Notes

Whoever controls Damascus. They’d cooperated for years in the Syrian civil war against the now-fallen dictator, Bashar al-Assad—but only met for the first time on February 4: Ahmed al-Sharaa, the country’s interim leader, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the president of Turkey.

Since the meeting, Sharaa has said he wants to pursue a deep strategic relationship with Turkey. Which makes sense: Turkey had long provided weapons and money to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the rebel group Sharaa led in the civil war. Sharaa and Erdoğan also share a similar ideology of political Islam, a broad ideology on which the principles of the Muslim faith provide the foundations for a country’s secular laws. And for Turkey, having Syria as close Arab ally in a critical location in the Middle East would be invaluable.

It’s an alliance that could reshape the region.

The complication is, since Sharaa and HTS toppled Assad in mid-January, almost every other powerful actor in the region has developed its own strategic designs for Syria. And the country will need massive investment to rebuild after more than a decade of civil war, sitting as it does on only modest reserves of oil and natural gas.

Last week, the emir of Qatar visited Syria last week to meet with Sharaa. And a day before his meeting with Erdoğan, Sharaa flew to Saudi Arabia to meet with its crown prince and de facto ruler, Mohammad bin Salman. Qatar and Saudi have far more capabilities to pay for Syria’s reconstruction, whereas Turkey’s economy has been struggling for years.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia and Erdoğan have long been deeply divided over political Islam: The Saudi royal family profess devotion to Islam but see their hereditary authority as separate, and they’ve always viewed Islamist parties as threats to their regime and other Gulf monarchies.

So who has the upper hand here?

Shortly after the fall of Assad, Vali Nasr looked at the dramatic recent changes in and around Syria. Nasr says Assad’s ouster caused the overnight transformation of the political landscape in the Middle East. For one, it means an acute loss of power and standing for Iran—as Assad was a key ally in the so-called Axis of Resistance Iran formed to counter what it casts as the regional dominance of the U.S. and Israel. But it also means new opportunities for the other leading regional rivals: Turkey, the Gulf states—Qatar, Saudi, and the United Arab Emirates—and Israel.

Still, Nasr says, there’s a bigger question in the background. The longstanding, shifting rivalries among the players in this immediate power struggle will continue to influence the Middle East. But the region’s deeper challenges don’t come from these players directly; they come from the region’s broken states—including Syria itself, but also Lebanon, Yemen, and Iraq—and from the chronically volatile situation in Israel-Palestine. The ways those challenges play out, Nasr says, will determine what happens in Syria more than anything Sharaa works out in the near term with Erdoğan or any of his rivals.

—Michael Bluhm