Syria: The Crisis and Its Implications

Syrian Crisis: Reasons and Implications in a nutshell

As the following section will demonstrate, border politics that are predominantly interest-based, and embedded in such contentious contexts, bear great potential for increasing the degree of interdependence at the regional—domestic nexus and for generating serious implications for domestic politics.

In the earlier stage of the Syrian conflict, Turkey's pattern of border management was significantly modified as an outcome of its liberal refugee admission policy. Initially, Turkey allowed the entry of Syrian nationals indiscriminately, with or without valid documents. The changed pattern of control under the open door policy had a blurring effect on the border in practice, as the regulatory and selective functions of the border in respect of human mobility became largely eroded.

In conjunction with Turkey's support of the FSA and its later engagement with a more diverse consortium of armed actors actively fighting in the Syrian civil war, the blurring effect of the refugee admission policy brought with it a highly contentious situation of high porosity at the border. In that period, claims proliferated as to Turkey's deliberate toleration of a high degree of porosity so as to turn a blind eye to bidirectional border crossing by armed rebels, arms transfers—with the involvement of foreign powers such as the United States, Saudi Arabia and Qatar 39 —and the circulation of foreign terrorist fighters.

Nonetheless, its border management pattern at earlier stages of the conflict can retrospectively be characterized as one that, unintentionally, contributed to the empowerment of extremist groups, in terms of personnel, operational networks and economic resources.

While the contentious porosity of the border continued to preoccupy public debate, after the downing of a Turkish jet by Syrian security forces in mid Turkey started to enhance its military presence at parts of the border, both in order to deter the Syrian regime and arguably also as a pre-emptive move against the PYD's territorial gains. In October the parliament passed a motion authorizing the Turkish armed forces TAF to engage in extraterritorial operations, justified by the increasing security threat at the Syrian border.

These were installed at three locations at the border, representing the invocation of Turkey's international alliances to maintain the border status quo. Armed conflict in Syria gradually expanded towards the border during , leading to the deterioration of security within Turkey's border areas, particularly those around Hatay province.

Following these bombings, the authorities declared the launching of several projects to enhance physical border security. Illustrating this region-wide mobilization, and intensified connections between the Kurds either side of the border, was the increasing flow from of Turkey's Kurdish citizens across the border into Qamishli to fight for the YPG against what was then Jabhat al Nusra. The securitization trend continued as ISIS and the PYD and the YPG increasingly acquired control at the border, as conflict spillover intensified, and as Turkey's international legitimacy started to suffer owing to widely shared suspicions about its toleration of cross-border circulation by armed groups.

By , Turkey had erected 13 kilometres of walls, dug kilometres of ditches, and installed kilometres of barbed wire along its Syrian border. By , half of the 40, military personnel guarding Turkey's borders were deployed at the Syrian border. At the same time it accelerated the process of completely sealing off its border with Syria. Launched in July and costing 2 billion Turkish lira, this comprised measures including the erection of modular walls, barbed-wire barriers and mobile watchtowers, and the installation of high-tech cameras at the border.

Thus, the trend of securitization and sealing the border has progressively continued since mid By February , the length of modular walls at the border reached 80 kilometres. Ankara aims to reach its ultimate objective of fencing off kilometres of the kilometre border by the end of The civil war in Syria quickly turned into a conflict mainly between an Alawite ruling minority and Sunni rebels: The AKP government's presentation of the conflict on similar lines within domestic politics contributed to the sectarian framing of the neighbouring civil war in Turkey.

In a region already characterized by a lack of congruence between state borders and identity boundaries, the accentuation of identity-based cleavages and solidarities within and between states has contributed to a context where societies and politics are increasingly framed by ethno-sectarian interconnections and fragmentations.

What is Syrian Crisis?

Turkey's border management modalities, leading to high degrees of porousness and selective im permeability before , directly interfered with these ethno-sectarian cleavages and solidarities. The state's border management modalities were strongly contested by sections of society that perceived them as either assimilatory or discriminatory. The ways in which Turkey's contentious border politics led to an increased ethno-sectarian structuring of politics within Turkey highlight the complex links between state borders and identity boundaries, and illustrate the role of border politics in enhancing interdependence between domestic and regional politics.

The high levels of political contestation of the state's border management patterns, which reflect highly centralized conceptions of statehood, illustrate the difficulty such conceptions have in accommodating ethno-religiously diverse societies in the MENA region. Border politics in the context of the Syrian conflict had impact at both local and national levels. The repercussions at the local level were twofold.

In border provinces such as Hatay, inhabited by sizeable Arab Alawite communities, the demographic and sociological balance was destabilized by the arrival of large numbers of predominantly Sunni Arab refugees. This destabilization, together with the free circulation of armed rebels in border regions, resulted in a sense of unrest and perceptions of insecurity, particularly among non-Sunni and non-Muslim communities. On the other hand, local Kurdish populations contested what they saw as ethnically discriminatory state border politics. The construction of fences within the framework of partial securitization of the border, particularly the barrier between Nusaybin and PYD-controlled Qamishli in October , provoked strong protest by local populations and Kurdish political actors.

Peace and Democracy Party accused the government of discriminating against Kurdish-populated areas in Syria in its uneven dispatching of official humanitarian aid, and of blocking the border to the passage of locally financed Kurdish aid. The sectarian framing of the event itself, by both government and the opposition, in the aftermath of the attacks contributed considerably to the accentuation of sect-based divisions.

Nationalist Movement Party and the pro-Kurdish BDP—held the government's biased meddling with Syria and the complete lack of border control responsible for the attacks. The CHP accused the government of pursuing a sectarian foreign policy, supporting jihadists, and creating fertile ground for domestic Alevi—Sunni conflict through its undermining of border security, in pursuit of its aims in Syria. The eventual securitization of the border largely diminished the public and political attention paid to the links between border politics and sectarian cleavages.

However, the periods of high border porosity played a role in making it possible for groups with extremist religious agendas, particularly ISIS, to infiltrate Turkey, organize cells, recruit militants and perpetrate numerous violent attacks. Whether the state was using the border as a means of exclusion or inclusion along ethno-national lines became the central question during the siege of Kobane in the autumn of , once more highlighting the interconnectedness of the Kurdish issue within the context of the Syrian conflict, and the role Turkey's border politics played in the augmentation of this interconnectedness.

People's Democratic Party 69 called on the government to open a humanitarian corridor and to allow the passage of military reinforcements from other PYD-controlled territories in Syria and from the Kurdistan Autonomous Region in Iraq. The government ruled out the option of allowing military transfer to the PYD and the YPG because of their links to the PKK, and instead of opening a humanitarian corridor admitted , Kurds fleeing Kobane. By the end of the unrest that lasted for a week, 46 people had died as a result of armed street clashes and the heavy-handed response by riot police.

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After the unrest, at the end of October, Turkey allowed the passage of military reinforcements from the Kurdistan Autonomous Region in Iraq to Kobane. In the longer term, the Kobane protests became a turning-point on the path towards the accentuation of ethnic boundaries, the dramatic deterioration of the peace process, and the replacement of political dialogue by securitized and conflict-oriented approaches and actors.

This article has examined the impact of the violent transition process in Syria since on Turkey's border management modalities and the implications for Turkish domestic politics of the state's instrumentally changing border management patterns between and Particular attention has been paid to the interplay between contentious border politics and the politicization of identity boundaries. The analysis has demonstrated that dynamics in Syria after encouraged Turkey to seek enhanced regional sway by attempting to influence the post-conflict power reconfiguration, as well as to safeguard its own territorial integrity and centralized nation-state structure against PKK-linked Kurdish nationalist mobilization.

Turkey's constant pursuit of these two objectives, along with its recalibration of strategies in the face of continuously changing power configurations in Syria, and the security threats emanating from the conflict, resulted in changing border management modalities. The specific ways in which the border functioned as a gateway for some and as a barrier for others, intertwined with the existing identity boundaries that demarcate society in a complex and overlapping fashion within and across state borders, became a highly contested issue.

As border management patterns were deeply embedded in regional and domestic politics, structured increasingly in ethno-sectarian terms, the state's specific patterns of border management and their outcomes were seen as a matter of discrimination or assimilation, particularly in the eyes of minorities. The major implication for domestic politics has been an overall hardening of sectarian, and particularly ethnic, boundaries.

The case of Turkey demonstrates that border politics have the potential to augment already high levels of interconnectedness and fragmentation in the post MENA context. The case of Turkey is also significant in terms of our understanding of the relationship between statehood, sovereignty and borders in the Middle East, in four ways. First, while acknowledging that full state control over the entirety of its borders is largely a conceptual construct, the role played by the Turkish state in the fluctuating nature of the border over decades, and particularly in the years between and , shows that the central authority has considerable power over the regulatory, and hence inclusionary and exclusionary, function of the border.

The use of this discretionary power has significant impacts on both local populations and the entire society, and hence on politics. Turkey's border management pattern during the early part of the conflict also illustrates the point that the problem is not always an unintentional loss of control over the border—a problem often attributed to states in the Middle East—caused by the state's incapacity or indifference in respect of securing its borders.

The OPCW said the blister agent was used in an attack on the northern town of Marea in August that killed a baby. Neighbouring Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey have struggled to cope with one of the largest refugee exoduses in recent history.

The warring parties have compounded the problems by refusing humanitarian agencies access to civilians in need. The armed rebellion has evolved significantly since its inception. Secular moderates are now outnumbered by Islamists and jihadists, whose brutal tactics have caused global outrage.

So-called Islamic State has capitalised on the chaos and taken control of large swathes of Syria and Iraq, where it proclaimed the creation of a "caliphate" in June Its many foreign fighters are involved in a "war within a war" in Syria, battling rebels and rival jihadists from the al-Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front, as well as government and Kurdish forces.

In September , a US-led coalition launched air strikes inside Syria in an effort to "degrade and ultimately destroy" IS. But the coalition has avoided attacks that might benefit Mr Assad's forces. Russia began an air campaign targeting "terrorists" in Syria a year later, but opposition activists say its strikes have mostly killed Western-backed rebels and civilians.

In the political arena, opposition groups are also deeply divided, with rival alliances battling for supremacy.

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However, the exile group has little influence on the ground in Syria and its primacy is rejected by many opponents of Mr Assad. With neither side able to inflict a decisive defeat on the other, the international community long ago concluded that only a political solution could end the conflict in Syria. The UN Security Council has called for the implementation of the Geneva Communique , which envisages a transitional governing body with full executive powers "formed on the basis of mutual consent".

Talks in early , known as Geneva II, broke down after only two rounds, with then-UN special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi blaming the Syrian government's refusal to discuss opposition demands. Mr Brahimi's successor, Staffan de Mistura, focused on establishing a series of local ceasefires.

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His plan for a "freeze zone" in Aleppo was rejected, but a three-year siege of the Homs suburb of al-Wair was successfully brought to an end in December At the same time, the conflict with IS lent fresh impetus to the search for a political solution in Syria. The US and Russia led efforts to get representatives of the government and the opposition to attend "proximity talks" in Geneva in January to discuss a Security Council-endorsed road map for peace, including a ceasefire and a transitional period ending with elections.

What began as another Arab Spring uprising against an autocratic ruler has mushroomed into a brutal proxy war that has drawn in regional and world powers. Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Notify me of new posts by email. What is Syrian Crisis? Integrate Learning With Test-Taking!

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