Turkey’s expansionist policies in Syria and Iraq are on nearly everyone’s radar following Middle Eastern geopolitics. There is no need to over-explain Ankara’s ambitions to conquer first the Kurdish regions and then strategic cities, such as Mosul, Aleppo, and Damascus. Turkish officials make little effort to hide these objectives.
As recently reported by the BBC, Turkey has built a network of 136 semi-permanent military bases in northern Iraq, where civilians are not allowed. In northern Syria, Turkey has effectively annexed two major stretches of land. Ankara does not conceal its ties with the new Islamist rulers of Damascus, nor its aspiration to lead the “war against Israel” and “liberate” Jerusalem from the Zionist entity, the State of Israel.
But how does one counter such expansionism, especially when the perpetrator is a NATO member and a 300-year-old strategic asset of the West in its long effort to contain Russia within the Black Sea?
To answer that, we must revisit history, specifically, the Ottoman-era Sanjak of Alexandretta, Iskenderun, Kurdistan’s historical port to the outside world.
Few are aware of a largely forgotten agreement between the United Kingdom, France, and czarist Russia to partition Asiatic Turkey, known then as the Near East. According to the agreement, Russia was to receive all of Kurdistan, including parts of what are now Turkey, Iraq, and Iran, excepting its western portion, which would fall under the French influence.
Fast forward to today
The Sanjak of Alexandretta was to be established as an independent port, not unlike Singapore.
This was no accident. France was tasked with controlling the westernmost corridor of Kurdistan to prevent Russia’s advance toward the warm waters of the Mediterranean. Alexandretta, a strategic port city, was left independent to prevent either France or Russia from dominating it. These decisions were calculated within the framework of the “Great Game,” the British-Russian geopolitical struggle for control over Eurasia.
However, the agreement for the partitioning of Kurdistan was never implemented, as the Russian Revolution derailed it. Lenin’s Bolshevik regime adopted a protectionist policy and retreated from contested lands it could not hold.
Britain, sticking to its Great Game playbook, instead invested in the creation of two new client states: Turkey and Iran. Two military officers (Atatürk and the Shah) with parallel biographies were selected, each entrusted with a Westernization agenda and similar but fictive national ideologies (the Turks and the Fars, wrongly associated with the Persians of antiquity).
The UK’s commitment to these projects buried any dreams of Kurdish statehood – an arrangement that suited both the British and later the Americans in their efforts to contain Soviet Russia.In 1936, Turkish leaders set their sights on Alexandretta.
At the time, Britain, France, and the USSR were preoccupied with Hitler’s rise in Germany. Seizing the opportunity, Turkey annexed Alexandretta in 1939, renamed it Hatay Province, and moved the capital from Iskenderun to the biblical city of Antioch – modern-day Antakya.
Fast forward to today: Turkey’s entire political spectrum – from the far Left to the far Right is united around the idea of territorial expansion into Iraq, Syria, and beyond.
Under the leadership of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish state apparatus – led by the military, intelligence services, and foreign ministry – believes the conditions are ripe for a repeat of 1939. Their analysis is simple: Europe is too distracted to intervene, and the United States, busy elsewhere in Eastern Europe and the Pacific, is unwilling to push back. So far, they are right.
WHAT TROUBLES Israel today is merely a continuation of Turkey’s long-term strategic expansionist plan.The Kurds alone cannot stop Turkey.
As demonstrated in Turkey’s offensives against Afrin in 2018 and Serekaniye in 2019, when the US does not intervene, Turkish-backed jihadist mercenaries move in, displace the population, and Ankara de facto annexes the territory. A similar pattern played out in northern Iraq since the 1990s, accelerating in the 2010s. The Turkish pretext is always the presence of PKK militants, but this belies the state’s broader campaign of anti-Kurdish repression, which extends even to countries such as Japan and Kazakhstan, in opposing both those governments’ recognition of Kurdish as a literary language in their institutions.
Now, the Kurds and Israel are increasingly concerned about a potential full US withdrawal from Syria. As Turkey eyes broader conquests, Israel has begun raising alarms internationally. However, the solution is not a tacit deal with Turkey to divide up zones of influence in Syria. The Turks have mastered this game. They know to wait patiently until their opponents are distracted or apathetic, then make their move, too late for anyone to reverse it. That was the case with Iskenderun and with Kurdistan. If unchecked, it will be the case with Mosul, Aleppo, and Damascus.
The only way to stop Turkey in Syria or Iraq is to help the Kurds build their agency, a Kurdish nation-state composed of their historical lands in both countries, with access to the Mediterranean via Latakia. Once established, it must be equipped with the means to defend itself, including the weapons needed to repel any territorial aggression.
The author, born in Iskenderun and based in Vancouver, British Columbia, is a writer on international politics, the Middle East, and Kurdistan. He is the vice president of the Canadian Kurdistani Confederation and hosts the podcasts Rojeva Kurdistan and Nation on the Rise.
Follow him on X/Twitter @mhusedin.