- Turkey offered to rebuild Syria’s demolished military.
- It’s an opening to grow its influence with its southern neighbor and counter Iran.
- “Turkey will likely try to fill Russia’s role,” a Middle East analyst told BI.
Turkey offered to help rebuild the Syrian military shattered by the fall of the long-ruling Assad regime and Israeli airstrikes, potentially filling a void left by Russia’s diminishing forces.
Limited Turkish arms are inroads to bolstering the victorious Hayat Tahrir al-Sham Islamist movement in Syria, but Turkey will likely need financial support to pay for more extensive military rebuilding that could allow it to become the dominant foreign power in Syria, regional experts said.
“Turkey will likely try to fill Russia’s role, including in relation to Israel,” said Aron Lund, a fellow with Century International and a Middle East analyst at the Swedish Defense Research Agency. “A Turkish contingent in the Golan Heights, or even just a military liaison of some sort, could back up UN missions and serve as a buffer and facilitator between Israeli and Syrian leaders.”
“It’s exactly the kind of role Turkey would want. It would institutionalize Ankara’s role not just in Syria, but in Arab-Israeli peacemaking.”
Russia and the former Soviet Union were long the leading suppliers of military hardware to Syria under the rule of recently deposed President Bashar al-Assad and his father Hafez, who died in 2000. Much of the former regime’s remaining military stockpiles were destroyed by Israeli airstrikes in December.
“While Turkey may play an important role in providing military hardware, it is unlikely to fully become the primary supplier of the new Syrian Army,” Suleyman Ozeren, a lecturer at the American University and senior fellow at the Orion Policy Institute, told Business Insider.
“With Western reluctance to arm HTS’s military and Turkey’s limited capacity, Syria will likely need to diversify its sources of heavy weaponry, potentially increasing its dependence on Gulf Cooperation Council countries” — Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. These countries share an interest in countering Iran’s influence.
Ozkan Bilgin/Anadolu via Getty Images
HTS leader Ahmed al-Sharaa recently said it could take up to four years before holding elections. Turkey may have an opportunity to extend its influence in Syria by backing a viable government whose immediate needs are likely to center on guns, vehicles and drones to consolidate internal control.
“Syria is awash in arms, ministries and state agencies are largely staffed by people appointed under Assad’s rule, and there’s no apparent economic base for any of this,” Lund told BI. “So, I would caution that Syria’s next government is still pretty much a hypothetical thing.”
“The new government will need military support and equipment,” Lund said. “The old military, or what was left of it, imploded when Assad’s regime collapsed.”
Turkey is well-positioned to fulfill the new regime’s likely needs. In Libya, in the wake of the Gaddafi regime’s 2011 collapse, it equipped the UN-recognized government in Tripoli with Turkish-built Bayraktar TB2 drones and Kipri armored vehicles, replacing the former regime’s destroyed arsenal. The TB2 drones played a decisive role in pushing back the militia forces of General Khalifa Haftar in 2020 after they had besieged Tripoli.
Building up a large conventional army to compete with foreign rivals will not likely be a priority for Damascus anytime soon, and a ground-up rebuilding will take years and large expenditures.
“The primary needs of Syria’s next government won’t be to wage major conventional wars. Rather, they’ll need the kind of stuff that helps them overwhelm local rivals, keep order in the chaotic rural periphery, hunt down Islamic State remnants, and patrol the borders,” Lund said.
Despite having the second-largest army in NATO and a formidable domestic arms industry, Turkey could still struggle to build a conventional Syrian military from the ground up.
“In so far as that can’t already be found in Syria, Turkey seems well placed to provide it,” Lund said. “The question, of course, is who would pay for it. Qatar might be willing to step in to fund some purchases.”
Turkey could train Syria’s new military, host its officers for military studies in Turkey, and eventually hold joint exercises that could pave the way for a deeper alliance, Lund said.
But standing up a military in a devastated country may prove more challenging than fueling an insurgency.
“Turkey will likely pursue defense and security agreements with Syria while carefully navigating its relationships with Arab states to avoid diplomatic isolation,” Ozeren said. “However, creating an army is very much different than supporting or creating a proxy force which could risk long-term instability in the region.”
“Ultimately, the question remains whether Turkey has the capacity to provide the necessary training and hardware to establish a fully functioning standard army in Syria,” Ozeren added. “The experiences in Libya and with the [Syria National Army opposition group] do not provide a definitive answer to this challenge.”
Paul Iddon is a freelance journalist and columnist who writes about Middle East developments, military affairs, politics, and history. His articles have appeared in a variety of publications focused on the region.
