Turkey-Syria Border

Istanbul, Turkiye – Just hours after Israel launched strikes last week against Qatar – a United States-designated “major non-NATO ally” and one of Washington’s closest Gulf partners – pro-Israel commentators quickly shifted their attention to Turkiye.

In Washington, Michael Rubin, a senior fellow at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, suggested that Turkiye could be Israel’s next target and warned that it should not rely on its NATO membership for protection.

On social media, Israeli academic and political figure Meir Masri posted, “Today Qatar, tomorrow Turkey.” Ankara responded sharply. In unusually harsh language, a senior adviser to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan wrote: “To the dog of Zionist Israel … soon the world will find peace with your erasure from the map.”

For months, pro-Israel media outlets have steadily escalated their rhetoric against Turkiye, portraying it as “Israel’s most dangerous enemy”.

Israeli commentators have also framed Turkiye’s presence in the eastern Mediterranean as a “threat” and its role in rebuilding post-war Syria as a “new rising danger”.

With Israel’s regional aggression escalating and its war on Gaza showing no sign of ending, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan retaliated in August by suspending economic and trade ties with Israel.

“In Ankara, this [anti-Turkish] rhetoric is taken seriously, with Israel seen as seeking regional hegemony,” Omer Ozkizilcik, non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council, told Al Jazeera.

“Turkiye increasingly feels that Israeli aggression has no limits and enjoys American support,” added Ozkizilcik.

The strikes on Qatar also likely underscored Ankara’s doubts about US security guarantees as a NATO ally. Despite Doha’s special ally status with Washington, Israel faced no visible pushback from the US, leading to questions over whether the US would truly see any attack on Turkiye as an attack on itself, as the NATO charter dictates.

Unlike many Arab states, however, “Turkiye has long ago understood that it cannot rely on the US or NATO for its own national security interests,” said Ozkizilcik.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself now increasingly boasts of his country’s regional expansionist goals. In August, when asked whether he believed in the idea of a “Greater Israel”, he replied: “Absolutely.”

For Ankara, such rhetoric is not just symbolic – it signals an Israeli vision of dominance that stretches across the Middle East, potentially clashing head-on with Turkiye’s own regional outlook.

On Sunday, Fidan told Al Jazeera that Israel’s “Greater Israel” vision – which some religious Zionists believe extends into modern-day Syria, Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan – aims to “keep the countries in the region weak, ineffective, and especially to leave Israel’s neighbouring states divided”.

Over the last few weeks alone, Israel – in addition to continuing its genocidal onslaught in Gaza and nearly-daily raids in the occupied West Bank – also attacked Yemen and Syria, and is accused of hitting the Gaza aid flotilla in Tunisia.

Against this backdrop, Turkiye and Israel are already in a “geopolitical rivalry”, noted Ozkizilcik, adding that Israel’s actions clashed with what the analyst views as the “Turkish agenda to have strong [centralised] states” rather than decentralised states where multiple forces can hold power.

Regional hegemon

The sense that Israel is trying to become the region’s sole dominant power seemed to be confirmed in July when Tom Barrack, US ambassador to Turkiye and special envoy to Syria, made a startling admission: that Israel would prefer a fragmented and divided Syria.

“Strong nation-states are a threat – especially Arab states, [which] are viewed as a threat to Israel,” he said.

The subtext for Ankara was clear: Israel believes it needs to be the hegemon in the region to feel secure.

Israel’s actions bear this out. It has bombed Syria dozens of times since December 8 – when former President Bashar al-Assad fled to Moscow – and grabbed Syrian territory in the immediate chaos.

It decapitated much of Hezbollah’s leadership in 2024 and still occupies parts of Lebanon despite a ceasefire, long seeking to weaken or destroy the group.

In June, Israel attacked Iran, sparking a 12-day war that struck Iranian military and nuclear facilities, killing senior commanders and nuclear scientists, and dragged in the US.

The attacks aimed not only to weaken Tehran’s defence and nuclear capabilities but also to push Washington towards regime change, targeting one of Israel’s strongest rivals in the region.

Israel may now view Turkiye as the next potential challenge to its regional hegemony, explaining its adamant stance that Ankara will not be allowed to establish new bases in Syria that “could threaten Israel” – as Netanyahu has previously said.

“The first manifestation of Turkish-Israeli friction will most likely appear in the Syrian front in the land and air,” warns Cem Gurdeniz, a retired Turkish admiral and architect of the Blue Homeland doctrine, a maritime strategy that calls for Turkiye to assert its sovereignty and safeguard its interests across the surrounding seas – the Aegean, Eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea.

“In parallel, Israel’s deepening military and intelligence footprint in Cyprus, tightly woven with Greece and the Greek Cypriot administration under American auspices, is perceived in Ankara as a deliberate attempt to fracture and contain the Blue Homeland,” Gurdeniz told Al Jazeera.

“To Ankara, this is not a defensive posture by Israel but an offensive encirclement strategy that could threaten both Turkish maritime freedom and the security of the Turkish Cypriot people,” he added, referring to Turkiye’s ties to the self-proclaimed Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, which is only Turkiye recognises, rather than the rest of Cyprus, which is ruled by Greek Cypriots.

The division of Cyprus is a major source of discontent between Turkiye, Greece and Cyprus.

Reports that Cyprus received Israeli air-defence systems last week are likely to raise alarm in Ankara.

In tandem in Syria, Israel has made no secret that what it considers to be a stable Syria “can only be a federal” one with “different autonomies”, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar told European leaders at a meeting in Brussels in February.

Turkiye, on the other hand, backs the new Syrian administration, which insists on a centralised and unitary state.

For now, tensions between Israel and Turkiye can be described as “controlled”, says Gokhan Cinkara, director of Necmettin Erbakan University’s Global and Regional Studies Centre in Turkiye.

“At present, the riskiest scenario for Turkiye would be an uncontrolled outbreak of intergroup conflict in Syria. For this reason, Ankara is likely advising the new Syrian administration to act with a degree of rational pragmatism,” Cinkara told Al Jazeera.

“The immaturity of Syria’s security apparatus makes any potential intergroup clashes harder to contain, and risks turning it into protracted ethnic and sectarian conflicts. In the short term, therefore, adopting a unitary model seems difficult,” he added.

Red lines and risks

Netanyahu, for his part, is pushing for a “Balkanised” Syria, divided along ethnic and religious lines, demanding the demilitarisation of much of southern Syria, mostly populated by the country’s Druze population.

That is a move that, if implemented, could light the touchpaper and ignite demands from members of other groups in the country, including the Kurds and Alawite, for their own tailored versions of de facto autonomy.

“Turkiye, however, has clear red lines in Syria,” says Murat Yesiltas, director of foreign policy research at SETA, a think tank in Ankara with close ties to the government.

“The US and Israel’s attempt to reshape the regional order carries various dangers and risks, deepening fragmentation in the Middle East,” Yesiltas told Al Jazeera.

In March, Israel’s most influential security think tank, the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), published a piece that warned against the nascent peace process between Turkiye and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which is seeking to close a chapter on a four-decade armed campaign against the Turkish state in a conflict that has killed more than 40,000 people.

The INSS warned that this could “weaken the ability of the Kurds in Syria to continue to operate autonomously” and contribute to Ankara “expanding its influence in southern Syria, in a way that could increase the threat to Israeli freedom of action”.

Israel’s Defence Minister Israel Katz made clear that swaths of newly occupied territory in southern Syria will be held for an “unlimited amount of time”.

As Turkiye scoped out potential military bases in Syria’s Homs province and the main airport in Hama province in coordination with the newly established Damascus government, Israel bombed the sites.

“If Tel Aviv persists on this path, a conflict between Ankara and Tel Aviv will become inevitable. Turkiye cannot accept policies that perpetuate instability on its southern border,” said Yesiltas.

But full-blown rivalry is “not inevitable” as both sides recognise the costs of confrontation, particularly given economic interdependence, Andreas Krieg, associate professor of security studies at King’s College London, told Al Jazeera.

“Israel’s threat to Turkiye is not conventional military aggression but rather the targeting of Turkish interests via indirect means,” said Krieg, speaking about Ankara’s interests in Syria, the Eastern Mediterranean and the South Caucasus.

Given Washington’s full and seemingly unconditional support for Netanyahu’s bid to “reshape the region”, Krieg says Ankara’s prescription is to “strengthen strategic deterrence, especially through expanded air-defence, missile systems and intelligence capabilities” and to pursue regional coalitions with Qatar, Jordan and Iraq while maintaining open channels with Washington to “avoid full strategic isolation”.

“Ankara must recognise that future flashpoints are more likely to emerge in the grey zone – covert operations, air strikes, and proxy competition – than in formal declarations or diplomacy,” he added.

The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) has begun the first steps towards disarmament, closing a chapter on a four-decade armed campaign against the Turkish state in a conflict that has killed more than 40,000 people.

A small ceremony was being held on Friday in Iraq’s northern Kurdish region, where 20 to 30 PKK fighters were destroying their weapons rather than surrendering them to any government or authority. The symbolic process is being conducted under tight security and is expected to unfold throughout the summer.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has welcomed the development, declaring it as “totally ripping off and throwing away the bloody shackles that were put on our country’s legs”. Erdogan also said the move would benefit the entire region.

The move follows an announcement in May by the PKK that it would abandon its armed struggle.

For most of its history, the PKK has been labelled a “terrorist” group by Turkiye, the European Union and the United States.

More than 40,000 people were killed between 1984 and 2024, with thousands of Kurds fleeing the violence in southeastern Turkiye into cities further north.

In a video aired earlier this week but recorded in June by the PKK-linked Firat News Agency, the group’s imprisoned leader Abdullah Ocalan described the moment as “a voluntary transition from the phase of armed conflict to the phase of democratic politics and law”, calling it a “historic gain”.

Ocalan has been held in solitary confinement on Imrali Island in Turkiye since his capture in 1999. Despite his imprisonment, he remains a symbolic figure for the group and broader PKK offshoots across the region.

The disarmament is being closely monitored by members of Turkiye’s Kurdish DEM party, as well as Turkish media. Further phases will take place at designated locations involving coordination between Turkiye, Iraq and the Kurdish regional government in northern Iraq.

The effect of the conflict has been deeply felt not only in Turkiye but across neighbouring countries, particularly Iraq, Syria and Iran, where the PKK and its affiliates have maintained a presence.

‘There’s a long way to go’

Reporting from Sulaimaniyah, Al Jazeera’s Mahmoud Abdelwahed described the event as “highly symbolic”, with senior figures from both the federal Iraqi government and the semi-autonomous Kurdish regional government in attendance.

Abdelwahed noted that while this marks a significant moment, the road ahead remains uncertain. “This is just the beginning and it seems there’s a long way to go,” he explained. “The PKK also have demands, including the release of their leader Abdullah Ocalan. They want him to come here to northern Iraq and lead, as they say, the democratic process.”

Abdelwahed added that the development signals a major shift for Iraq, where the PKK was officially designated a banned organisation in April last year, following a high-level security meeting between Iraqi and Turkish officials.

Speaking from Istanbul, Al Jazeera’s Sinem Koseoglu said Ankara views developments in Sulaimaniyah as a major step forward in ending the conflict that has dragged on for decades. “What is happening in Sulaimaniyah is being seen by Ankara as a critical breakthrough in the decade-long conflict that cost tens of thousands of lives, both from the Turkish side and the Kurdish side,” she said.

The move follows months of direct talks between Turkish officials and Ocalan.

Koseoglu highlighted the political significance of this moment within Turkiye. “This is an important step that Turkish President Erdogan approved this process,” she said, noting that even traditionally hardline groups have shifted position.

“The Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), which once denounced peace efforts as ‘treason’, now supports the process.”

The pro-Kurdish DEM Party is playing a key facilitation role, and the main opposition CHP – once highly critical of earlier peace attempts – now says it supports efforts to achieve peace, noted Koseoglu.

‘If the PKK leaves, there won’t be any shelling’

In northern Iraq, where the fighting has often spilled over, civilians are cautiously hopeful.

Al Jazeera’s Mahmoud Abdelwahed visited communities in the mountainous district of Amedi, near the Turkish border, where villages have been caught in the crossfire.

“Here in northern Iraq, the PKK controls hundreds of villages spread across the semi-autonomous Kurdish region,” said Abdelwahed. “Some have been turned into battlefields, severely limiting access to farmland and making life even more difficult for displaced families who are desperate to return home.”

Shirwan Sirkli, a local farmer, told Al Jazeera that the conflict destroyed his family’s livelihood. “My farm was burned down by shelling as Turkish forces and the PKK brought their conflict to our lands. My brother also lost his $300,000 worth of sheep ranches. Many of our neighbours have left the village – only 35 out of about 100 families remain.”

Turkish military operations in the area have intensified in recent years, with Ankara establishing outposts across the border and frequently attacking PKK positions.

“The presence of PKK fighters in the area has only brought disaster to us,” said Ahmad Saadullah, a local community leader, speaking to Al Jazeera. “If they leave, there won’t be any shelling. We would like to see the peace deal implemented on the ground so we can reclaim our land and live in peace.”

Three have died as blaze continues to rage in southern coastal area of Dortyol in Hatay province, which borders Syria.

A forestry worker injured in a wildfire in the western Turkish province of Izmir has died from his injuries, raising the death toll in recent days from the fires to three, as the blaze in villages of the Odemis district was brought under control but emergency crews continued to battle one in a province bordering Syria.

Worker Ragip Sahin “who was injured while fighting the fire in Odemis and was being treated in hospital, has died”, Agriculture and Forestry Minister Ibrahim Yumakli said on Saturday in a post on X. Yumakli also said the blaze in Odemis had been brought under control by Friday evening alongside six other wildfires, mostly in western and central Turkiye.

He added that firefighters were still trying to control a blaze in the southern coastal area of Dortyol in Hatay province.

Turkiye was mostly spared the recent searing heatwaves that engulfed the rest of southern Europe, but firefighters have battled more than 600 fires since June 26 in the drought-hit nation, which have been prompted by high winds.

The fire in Odemis, about 100km (60 miles) east of the resort city of Izmir, had on Thursday killed a bedridden 81-year-old man and a backhoe operator who died while helping firefighting efforts.

In a video on X, Odemis Mayor Mustafa Turan said the fire had ravaged about 5,000 hectares (12,400 acres) of land. “The fire came violently to this area, there is nothing left to burn. About 5,000 hectares was reduced to ashes,” said Turan.

On Monday, rescuers evacuated more than 50,000 people to escape a string of fires.

“According to the authorities, the fires that lasted for four days started in Tusurman village … you can still see smoke coming out from this evacuated village,” said Al Jazeera’s Sinem Koseoglu, reporting from Odemis.

“Nothing is left in this village, no one is living here and there is nothing left to reside in. After the fires erupted due to electrical cables in this village, it quickly spread to the nearby villages on this side and then to other villages. Just on the first night [of the wildfires], authorities had to evacuate five villages,” she added.

“For citizens of Turkiye living in the valleys and forests, life is becoming more difficult every year as climate change brings more wildfires. And this year, wildfires came earlier than expected to Turkiye,” said Koseoglu.

Turkiye sends help to Syria

In the meantime, in Hatay province, which borders Syria, emergency crews continued fighting a blaze that broke out Friday afternoon in the Dortyol district near a residential area and rapidly intensified due to strong winds, the state-run Anadolu Agency reported.

Some 920 homes had been evacuated as a precaution against the advancing flames, Governor Mustafa Musatli said late Friday.

Turkiye also sent two firefighting aircraft on Saturday to help neighbouring Syria battle wildfires in its northwest Latakia region.

Eleven fire trucks and water support vehicles were also dispatched, according to Raed al-Saleh, the Syrian Minister of Emergency and Disaster Management.

Turkiye’s Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya said 44 suspects have been detained in relation to 65 fires that broke out across the country, which led to the evacuation of tens of thousands of people and damaged some 200 homes.

According to the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) website, there have been 96 wildfires in Turkiye this year that have ravaged more than 49,652 hectares (122,700 acres) of land.

Experts say human-driven climate change is causing more frequent and intense wildfires and other natural disasters, and have warned Turkiye to take measures to tackle the problem.

Aref Shamtan, 73, chose to erect a tent near his decimated home in northwest Syria instead of remaining in a displacement camp following the overthrow of longtime ruler Bashar al-Assad.

“I feel good here, even among the rubble,” Shamtan said, sipping tea at the tent near his field.

Upon returning with his son after al-Assad was toppled in December, Shamtan discovered his village of al-Hawash, situated amid farmland in central Hama province, severely damaged.

His house had lost its roof and suffered cracked walls. Nevertheless, “living in the rubble is better than living in the camps” near the Turkish border, where he had resided since fleeing the conflict in 2011, Shamtan explained.

Since al-Assad’s downfall after nearly 14 years of war, the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration reports that 1.87 million Syrians who were refugees abroad or internally displaced have returned to their places of origin.

The IOM identifies the “lack of economic opportunities and essential services” as the greatest challenge facing returnees.

Unable to afford rebuilding, Shamtan decided approximately two months ago to leave the camp with his family and young grandchildren, and has begun planting wheat on his land.

Al-Hawash had been under al-Assad’s control and bordered front lines with neighbouring Idlib province, which became a stronghold for opposition groups, particularly Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the opposition fighters that spearheaded the offensive that toppled the former president.

“We cannot stay in the camps,” Shamtan maintained, even though “the village is all destroyed … and life is non-existent,” lacking fundamental services and infrastructure.

“We decided … to live here until things improve. We are waiting for organisations and the state to help us,” he added. “Life is tough.”

Local official Abdel Ghafour al-Khatib, 72, has also returned after escaping in 2019 with his wife and children to a camp near the border.

“I just wanted to get home. I was overjoyed … I returned and pitched a worn-out tent. Living in my village is the important thing,” he stated.

“Everyone wants to return,” he noted. However, many cannot afford transportation in a country where 90 percent of the population lives in poverty.

“There is nothing here – no schools, no health clinics, no water and no electricity,” al-Khatib said while sitting on the ground in his tent near what remains of his home.

The conflict, which erupted in 2011 following al-Assad’s brutal suppression of antigovernment protests, killed more than 500,000 people and displaced half of Syria’s pre-war population either internally or abroad, with many seeking refuge in Idlib province.

According to the International Organization for Migration, more than six million people remain internally displaced.

When Abdullah Ocalan said his Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, should lay down its arms and disband after more than four decades of conflict with the Turkish state and tens of thousands of deaths, there was an instant look across the border to Syria.

Syria’s northeast is largely controlled by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a Kurdish-led military force Turkiye has repeatedly fought against over the past decade.

The SDF is led by the People’s Protection Units (YPG), which Turkiye views as a “terrorist” group and the Syrian branch of the PKK. The United States, however, has backed the YPG in Syria to fight against ISIL (ISIS).

Since the fall of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in December, the SDF has been negotiating with the new Turkish-allied government in Damascus over what its future role in a newly unified Syria and as a military force will be and what kind of governance will extend to the northeast of the country.

No laying down of arms

The removal of the PKK from the equation will likely facilitate the SDF’s integration with Damascus, analysts told Al Jazeera.

“For the SDF, it makes it much easier to talk with the government in Damascus and also to de-escalate their relations with Turkey,” said Wladimir van Wilgenburg, an analyst of Kurdish politics based in Erbil, the capital of the autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq.

While the SDF rejects Turkiye’s assertions that it is the Syrian arm of the PKK, analysts said the groups have strong links.

While the PKK’s announcement that it would heed Ocalan’s call and disarm was welcomed by SDF leader Mazloum Abdi, he said his group would not disarm and Ocalan’s decision did not extend to Syria.

But this could give the group further incentives to bring its fighting force and governing structure – called the Autonomous Administration in North and East Syria (AANES) – under the umbrella of the new government in Damascus.

When reached for comment on Monday, an AANES spokesperson told Al Jazeera: “The autonomous administration is not concerned with the internal affairs of other countries.”

The SDF has clashed with Turkish-backed Syrian factions, including in the immediate days after the fall of al-Assad’s regime, and sustained attacks from Turkiye’s air force.

In December, the US negotiated a ceasefire between the SDF and the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army, which has since been incorporated into Syria’s new armed forces.

Abdi has been in discussions with the new Syrian government, led by Ahmed al-Sharaa, over how best to integrate the SDF into the post-Baathist Party security forces and govern Syria’s northeast.

Increased pressure to negotiate

The SDF has engaged in the talks with the pressure of an impending US troop withdrawal from northeast Syria.

Without a US presence and support, the SDF has feared it might be vulnerable to attacks from Turkiye or Turkish-backed factions in Syria.

But should the PKK’s decision to disarm bring a feeling of security to Turkiye along its border with Syria, analysts said the relations between the SDF and Turkiye would also likely improve.

“We know that Turkey’s hardline stance towards the SDF was very much linked to concerns over the PKK and not so much about the SDF being Kurdish-dominated,” Thomas Pierret, a Syria specialist and senior researcher at the Institute of Research and Study on the Arab and Islamic Worlds, told Al Jazeera.

This is evident by Turkiye’s relations with Masoud Barzani and his Kurdish Democratic Party in northern Iraq’s Kurdish region, Pierret said.

Of course, this new reality “doesn’t mean it will be easy”, according to Pierret. Under the agreement between Turkiye and the PKK, some fighters could be relocated to third countries – essentially sent into exile. There’s also the possibility some fighters may decide to make their way to northeast Syria, in which case, Pierret said, Turkiye could see the SDF as a haven for PKK fighters.

So Turkiye will keep a close eye on the SDF in Syria and the SDF’s negotiations with Damascus.

In the past, the Turkish military has launched drones, fired artillery and carried out air strikes against Kurdish fighters, including the SDF.  And analysts said military options may still be on the table going forward.

“For now, they seem to be letting negotiations take their course,” Aron Lund, a fellow at Century International with a focus on Syria, told Al Jazeera. “And that’s probably related both to events in Syria but also to the PKK process.”

Beyond Syria

The PKK’s affiliates and allies are spread across regions of the Middle East where Kurds live.

Historically, the PKK has operated in Turkiye as well as northern Iraq. And their allies have operated in places where Kurds live in Syria and Iran. Their struggles have often opposed the national authorities in those places or sought self-determination or federalism.

One example is the Kurdistan Free Life Party, or PJAK, in Iran, which says its goal is to declare an autonomous Kurdish region in Iran.

“It’s unclear what will happen with the … PJAK because they also have a number of Iranian Kurdish fighters inside the PKK,” van Wildenburg said.

“It’s possible that they will continue as a political party and not as an armed group because they are already not doing much fighting against the Iranian state anyway.”

Analysts agree it is unclear whether the PKK’s allies will follow Ocalan’s lead and lay down their arms or, as is the case with the SDF in Syria, if they will view their own struggles as independent and make decisions on their own.