In recent years, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said he wants to help bring his ally, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, in from the cold. Diplomatically, that means facilitating normalisation between al-Assad and the Arab world, and between al-Assad and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Both men have ruled for more than two decades.
Re-establishing Syria’s ties with Arab countries has been relatively straightforward, as exemplified by Damascus’s readmission to the Arab League in May 2023, and al-Assad’s participation in the last two Arab summits. However, the situation with Turkey is decidedly more complex, in large part because the Turkish military—either directly or through proxies—controls around 10% of Syrian territory, an area twice the size of Lebanon.
Ankara has been providing military and intelligence support to armed factions since 2012, and Turkey hosts around 3.5 million Syrian refugees, so this is no temporary arrangement. The Turks will only extract themselves when everything lines up.
No preconditions
Russia can feel quietly confident. After all, it has previously brokered dialogue between al-Assad and Erdogan, culminating in intelligence, military, and political meetings. Among these, former Turkish intelligence director (now Foreign Minister) Hakan Fidan and National Security Office director Maj. Gen. Ali Mamlouk secretly visited Damascus after publicly visiting Moscow in early 2020.
For al-Assad, though, Turkish incursions into Syria sting, and every time there has been talk of a meeting between him and Erdogan, the Syrian president has said the Turks must first either withdraw or set a public timescale for doing so. Until now, this has been where the process typically ends. For its part, Ankara says it adheres to UN Security Council Resolution 2254, noting that its withdrawal is linked to a political solution in Damascus, and ensuring that northern Syria does not pose a threat to Turkish national security.
Now, a breakthrough appears to have been achieved, which would mark a significant shift. The mediation efforts of Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia' Al Sudani and Russian envoy Alexander Lavrentiev appear to have found a compromise. In short, the Syrians are waiving their precondition of a Turkish withdrawal, while Ankara is dropping its requirement for a political solution as a precursor to withdrawal. What has driven the shift? Rather, it is better to ask: who?
Read more: Softened stances help grease the path to Turkey-Syria normalisation
Enter Ocalan
The answer appears to be the ever-influential Abdullah Ocalan, co-founder and leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), and a high-profile Turkish prisoner since he was abducted from Nairobi by Turkish intelligence officers in 1999.
Ocalan was based in Syria from 1978-98, but Damascus abandoned him in October 1998 to avoid a Turkish military attack. Professionally homeless, the PKK man was abducted just months later. After Ocalan’s arrest, political and economic relations between Syria and Turkey flourished. They shared intelligence, and Damascus soon handed other Kurdish leaders over to Ankara, imprisoning other Syrian-based PKK fighters.
Today, both Ankara and Damascus are convinced that the Kurdish institutional presence—particularly the Autonomous Administration in north-east Syria—poses an existential threat to their unity and territorial integrity.
