The Turkey adjustment in Syria: Syria belongs to the Syrians!

Trump's decision to withdraw ABD troops from Syria was in fact a step consistent with his own politics, which he had declared from the start. Since his election campaign Trump has been asking what ABD has to do in Syria, or in the Middle East in general, and this question of his was received as reasonable by his own voters. But it is very clear that it was Turkey that persuaded Trump to take this step with this timing and made him take this decision. He himself also stated this.

For a long time Turkey had been insistently emphasizing the dimensions of the ABD presence or activities in Manbij that threatened Turkey as a NATO ally. The connection between the justifications ABD announced when it came to Syria and its activities after arriving was completely severed in a short time. It came because there was a humanitarian tragedy in Syria, but with its arrival the scale of the tragedy, to which it itself contributed, grew even larger.

The aim was to protect people against Assad, the merciless killer of his own people. Yet after the ABD forces arrived, priority went to fighting an organization called DEAŞ, which, it is very clear, Assad himself contributed significantly to creating.

At best ABD began to be occupied with DEAŞ, which Assad had put out in front, the very Assad it had come to overthrow. Undoubtedly this scenario requires casting ABD as a very naive actor, and the situation is not that simple. That with the ABD soldiers' withdrawal from Manbij the regime soldiers were quick to announce they had begun entering there shows us again the implicit dimensions of the relationship between them. Moreover, it is understood that the only possible mission of the YPG-PYD elements, which ABD trained, armed and stationed on our border in Manbij, whose population consists entirely of Arabs, in the name of fighting DEAŞ, after ABD withdraws is nothing other than handing the region over to the regime.

The PYD-YPG did not need to look for a harbor to take refuge in against ABD's departure. They never had any problem with the regime from the start. Instead of standing with the Syrian people against the regime's massacres and showing solidarity with the Syrian people, they took quite strategic positions for the regime's survival.

The existence of the YPG-PYD alone would of course not have sufficed to protect the regime in the places where they are. The support ABD gave the PYD under the pretext of fighting DEAŞ in effect took the place of support given to the regime in this respect. Now, with ABD stepping out, we can expect the regime-PYD alliance to perform their own particular dance both in Manbij and in other parts of Syria. For now we are watching the flag-raising and flag-lowering phase of this dance.

The clear truth is that Turkey, with its tanks lined up at the Syrian border, has persuasively conveyed the seriousness that it could not convey so far either in diplomatic language or with the S400 agreements with Russia or the Sochi and Astana processes. Turkey has made it thoroughly clear that it will not stand by as a fait accompli unfolds in Syria, by recalling its performance in the earlier Euphrates Shield and Olive Branch operations.

Now everyone is calculating accordingly, everyone is starting to take a new position accordingly. Of course it cannot be expected that anyone will surrender to the new vision Turkey has put forward. Although it is Turkey that made the decisive move, in this process everyone will try either to protect their own gains or to foil Turkey's move.

In this framework Syria's hurried entry into Manbij and rush to raise a flag is an understandable situation. But it is also clear that it has no realism or reality. The reason Assad did not enter Manbij was not that PYD or ABD soldiers were there but that he had already become unable to govern it. Now it is understood that the presence of both ABD and the PYD there was a proxy for him. But this situation can no longer be sustained. In its present state he will not be able to govern this place with his own means, as he cannot many places in the country, because the people of Manbij reject Assad. And leaving Assad alone with the people of Manbij is dangerous to a degree that cannot be risked, because everyone has seen well enough in eight years what Assad is capable of doing to his own people.

Turkey's line, on the other hand, has been clear from the start. It has no eye on Syrian land, and it has no aim other than creating an environment in which the 4 million Syrians who are refugees in Turkey and the 4 million Syrians who are refugees in other countries can return to their own country. President Erdoğan does not hold back from declaring this aim even at such a moment.

From the start the most important point agreed on both in Sochi and in Astana has been that Syria belongs to the Syrians, and insisting on this thesis gives Turkey the power of being in the right more than anyone. Turkey asserts the withdrawal of all foreign elements from Syria, the securing of Syria's integrity, and the establishment of a constitutional formula in which the rights of all elements in Syria, Arab, Kurdish, Turkmen, Armenian, Alawite, Sunni, Christian, are observed to the fullest.

Nobody other than Turkey has the power or the position to allow this formula, to which no one can object, to be put into practice. Because compared with the other actors, Turkey has been the only country that has been able to maintain its impartiality among the elements within Syria and whose basic priority is human rights and humanitarian politics. This position gives it the opportunity to be the key to the solution in Syria. That is why it is destined to be at the center of all developments in Syria in the coming days.

It is also being watched carefully that the Arab League, which since the beginning of the crisis in Syria has made no contribution to resolving the humanitarian situation that emerged, and has even always worked to deepen the crisis, has begun, in these days when progress is being made on the path to a solution, to take steps that legitimize the Syrian regime.

The decisions of BAE, Egypt and Bahrain to reopen their embassies in Damascus after 7 years are steps of a new game that is being cooked somewhere. Moves like pouring water on a cooked stew. How bitter that these steps do not sound good at all, and that what is heard of them cannot be interpreted as auguring anything good.