turkey as a safe haven. The strategy failed, the war in Syria has been dominated by Iranian backed forces udder Hezbollah and radical Islamic forces devoted to Al Qaeda and ISIS.
That is about to change!
The region has been crying out for a pan-Arab response to Assad’s barbaric smiting of a popular revolution, and yet none came. Arabs have long feared the Turks, visions of a return to Ottoman hegemony remain. Now, hopefully Turkey is coming back into the fold. Saudi Arabia has been speaking to Turkish president Recep Erdogan about a regional response to the Syrian crisis.
The International Business Times reports that Jamal Khashoggi, a prominent Saudi journalist, took to Twitter :
The alliance, Saudi money with Turkish logistical support, would effectively replace the US as a stabilizing force in the Eastern Mediterranean.
Huffington reports that a “pact was sealed in early March when Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan flew to Riyadh to meet Saudi’s recently crowned King Salman. Relations had been tense between Erdogan and the late King Abdullah, in great part over Erdogan’s support of the Muslim Brotherhood.” Since then a combination of Turkish and Saudi support with American airstrikes have enabled the rebel advance to undermine the Assad government and is winning the civil war.
More from Huffington: “The Turkish-Saudi agreement has led to a new joint command center in the northeastern Syrian province of Idlib. There, a coalition of groups — including Nusra and other Islamist brigades such as Ahrar al-Sham that Washington views as extremist — are progressively eroding Assad’s front. The rebel coalition also includes more moderate elements of the Free Syrian Army that have received U.S. support in the past.
At the end of March, the alliance — calling itself “Conquest Army” — took the city of Idlib, followed by the strategic town of Jisr al-Shughour and then a government military base.
“They have really learned to fight together,” the Turkish official said.
…. Turkish officials say that the U.S. has no strategy for stabilizing Syria. One Turkish official said that the CIA has even lately halted its support for anti-Assad groups in northern Iraq. U.S. trainers are now in Turkey on a train-and-equip program aimed at adding fighters to counter the Islamic State group and bolster moderate forces in Syria, but Turkish officials are skeptical that it will amount to much.
Usama Abu Zeid, a legal adviser to the Free Syrian Army, confirmed that the new coordination between Turkey and Saudi Arabia — as well as Qatar — had facilitated the rebel advance, but said that it not yet led to a new flow of arms. He said rather that the fighters had seized large caches of arms from Syrian government facilities.
So far, Abu Zeid said, the new understanding between the militia groups and their international partners has led to quick success.
“We were able to cause a lot of damage and capture more territory from the regime,” he said.”