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Turkey Is Changing the Middle East
(Bloomberg) Hussein Ibish - While the pro- and anti-Iranian camps do exist in the Middle East, there's also a distinctive third bloc emerging, with a Sunni Islamist orientation, led by Turkey. When rebel-held parts of Aleppo fell to pro-Assad forces in December 2016, the Syrian war effectively ended along with the united front against Iran. Turkey instead began to focus on containing Kurdish militias in northern Syria and forging a partnership with Russia, Iran, Assad and Qatar. Turkey maintains a military base in Qatar and the two countries also back the regional Sunni Islamist Muslim Brotherhood movement and support Hamas. Now, just as Turkey and Qatar are growing closer to Iran, Hamas is renewing its Iranian ties. Turkey has not hidden its growing ambition to revive the dominance that the Ottoman Empire enjoyed over much of the Islamic world. At a recent rally, Turkish Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu declared, "We are not only just Turkey, but also Damascus, Aleppo, Kirkuk, Jerusalem, Palestine, Mecca and Medina." Former U.S. officials have seen Turkish government maps showing their spheres of influence extending into Saudi Arabia and down to Basra, Iraq. The writer is a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington.