Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the President of Turkey, has imperial ambitions. He seeks to revive Turkish influence and where possible, rule, in the former lands of Ottoman Empire. More on his ambitions can be found here:
Why Erdogan’s Turkish Empire Is an Emerging Threat
by Shoshana Bryen, Algemeiner, December 30, 2024:
The world was once a series of empires. The British Empire, at its peak in 1922, covered about a quarter of the Earth’s land and ruled over 458 million people. The Russian Empire once covered about 8,800,000 sq/mi, roughly one-sixth of the world’s landmass, making it the third-largest empire in history, behind only the British and Mongols. An 1897 census recorded 125.6 million people under Russian control. Genghis Khan’s Mongol Empire, while short, was the largest contiguous empire in history.
The Ottoman Empire lasted from 1301 to 1922, and at one point, included parts of Turkey, Egypt, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Macedonia, Hungary, Palestine, Jordan, and Lebanon. It was, in some ways and at some times, a relatively benign occupation of other people, though decidedly not for Greeks, Armenians, or Kurds.
Why does it matter? We don’t do empires anymore. Do we?
That depends. Turkey now, under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is projecting its next empire — a scary combination of ISIS-related religious extremism, nationalist prejudice, and Western weaponry.
Erdogan gave a speech last week. The key paragraph is this:
Turkey is much bigger than Turkey as a nation. We cannot limit our horizon to 782,000 sq/km, Just as a person cannot escape from his destiny by fleeing it, Turkey as a nation cannot flee or hide from its destiny. We must see, accept and act according to the mission that history has given us as a nation. Those who ask, “What is Turkey doing in Libya, Syria, and Somalia?” may not be able to conceive the mission and the vision.
And, if you couldn’t “conceive the mission,” Bilal Erdogan, his son, clarified for you. At a massive rally, he exhorted the crowd: “Yesterday Hagia Sophia (once a Church in Istanbul), today the Umayyad Mosque (Damascus), tomorrow Al-Aqsa (the site of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem).”
Today, Turkey illegally occupies a large swath of northern Syria, claiming only to have in interest in defeating the PKK –– considered by Ankara to be a Kurdish terror organization. [For the US, the Kurds were an essential partner in defeating ISIS in Syria and northern Iraq, and remain an ally.]
Between October 2019 and January 2024, the Turkish military carried out more than 100 attacks on oil fields, gas facilities, and power stations in Kurdish-held areas. According to the BBC in October 2024, Ankara cut off access to electricity and water for more than a million people….
Turkey has not taken over Damascus, but Turkish troops are now ensconced in northeastern Syria, determined to crush the local Kurdish forces that Ankara claims, inaccurately, all belong to the Kurdish terrorist group PKK. And the Turks have no intention of leaving Syria. They are there to stay and to influence the choice of regime that will rule in Damascus. Bilal Erdogan has been hinting at what his father hopes to accomplish in Syria — a territorial expansion that his father no doubt thinks Turkey has earned since it backed the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) group that took over Syria.
Nothing — not a UN Resolution, not a plea from the new Syrian government, not a request from Turkey’s fellow members in NATO — will make Erdogan pull his troops out of Syria. They are there to stay.
According to a Turkish news source, as a new Syrian military establishment begins to take shape, “Turkey will actively provide consultant-expert support to the restructuring process of Syria’s sea, air, and land forces. In addition … Turkish military presence will be included in five different points of Syria.”
The new force will number 300,000, according to the Turkish report, including 40,000 fighters from HTS, and 50,000 from the Syrian National Army (SNA). The latter is actually an auxiliary of the Turkish Armed Forces. SNA forces have been deployed by Turkey as a proxy in Libya and elsewhere.
And the rest of the force of 300,000 that the Turks are planning — 210,000 troops — will be members of the regular Turkish army. That will ensure that the Turks remain in military control of Syria, whatever civilian regime is in power in Damascus.
Under Erdogan, Turkey — which in the long-distant days when Kemalists ruled Turkey was friendly to the Jewish state — has moved steadily into the anti-Israel camp. It sent a flotilla of ships in 2010 carrying supplies in an attempt to break the “Israeli blockade of Gaza” — the Mavi Marmara flotilla — that led to a bloody encounter between Turkish activists on one of the vessels and Israeli commandos who rappelled down from hovering helicopters and managed to take over that ship, killing 10 Turks who attacked them in the process.
Turkey operates across Africa, as Erdogan noted in his speech. In January 2020, Turkey sent military forces to Libya in support of the Government of National Accord, the Tripoli government, followed by as many as 18,000 soldiers of the Syrian National Army (SNA — see above), which included child soldiers. Turkey has defense agreements with Somalia, Kenya, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Ghana. Turkish drones have been recently delivered to Chad, Togo, Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger….
Libya was a natural target for Turkish troops. The country was, after all, once part of the Ottoman Empire, and the Turks still feel they have a right to intervene where they once ruled.. They sent both their own Turkish troops, and 18,000 Arab soldiers of the Syrian National Army, which receives weapons and money from Ankara, to fight in Libya in support of the Government of National Accord. Turkey has been busy making defense agreements with sub-Saharan African countries, extending its influence far beyond the territories that were once part of the Ottoman Empire, including Rwanda, Ethiopia, Nigeria and Ghana. It has also provided Turkish drones to Togo, Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, not one of which was ever part of the Ottoman Empire. How close a military alliance Turkey has with each of these countries is unclear. But Turkey is certainly trying to bind those countries closer to it by its defense pacts with some of them, and its supply of critical weaponry to others. It’s a sign of Erdogan’s far-flung ambitions to deepen Turkish influence throughout sub-Saharan Africa.
In the latest “scramble for Africa,” the Turks want to have access to Africa’s mineral wealth, a and are attempting to use Islam as a tool to persuade Muslims in Africa to favor economic ties with their fellow Muslims in Turkey over other countries — Russia, and especially China — that are also seeking to exploit Africa’s mineral wealth.
Turkey’s continued membership in NATO should not be tolerated. Erdogan, after all, has said that he can foresee a coming war “between the crescent and the cross” — Islam and Christianity — and he left no doubt as to which side Turkey would be on, even suggesting that Turkey was the natural leader of the Muslims. That should be enough to expel Turkey from NATO. That would require changing the NATO rules so that the a member can be expelled with a majority rather than a unanimous vote.
Trump should lead the way in demanding a change in the NATO rules so that Turkey can be expelled, which would leave Ankara exposed to its enemies, including Iran and Russia. It can win back American favor, and retain its membership in NATO, if it ends its occupation of northern Syria (and thus its war on Syrian Kurds), and its anti-Israel campaign as well, by expelling members of Hamas and ceasing to threaten Israel, the way Bilal Erdogan did when he said to a huge crowd in Istanbul: “Yesterday Hagia Sophia (once a Church in Istanbul), today the Umayyad Mosque (Damascus), tomorrow Al-Aqsa (the site of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem).”
Erdogan should pull in his horns, cease to hold onto Syrian territory, stop making war on the Syrian Kurds, and end making threats against Israel, and supporting the terror group Hamas. A revived Ottoman Empire, enlarged with black African countries, is a pipe dream; so is Erdogan’s vision of a war between ”crescent and cross” that Turkey would lead. The Arab states remember with horror what they endured under the rule of the Ottoman Turks and have no desire to come under Turkish sway again. If Erdogan wants to expand Turkish influence and even, possibly, its territory, he should look to the five “Turkic” stans — Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan — that might be susceptible to the siren song of pan-Turkism.
