‘People wanted to know everything. They wanted to know how many audio recordings there were, what was on those recordings. I knew that it was a reckoning over the 2013 corruption scandal,’ he says. ‘I’ve never had quite the same experience, to have so many followers and so much interest in what I’m tweeting. I took this to be the hunger for information, that’s what it was. My impression was that there is this tremendous hunger for information that relates to the Turkish government and relates to their future and their history.’
At four o’clock in the afternoon on New Year’s Eve 2017 in New York – as the clock was striking midnight in Turkey – Klasfeld raised a glass of rakı with his American friends to toast his new friends on the other side of the world. Three days later, the jury found Atilla guilty on five of the six counts against him.
5
SYRIA: THE WAR NEXT DOOR
It is hard to pin down the moment when Erdoğan’s ambitions swelled beyond his borders. In the first years of his era, as he battled against the Kemalists and the army, he was too weak at home to contemplate intervention overseas. But the Arab Spring offered Erdoğan an opportunity to clinch a bigger global position, at the exact moment that the Gülenists’ defeat of the army enabled him to do so. Erdoğan’s response to the cataclysm that has rocked his neighbourhood has turned him into one of the most divisive leaders in the world today – a champion of the oppressed to some and a byword for Islamist authoritarianism to others. The roots stretch back to the very start of his era, when the Turkish parliament voted against joining the US ‘Coalition of the Willing’ in Iraq in 2003. That was the beginning of a rift between Erdoğan’s Turkey and America’s generals that would never fully heal, even in the years when political relations were good. Eventually, it would crack open into a raw wound that has dragged Turkey’s relations with Washington down to their lowest point in decades and repeatedly brought the two NATO allies to the brink of armed standoff.
Ahmet Davutoğlu: the ideologue
In the years after that 2003 vote, Erdoğan and Ahmet Davutoğlu, a foreign policy adviser who would later become foreign minister, quietly set to work building new relations in old Ottoman lands. Turkey had long neglected its Muslim neighbours, focusing instead on strengthening ties with Israel and Europe. But Erdoğan and Davutoğlu forged friendships with Muslim-majority nations from the Balkans to the Arab Middle East and large parts of Africa, opening their diplomatic pitches with expressions of their shared faith and history and sealing them with investments, visa-free travel and soft-power outreach, primarily through the Gülenist networks.
Davutoğlu, like Erdoğan, was a pious man from the provinces. But unlike his street-fighter boss, he was an academic who had taken his Ph.D. in political science from the prestigious Bosphorus University before teaching in Malaysia and Turkey. He had joined the AKP as an adviser before being promoted to the top of the foreign ministry, where he became the engineer of the party’s world plans. He based the AKP’s foreign policy project on his 2001 book, Strategic Depth, in which he argued that Turkey should pursue proactive foreign outreach in the old Ottoman territories, with the aim of becoming the world’s Muslim superpower.
‘Davutoğlu had the full sophisticated foreign policy strategy,’ says one foreign diplomat. ‘He had his ideology around Ottoman power and strength. He was more of a democrat [than Erdoğan]. His desire was not for an authoritarian Ottoman empire. But it was for a highly powerful Turkey exerting this power through democratic means rather than through authoritarian means.’
Domestic observers schooled in the old way of Turkish foreign politics were less forgiving in their assessment of Davutoğlu and his new direction. ‘In contrast to Erdoğan, Davutoğlu is a hardened ideologue entrenched by his academic side,’ said Faruk Loğoğlu, Turkey’s ambassador to the US when the AKP first won the parliament in 2002. ‘He lived in the world of his own constructs, all of them rooted in an Islamist ideology and governed by theoretical absurdities … You could judge that his mind does not work very well by the fact that when you meet him he talks incessantly, without stopping; it is not a product of a thoughtful mind. Davutoğlu’s ideological commitment to the Muslim Brotherhood and to Sunni access was reflected in both domestic and foreign policy.’
Davutoğlu’s ideas appealed to Erdoğan because they promised to propel him to the top tier of the world’s Sunni Muslim leaders. The AKP’s early democratising reforms, driven by a roaring economy, had turned Turkey into the richest and most open Muslim-majority state in the region. In the West, leaders started to talk of Turkey as a model for Islamic democracy. Davutoğlu summed up his foreign policy with two catchphrases: ‘zero problems with the neighbours’ and ‘less enemies, more friends’. And at that time Erdoğan had no better friend than another apparent reformer – the young Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad.
Assad’s Syria
Assad had inherited Syria from his father, Hafez, in 2000, when he was just thirty-four years old. He seemed to be in power reluctantly; after all, he had not been brought up to expect it. It had been Bashar’s older brother, Basel, who was groomed for the job while Bashar, the shy second son, planned to lead a life out of the spotlight. He studied hard, largely shunned the luxurious trappings of his position, and went to London to enjoy a life of relative obscurity as a trainee eye doctor.
But in 1994 Basel was killed in a car crash. Bashar, now the heir apparent, was forced to abandon his medical studies and returned to Damascus to begin his political apprenticeship. When Hafez died six years later in June 2000, Bashar stood uncontested for the presidency: Syrians could vote yes or no for Bashar, but they weren’t offered any alternative. And with the mukhbarat – the feared Syrian secret police – eyeing voters as they dropped their slips into the ballot box, few were inclined to vote no. Bashar was sworn in with a 97 per cent mandate.
Soon after, he married his beautiful and stylish British-raised fiancée. Asma al-Assad, from a powerful Sunni family from the central city of Homs, had attended a Church of England primary school, studied computer science at King’s College London and worked as an investment banker at JP Morgan. Bashar, with his educated wife by his side, also seemed to be in tune with what Syria’s upcoming generation wanted. He was technologically savvy; one of the first things he did when he came to power was allow access to the internet – albeit heavily restricted and monitored – and he became head of the Syrian Computer Society. He was a nerd who seemed to eschew the ostentatious trappings of wealth that had so beguiled the Middle East’s other dictators, such as Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi with his snakeskin shoes and satin robes. Bashar took pride in the fact that he drove himself and his family around the streets of the capital, Damascus, in an unarmoured car and without bodyguards.
In Bashar’s early years as president, Syrians dared to believe that their country might be changing. He gave lip service to allowing other political parties into parliament, though they would never have been given a chance to form a government. He permitted civil societies and discussion groups to open in the public sphere. Many political prisoners were released, Damascus got a stock exchange, and Syrians were at last given access to mobile phones. The first two years of Bashar’s tenure came to be known as the Damascus Spring – artists, intellectuals, campaigners and ordinary citizens breathed a collective sigh of relief as their regime’s iron grip on the country seemed to relax.
It didn’t last. In 2002 the Damascus Spring screeched to a devastating halt. The thinkers and dissidents who had taken advantage of the past two years’ new freedoms were rounded up and thrown into prison. The fledgling civil society sector was cut down. Syrians realised that their new communication tools simply gave the regime more options for spying on them, and the fear and loathing swelled until the spring of 2011, when the nascent wave of Arab revolution washed into Syria and Bashar al-Assad’s people rose up against him. His reaction was quick and brutal – within six months, the protests had morphed into all-out civil war.
Erdoğan and his wi
fe, Emine, had holidayed with the Assads in the fashionable Turkish resort of Bodrum in 2008, just three summers before the revolt. After their getaway, Erdoğan started referring to Assad as his ‘brother’, and trade ties between the two countries flourished. But with the onset of the Arab Spring uprisings in late 2010, Erdoğan saw that he could grab an even bigger role for himself in the region. Old secular dictators were being overthrown, and Islamist parties were increasingly dominating the opposition. Erdoğan had visited Egypt in the wake of its revolution, taking the stage in front of an ecstatic crowd chanting ‘Turkey and Egypt are one hand’. He went on to Tunisia and Libya, where similar scenes awaited him. All three countries voted in new leaders with strong links to the Muslim Brotherhood.
Erdoğan was initially more hesitant to back the Syrian opposition – Assad was his neighbour and professed friend, not a faraway pariah like Mubarak or Gaddafi. But in the US there was growing determination that the Syrian strongman should go. And so it turned to its regular Muslim ally, Turkey, for support.
‘From mid-2011Washington put increasing pressure on governments around the world to break with Assad and to call for his ouster,’ says a US diplomat based in Turkey at the time. ‘Ankara was reluctant. Some, including Davutoğlu, still believed that Assad could be weaned away from Iran and toward reform. Davutoğlu and Erdoğan made a couple of efforts, including at least one trip to Damascus, and got some promises to change that Assad did not keep. After several such go-rounds, the Turks realised that the effort was pointless, broke with Assad, and joined US calls for him to step down. One very senior Turk told me that Ankara thought it would be joining onto a US strategy for getting rid of Assad and was later dismayed to learn we had none.’
Inside Turkey, the opposition was disquieted when Erdoğan and Davutoğlu did an about-turn on Assad. The CHP, with its secular zeal, was horrified at the thought that the Syrian president, brutal as he was, might be overthrown and replaced with an Islamist government. The party’s stance was at least partly swayed by the large Alevi bloc in its voter base; the Turkish Alevis, followers of a branch of Shia Islam, are loosely linked to Assad’s own Alawite sect, and are similarly terrified by the prospect of a fundamentalist Sunni resurgence in the Middle East.
The CHP sent a delegation to meet Assad in October 2011, a month after Erdoğan cut ties. Faruk Loğoğlu, who had by then retired from the diplomatic service and rejoined his party, was part of it: ‘Assad told us his version of the events. At the beginning Turkey and Syria enjoyed a very good and positive relationship. The Turkish side was offering advice to the Syrian banking sector, and counselling Assad as to how he could soften his presence in the lives of the people. Assad did not mind this brotherly approach from our elders. But then a point in time came in which this advice and counsels offered were not from one equal to another but more of a command. Assad did not mind the tone but it was not appropriate to the head of a state. He told us that what broke the camel’s back was the Turkish government’s insistence that he incorporate the Muslim Brotherhood into the Syrian government.’
Abdullah Gül, president of Turkey at the time the Syrian crisis erupted, also counselled both his government and the US to be cautious. ‘I told the Americans that the rhetoric was too high. If there was not going to be force, it was a dangerous thing. Later on, we discovered that they were not going to put force,’ Gül said.
2011–2013
Syria’s descent
As the bloodshed escalated in north-western Syria in late 2011, Turkey opened its borders to fleeing civilians and provided a safe fallback position for both the political and armed opposition. Erdoğan and Davutoğlu were now building their Syria policy on the reckoning that Assad could be toppled quickly as Mubarak, Ben Ali and Gaddafi had been in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, and so they openly supported his opponents. Unease swelled inside Erdoğan’s government.
‘Until 2011 Syria had very good relations with Turkey,’ says Ertuğrul Günay. ‘We held joint meetings of the cabinet. We had established joint tourism destinations. Afterwards I suppose Erdoğan thought that Assad would fall quickly, and he wanted to have a say in the new [Syrian] administration. As a member of his cabinet I had tried to explain to him that this would not be possible. He believed the Syrian question would be resolved in six months.’
Others say that, in retrospect, Erdoğan’s turn against Assad in 2011 marked a bigger moment, when the prime minister began pursuing an openly Islamist agenda both in foreign policy and at home.
‘Erdoğan is ideologically in line with the Muslim Brotherhood, representing the Turkish version of it. He wants Turkey to be in leading position among the Islamic countries, especially within Turkey’s historical hinterland,’ says former AKP deputy Haluk Özdalga. ‘The Muslim Brotherhood agenda is the best way to understand the foreign policy the AKP has been conducting. Only under the light of such an agenda would Ankara’s international policy, full of zigzags, otherwise difficult to explain, make sense in its whole – just look at the policies followed in relation to Syria, Egypt, Sudan, Qatar, UAE, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Palestine, et cetera, and even vis-à-vis the West. The crisis in Syria has turned out to be long and defining in many respects for the AKP and Erdoğan.’
Had the rebels managed to unseat Assad in the early years of the war, Syria would almost certainly have been taken over by a Brotherhood-led government and become another Arab state in which Erdoğan could wield huge influence. But that is not how it panned out. After the rebels stormed into Aleppo in the summer of 2012 – aided by the sanctuary and training they were receiving in Turkey and the weapons supplies coming through the border – the uprising turned into a bloody war of attrition. The front lines barely moved for three years, while Assad used his air power to punish the civilian population with endless airstrikes. Donors from the Gulf began co-opting rebel groups, offering them huge wads of cash on the condition that they change their name to something Islam-inspired, fight in the name of Allah and implement Sharia law. Soon, Islamic fundamentalists from outside Syria also moved in to plant their flag in the rubble. Many Syrians welcomed them at first, not so much for their religious ideas as for their strict code of law and order – a welcome break from the anarchy of rebel rule.
On each trip I made back into the war zone over the spring and summer of 2013, I saw that the war’s paradigm had shifted a little more. The fundamentalists had always been there to varying degrees, although in the early days it was fairly easy to avoid them. But signs of their presence and growing influence were piling up. Young rebel fighters who had once overloaded on hair gel and pulled on tight jeans and knock-off designer T-shirts now started growing their hair straggly-long and shaving their top lips clean while leaving their beards intact, a homage to the Prophet Muhammad. One stinking hot August day I spotted a badly transliterated piece of teenage graffiti on an Aleppo backstreet: Ben Laden, scrawled in red spray paint on an un-rendered wall. The hardliners fought harder, played smarter and paid more, and the troops voted with their feet. I interviewed an Al-Qaeda fighter who had once worked in the alcohol department of the duty-free store at Aleppo airport but had now decided that Islamism was the best path, and, somehow, managed to convince another that I was not an atheist by reciting the Lord’s Prayer, the lines swimming back to me across two decades from primary school assemblies.
‘I’m not saying you should be a Muslim, but you have to believe in God!’ he’d beseeched me. ‘Because you’re a nice person, and I don’t want you to burn in hellfire.’
The irony was that, as the extremists grew in power, so newspaper readers back in the West cared less about what Assad was inflicting on his people and more about the threat that these black-clad young men might soon pose to their own lives and societies. And that, in turn, powered Al-Qaeda all the more, because it could claim, with increasing validity, that no one in the West cared when Muslims were dying. One teenager I had got to know in Aleppo, a seventeen-year-old called Molham who spent at least fifteen minutes each morning
styling his hair and stopped to do top-ups in car mirrors throughout the day, knocked me speechless as we were eating shawarma.
‘Hannah, I’m going to join Al-Qaeda,’ he said. ‘All my friends are dying and they are the only ones doing anything about it.’
I stared back at him, my mouth full of chicken and mayonnaise. He flashed a wad of hundred-dollar bills that he said the group had given him as his joining-up fee. Once I had gulped down my food, I offered him the only pallid discouragement I could think of: ‘Please don’t.’
Some of the more hardcore rebels took to wearing suicide belts full time, in what I initially took as a swaggering statement of fashion more than intent. But then I interviewed the father of a fighter who had gone the whole hog and detonated his belt at a regime checkpoint. The father could not wipe the smile from his face as he talked about his first-born, dead for less than a week.
‘Are you upset?’ I asked him.
‘Of course not!’ the father replied. ‘He took at least ten of Assad’s men with him. He’s a martyr.’
I asked whether the family had held a funeral for him. The father’s expression shifted from pleasure to one of the pain reserved for an idiot.
‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘Nothing to bury. He was kebab meat.’
Isis rises
Then, Syria got even darker.
‘There is a new group,’ my fixer Mohammed told me as I prepared for my next trip into Aleppo in April 2013. ‘It has come from Iraq and it is called Isis.’
It was hard to weigh the danger at first – Syria’s sands were always shifting in those months, sometimes swallowing rebel groups and sometimes spitting out new ones. I asked all my contacts whether Isis would talk. Difficult, I was told, they don’t like journalists. But eventually, I was taken to meet a skinny young man called Abu Mahjin, who was dressed in shalwar kameez and showed only kohl-lined eyes through his balaclava. He had brought his Kalashnikov along even though I had requested no weapons in the room. His condition was that I cover my head and wear an abaya, and so we sat opposite each other, both looking ridiculous – a mujahid in make-up and a sweaty white woman wearing a tent. The scene grew more surreal when the woman whose house we were doing the interview in brought in two bowls of vanilla ice cream and set them in front of us, an impeccable Syrian host to the last. He couldn’t eat his without removing his face mask and I didn’t want to offend him by eating mine, so they melted as he told me how he believed Syria’s chaos had been foretold in the prophecies.
Erdogan Rising Page 12
