Turkish partition of Syria

Yulia Latynina - about how Erdogan is pushing out his competitors in the Middle East and what they could agree on with Putin

The editors may not share the author's opinions.

The first division of Syria was completed. Its main beneficiaries were President Erdogan, for whom this is another step in restoring the great Ottoman project, and Israel, which secured itself by occupying Hermon. Iran lost the most: not only Syria, but also the entire network of terrorist Shiite proxies it had been creating for a long time.

However, the division of Syria means much more. It shows that the world based on the principle of the inviolability of borders is over, that big states are again using force, and that all the principles on which Western democracies have tried to build the universe for the last 30 years have failed miserably.

However, in order.

Shortly before the overthrow of Assad, Major General Roman Hoffman, the current military secretary to the Prime Minister of Israel, was in Moscow. After his visit, the Israeli Defense Forces occupied the Golan fortifications occupied by Russian observers without interference. It’s not that she wouldn’t have occupied them without this, but with this she went especially quickly and clearly.

A similar agreement was reached with Erdogan.

The condition was this: Putin does not shoot at the Turkish army, posing as “miners and tractor drivers”; in exchange, he is left with Khmeimim and Tartus.

There were 33 planes in Khmeimim, 25 took off in the last month.

Another - and most significant part of the agreement - included the personal salvation of Assad. The plane carrying Assad took off from Damascus and flew over Turkish territory; that same Turkey, which, in fact, was preparing the overthrow of this regime and whose troops - as usual, who had gone on leave in entire regiments along with artillery purchased from the local military store - accompanied, and sometimes pretended to be, detachments of Syrian liberators.

It is clear that in such conditions it is possible to fly over Turkish territory only within the framework of a preliminary agreement. Assad flew to Moscow, where, as it turns out, in recent years his family bought 19 apartments for $40 million in Moscow City alone. Thus, three ousted presidents already live in Russia: Askar Akaev, Viktor Yanukovych, and now Assad.

Despite the caustic comments, this is a very smart strategy for Putin. The overthrown rulers once lived in the West. This was traditional: whether a prince, a dictator, a king, some Duvalier Jr. - any of them sent their billions to Europe, and then, in the event of force majeure, they moved themselves. And no one touched him.

Now suddenly it’s the other way around. A fugitive dictator who decides to move to Europe will go to The Hague, his holdings will be arrested - and here Putin offers a unique service in the financial market and, by the way, shows the goods with his face. He doesn’t cheat clients, the property and person of the dictators who trust him are more inviolable than in Europe.

As we already said,

the main beneficiary of everything that happened is Erdogan, who, in fact, does not hide his goal: the restoration of Greater Turkey. It is this nascent recovery that people across the country are now celebrating.

Erdogan’s maneuver will be included in all textbooks. Strictly speaking, he could have captured Syria two years ago. Even then it was obvious that there was no Russian army in Syria: all combat-ready units had been transferred to Ukraine. But this meant entering the war too early, incurring the wrath of all sorts of international organizations and the White House, obsessed with the topic of maintaining borders, and most importantly, entering into a long and exhausting war with the main supporting force of the Assad regime: Iranian Shiite units.

Therefore, Erdogan waited until the time when these Shiite troops were transferred to help Hezbollah in Lebanon, where they were destroyed by Israel, agreed and struck. Thus, Erdogan turned out to be the main beneficiary of Israel's destruction of Hezbollah.

The main loser in the Syrian gambit turned out to be, as we have already said, Iran. He lost more than just his Syrian bases. After October 7, thanks to Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israel Defense Forces, he lost the entire Shiite-terrorist network he had carefully built, which was supposed to permeate the Middle East and strangle Israel.

Another beneficiary is Israel, which has now occupied Mount Hermon, from the top of which its artillery will reach, if anything, even to Damascus.

Putin lost - but quite a bit. If he really retains Tartus and Khmeimim, then he will retain the only two types of military real estate that make sense for Russia in this region - without any moral, financial and image burdens in the form of the need to support the cannibalistic Assad regime. From now on, Erdogan and his tame, re-educated al-Qaeda bear moral responsibility for everything that happens in Syria. Of course, Putin was forced to change Assad at the residual rate, but if he really replaced him with Tartus and Khmeimim, and even got him as a model dictator refugee with his billions to Moscow, then on the whole, for Putin, the pros almost balance the cons.

Putin once got involved in Syria in order to sell Assad to the United States at a higher price and exchange him for Ukraine. The United States did not buy, but another seller was found - and we must emphasize the quality of the game of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who could, without a doubt, impose his will by force, but preferred a 100% risk-free agreement with a seller who was in a hopeless situation.

The main moral of this story, however, is different. At one time, Syria and almost the entire Middle East were part of the Roman Empire - not because of the military might of the conquerors alone, but because of the peculiarities of political geography.

In principle, thanks to the same geography, it is difficult for Syria to be an independent state.

The last time it was like this was during the time of the biblical ben-Hadad, and even the last Seleucids (which is why they were the last). Even in ancient times, Syria - like neighboring Canaan - was a narrow, coastal mountainous region between two superpowers, built in the fertile giant river valleys of the Nile, on the one hand, and the Euphrates and Tigris on the other.

In addition, the Mediterranean Sea is a gigantic transport artery - a thousand-lane highway; and the lands on both sides of this sea will sooner or later be subordinated to a single Big Project, as it was during the time of Rome.

At the beginning of the 20th century, after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, it seemed that this single Big Project would be European civilization. That Europe will reclaim the old legacy of Rome: the Middle East and Africa. However, Europe, instead of developing these territories, became involved in a great civil war, which lasted from 1914 to 1945, and during this war destroyed its civilizational resource (which is why the Middle East is now colonizing Europe, and not vice versa).

After this, Europe began to decolonize and build nation states. What is the “nation state” of Syria, in which Shiites, Sunnis, Alawites, Druze, Christians and Kurds hate each other, don’t ask. The building of nation states and decolonization ended, specifically in Syria, with the 54-year dictatorship of the Assad family. Without exaggeration, we can say that Syria has been well governed twice over the past 2 thousand years. Firstly, when it was ruled by some consul Ventidius Cuman, and secondly, when it was ruled by the French.

Instead of “decolonization” of the Middle East, it turned out to be its complete destabilization. In place of the rapidly modernizing and safe society that we see in the 1930s in Agatha Christie’s novels, dictatorships came: first secular, and then religious.

The United States also made its contribution to finishing off the region. First, they overthrew, with the best intentions, Saddam Hussein, which, in fact, destabilized the existing status quo between Shiites and Sunnis and led to Iran building that same terrorist network.

Then President Barack Obama supported the Arab Spring. By the way, we should not forget that the famous murder of the American consul in Benghazi, which remained unpunished, was due precisely to the fact that the Obama administration actually started transferring Libyan weapons through the Turks to the Syrian “freedom fighters.” As a result of this operation to arm the Syrian opposition through Turkey, the moderate Syrian opposition instantly disappeared, and was replaced by al-Qaeda and ISIS. And when Saudi Arabia wanted to put an end to the main hotbed of Sunni religious fanaticism in the region - that is, Qatar - the White House forbade them to do this.

I have met people who quite seriously believe (including many such believers in the Middle East itself) that the evil democratic rulers of the United States plunged the Middle East into all this hell on purpose. They pay American politicians (especially Democrats) an undeserved compliment, endowing them with diabolical forethought where in fact there is only complete disregard and beautiful doctrinaire. You can't come up with something like this on purpose. This was all the result of purely good intentions.

The division of Syria is precisely the story that eighty years of good intentions, inviolable borders, democratic transformations and other spherical horses in a vacuum are coming to an end.

People of good will have ruled the world, especially in the last thirty years, and their legacy is frozen conflicts, subsidized terrorists, aggressors portraying themselves as victims, and people who seriously argue that Mount Hermon should immediately be returned to the new leader of Syria, Julani ( to the sweetest man, whose head the United States valued at $10 million and who heads a group declared terrorist not only in Russia and the United States, but also in Turkey ). “The main thing here is that the existing border is untouched! - they reason. “The main thing here is not to provoke these progressive jihadists.”

War is a bad thing. But the attempt to abolish the war ended with the fact that in a world where the strong do not fight, hooligans and terrorists began to fight.

In this new world, where strength matters, the era of nation states and inviolable borders is ending, and the time of intelligent force and big projects is returning.

And Erdogan has already demonstrated his level. Starting a war is a simple matter. But starting a war so that no one notices anything, having reached an agreement with everyone, and also so that the Washington regional committee greets you as a savior - this is the highest class of the game.

Which Erdogan’s icebreaker, Putin, lacks so much.