Turkey’s Wrong Bet on Syria

• Today, instead of the free movement of labor and capital, there is, around the border area, the free movement of bombs and bullets.
• Ankara considers the real security threat from Syria as not the jihadists, but the secular Kurds who fight the jihadists.
• Turkey has worked so hard to create a “Peshawar” (Afghanistan) across its border with Syria — hoping instead to create a Muslim Brotherhood zone.

It was supposed to be Turkish gambit: Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s days in power were numbered; the Nusayri (Alawite) man would be toppled by Syria’s Sunni majority in a popular revolt. The Sunni majority would set up in Damascus a Muslim Brotherhood type of regime that would be subservient to Ankara, and Turkey’s southern border with Syria would be now be a borderless Sunni “Schengen” zone; cross border trade would flourish with the free movement of labor and capital. Peace would prevail along the 900-km border, and Turkish and Syrian Sunni supremacists would advance their agenda in the not-always-so-Sunni lands of the Middle East.