President Barack Obama and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan met this weekend for the first time since the July 15 failed coup attempt.
“This is the first opportunity that I’ve had to meet face to face with President Erdogan since the terrible attempted coup,” Obama said during their meeting on the sidelines of the G-20 summit in Hangzhou, China. “We’re glad you’re here, safe, and that we are able to continue to work together.”
Obama told Erdogan that the U.S. will make sure that those behind the coup effort “are brought to justice.” Ankara has laid the blame for the coup plot on U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, and has called for the U.S. to extradite him, a source of great tension when Vice President Joe Biden recently visited Turkey.
After their closed meeting, Obama and Erdogan said they also discussed efforts to combat ISIS in Syria, with Erdogan calling for Obama to fight against all terrorist groups — including Kurdish groups. The U.S. has supported and equipped the Syrian Kurds in the campaign against ISIS.
The Cipher Brief’s Mackenzie Weinger spoke with Soner Cagaptay, the director of the Turkish Research Program at The Washington Institute, on Tuesday to get his take on the meeting, U.S.-Turkish relations and what is happening with Turkey’s efforts on the ground in Syria.
The Cipher Brief: Obama met with Erdogan this weekend for the first time since the failed coup attempt. How would you assess their meeting? What kind of significance is there in Obama’s seeming goal to try to smooth over relations with Turkey by not bringing up the crackdown, instead vowing to give his full support to Erdogan and help bring the plotters of the coup to justice?
Soner Cagaptay: Look at Erdogan’s body language compared to when he met Biden - he was a little bit more reserved with Biden. I think the meeting worked. It is what Erdogan wanted -basically, tender loving care from President Obama, which he had not gotten a lot of lately.
And they had disagreements going back before the failed coup plot, from Erdogan’s democratic transgressions to Turkey’s Syria policy. But Erdogan views the coup not only as an attack on himself, but on Turkey’s constitutional order, as well as its parliament and its people. The coup plotters not only tried to assassinate Erdogan, unsuccessfully, but also bombed the country’s parliament and the capital. So it was a rather traumatic event, and I think the fact that the first head of state after the coup plot to call in and to wish him well was [Russian President] Vladimir Putin did not go unnoticed. This building Turkish-Russian rapprochement, which had already started before the failed coup plot, basically accelerated the process.
I think Erdogan really wanted to have this meeting with Obama. During the meeting and later on, the president spoke only about his support for Turkey and did not mention, to the dismay of some of Erdogan’s critics, mass arrests in Turkey following the coup plot. I think it was received well by Erdogan. And of course, and again not surprising, the Jarabulus offensive, which is something on which the U.S. and Turkey had been working together to plan now for years, has finally come to fruition. Finally, ISIS does not border NATO ally Turkey.
All of that is good news. So it’s a minor uptick in the relationship, but there has not been an uptick in the relationship for a very long time, so it’s a very significant one.
TCB: What did you make of Erdogan’s statement that “there is no good terrorist or bad terrorist,” especially in the Kurdish context? Did you think that was a significant thing for him to say on such a global stage?
SC: I think it was basically him making his statement that, in Erdogan’s view, Turkey views both the PYD and ISIS as terrorist organizations. It’s showing that Turkey is not changing its policy on PYD. Turkey sees the PYD and PKK as basically the same organization, that it’s not going to change on that.
The Turkish incursion into Syria, in my view, really bundles Turkey’s numerous objectives together, and it actually also shows that the targets in Syria are being rebalanced or re-shifted. For almost five years, Turkey singularly tried to oust the Assad regime. That did not work out.
But Turkey stayed with that goal, though pretty much the rest of the world moved forward. Turkey was still committed to that, providing aid to rebels, and ignoring, or at least, delaying dealing with other issues, whether it was ISIS or other threats coming from Syria.
The Jarabulus offensive, which has basically taken a major border crossing from ISIS, is the first time Turkey has taken things in Syria into its own hands. But it’s also interesting to note that as Turkey takes Jarabulus from ISIS and pushes ISIS away from the Turkish border, it is also blocking PYD advances in Syria. These two goals are now serving each other, which is very interesting.
TCB: So what would you say is Turkey’s strategy given its current operation in Syria?
SC: As Turkey takes away territory from ISIS, it’s also making sure that the PYD does not form a corridor in northwestern Syria. Turkey is still committed to the goal of ousting Assad, but it’s not in the Jarabulus offensive. So the offensive does not actually do anything to undermine Assad, but it promotes the Syrian rebel presence because it provides the rebels with a de facto safe haven, which Turkey has been asking for a very long time. So ultimately, I think this offensive shows that Turkey has three equally important objectives in Syria, and they are serving each other.
So Turkey takes Jarabulus, number one, it pushes ISIS away from the border, number two, it prevents PYD from taking that town and creating a Kurdish corridor, and number three, it makes Jarabulus into a safe haven for Turkey-backed rebels. So that’s how I think they have conjoined all three objectives in one offensive.
TCB: Erdogan also said on Monday that he raised the idea of setting up a no-fly zone in northern Syria with both Putin and Obama, and he also said that Turkey is currently trying to work with Russia on potentially getting a ceasefire declared in Aleppo by September 12. What do you make of those particular efforts by Erdogan?
SC: I think that’s a little bit more ambitious. A no-fly zone would require both Russian blessing and U.S. backing — Russia has to say okay to it and the U.S. has to support it. I think that’s something that, having watched White House policy on Syria for the last five years where the White House has shut down every no-fly zone idea, I just can’t see why they would embrace it this time. One could argue that there are already de facto no-fly zones because the U.S. has provided air cover to its allies in Syria, but I think it’s a stretch that the administration would endorse a delineated, internationally recognized safe haven or no-fly zone, as opposed to ad-hoc declarations of safe havens for this group or that area. I think that’s what Erdogan wants, because Erdogan really wants to use the area that Turkey has captured between Jarabulus and Azaz and turn that into, not only a staging ground for anti-Assad rebels, but also a safety belt and cordon sanitaire against ISIS as well as a place to host refugees.
If Aleppo falls to the regime, it has about 100,000 people. Many of them will flee. And, I think Turkey wants to relocate some of the refugees who are already inside Turkey onto the Syrian side of the border.
To me the most significant thing here is that the Jarabulus offensive shows that Turkey is finally going for what is called the Jordanian model in Syria. What is the Jordanian model? After receiving just under a million refugees, the King of Jordan decided early on that this was not the way to go. He realized that if you kept the door open more would come and they would destabilize the country and Syria’s war would be imported into Jordan. So he decided to set up the Jordanian model, which is: keep the refugees on the Syrian side of the border, tend to their needs through NGOs and international humanitarian agencies, have a tacit unwritten agreement with the Syrian government that they won’t be targeted, in exchange for which the refugees and/or rebels cannot cross into Jordan and use Jordan as a staging ground to fight the regime. So for Turkey to move forward with a Jordanian model, where I think they’re going, it would mean creating a safe haven on the Syrian side of the border where Syrian refugees would be hosted and where future refugee flows can be kept. This would require, of course, that the Assad regime orders that Russia respect this undeclared safe haven — and that has a lot to do with whether Turkey will completely go for the Jordanian model, which is that rebels are not given safe haven or staging ground in Turkish territory.
Mackenzie Weinger is a national security reporter at The Cipher Brief.
Mackenzie Weinger is a national security reporter at The Cipher Brief.
