How al-Sharaa’s Syria May Work with the Turkish Toolkit
Syria’s govt draws on the AKP’s mode of development and control. This frame shows how Islamist praxis adapts when survival requires efficient governance. Will this work, and who cares about democracy?
Contrary to the neo-orientalist imagination, the Syrian state’s core bureaucratic and administrative institutions are not run by men with long beards in military khakis or shalwar kameez but by technocrats who returned from exile and know what they are doing.
Just one small example: Syria’s 47-year-old minister of communications and information technology, Abdesselam Haykal. He fled the country in 2012 because he saw himself on the Assad regime’s arrest list, did his master’s degree at SOAS London and took over his family’s shipping and logistics business headquartered in Abu Dhabi. He now moves across the region seeking investors for his ambitious public and private ventures, including a plan to position Syria as ‘a digital Silk Road’ that would need 4500 km of fibre-optic lines and new submarine cables. He says thousands of other exiles with backgrounds in technology are preparing to return as he did. Now listen to him:
“The other thing is, from a security point of view, whether the country is safe for people to operate in, to live in, to thrive in? Probably Damascus today is safer than New York or Chicago. Are there concerns? Of course. Not every part of Syria is Damascus. But that’s a work in progress. I do not really anticipate anything that could derail us from a security point of view, unless something dramatic happens, which I do not see on the horizon. We are on track to increase the level of safety and security in the country. It might seem to an outsider as Mission Impossible. That’s why you need the will, because it is a complex situation. So we have the intent and we have the will. What we need more of are the tools. Technology is a tool. Money is a tool. Experience is a tool. Expertise is a tool. And we’re building that tool kit.”
You may hang on his hyperbolic claim about Damascus being safer than New York or Chicago, yet the words on experience, expertise and the toolkit matters more. At least for me, because those words echo something I have heard many times before.
That vocabulary is foundational in the “big brother role (you can call it mentorship)” that the AKP used to create a success story out of the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan) in Egypt after the fall of Mubarak and simultaneously Ennahda in Tunisia. The political confluence that emerged in the aftermath of the Arab Uprisings among these three distinctive Islamist entities offered rich insight into the evolution and trajectory of Islamist praxis, since the AKP’s relationships with Ikhwan’s political party FJP and with Tunisian Ennahda revealed what Islamist parties and leaders aspire to and the limits of the malleability of their ideology.
In a very similar quest to become legitimate actors that can govern, al-Sharaa and al-Shaibani now also rely a lot on “the tool kit” based on AKP’s “experience and expertise” in governance and development.
If you go back to my DPhil thesis that started almost 9 years ago and read the book that it is based on, The New Spirit of Islamism, you would see these words, along with the crown word “success,” being used greatly among the elites of the AKP, the Egyptian Ikhwan and the Tunisian Ennahda when they are describing their relationship to me.
As I have been arguing since the first couple of days of al-Sharaa’s ascent in Damascus, a similar process of diffusion is happening between the AKP and al-Sharaa’s team. The relationship of HTS and the Turkish state goes back almost a decade. The meetings with the civil AKP teams, on the other hand, only began with the fall of the Assad regime.
But please do not think of this as a robotic downloading of tactics but as a natural diffusion of a mindset.
Two points matter here. First, Turkish mentorship and diplomatic support have been central to al-Sharaa’s international legitimacy. Neither side likes to acknowledge this because it would strengthen Israel’s argument that Syria has become a Turkish mandate, yet President Trump speaks openly about this diffusion across different settings. Second, the mindset of service and development remains the ABC of Erdoğan’s politics, and al-Sharaa repeats it in his own interactions with Syrians. Last week Syria saw twenty-four hours of uninterrupted electricity for the first time in two decades. Even the fiercest critics will pause if basic services improve. Legitimacy begins there. Even the most secular Syrians will adjust to the idea that a former jihadist governs Damascus if the lights stay on and the signal stays strong. Transitional periods have their own logic and cycle and recycle.
The Ikhwan could not meet the managerial demands of the moment. Ennahda might have survived if the pandemic had not intervened. We cannot know in any counterfactual universe whether the AKP’s toolkit would have produced success stories in post-revolutionary Egypt or Tunisia.
It certainly did not bring the outcome that all three parties intended, which was to write another success story (other than the AKP’s) in governance. But focusing blindly and obsessively on the failures of Ikhwan and Ennahda in post-revolutionary Egypt and Tunisia does not offer meaningful clues about the aspirations of Islamists in that specific interval or the changing morphology of the ideology. What matters from that period is the clear record of what these movements sought, how they operated on a daily basis, and how far their leaders were willing to stretch their ideological commitments in order to rule.
Sharaa’s, and as a matter of fact the prime jihadist group al-Qaeda’s, praxis shifted since 2015 (see my earlier post). Jihadism became local, as in a holy war not waged in faraway lands but fought in their local arenas. Furthermore, since 2016 al-Sharaa has been working with US and Turkish intelligence, therefore its recent formal inclusion in the anti-ISIS alliance, or the fruits of US intel sharing with the Sharaa government, have brought remarkable successes in raids that led to the capture of current top leadership of ISIS in Syria. This should not shock anyone.
What I am trying to say, I guess, is that the sharp shift that the world sees in Sharaa is not so sharp and abrupt but in line with a broader shift and trajectory in Islamist movements at the beginning of the 21st century.
Now al-Sharaa and his closest teammate, foreign minister al-Shaibani, are using a toolbox shaped by the AKP’s self-proclaimed success formula. The Turkish government is very happy with the current outlook. The half-serious joke in Ankara nowadays is that Sharaa and his public-facing team (particularly al-Shaibani who had done his graduate studies in Istanbul) have adapted to Western settings so quickly that they may soon discover LGBTQ rights. Overstatement aside, it is only a matter of time before al-Sharaa begins to echo Erdoğan’s favourite motto that ‘service to the people is a form of prayer (Halka hizmet, Hakk’a hizmettir)’, using it to consolidate both his elite entourage of former jihadis and the wider population.
The authoritarian triad, as if anyone cares
No one wants Syria to succumb back into the abyss and all sincerely hope for stability and peace for the war-torn country and its people. However, stability or al-Sharaa being perfectly adaptable or no longer a jihadist does not mean democracy or free speech for the Syrian people.
If anyone, especially within the US and European security apparatus, still worries that Sharaa will return to the jihadism of his late twenties or act in complicity with ISIS while presenting another face to the world, they can take a sigh of relief. There is no recorded road from the presidential palace down to jihadi bunkers.
He will fight all extremist factions beyond his control and all Iranian influence and Hezbollah with full force. Not because he hates extremists or jihadists for the sake of Islam, but to maintain his power, an aspiration he has demonstrated throughout his whole being. In this sense he is much like Erdogan. The motive is power. He seeks it and will try to maintain it with the same tenacity that Erdoğan has displayed for two and a half decades.
And again, in keeping with his steps following Erdoğan, there may, and most probably will, come a point where his rule begins to harden into an authoritarian form unless something dramatic such as an assassination or countercoup intervenes (which looks unlikely at the moment).
Not because he was a jihadist or because he is an Islamist and that Islam has this all-encompassing doctrine that naturally spills over into politics. But first because his rule in Idlib had been quite authoritarian. Brutal, authoritarian, yet more efficient compared to other places in Syria.
And also because Islamism is a (thin-centred) right-wing ideology, and as with all right-wing ideologies we see around the world, its centre gravitates toward an authoritarian triad marked by a close covariance of three features: submission, aggression and conventionalism. From there come the familiar shades of ethnocentrism and intolerance toward plurality.
But I am sure that as long as he remains inside the neoliberal order and keeps the market open, few will object. If he is as lucky as Erdoğan, the rest can be waved away after a certain point as vulgar parlance or as ‘domestic matters’ in the boulevard of international politics.
Dear Ms Başaran, do you believe that the ‘tool kit’ will eventually shift the approach to the Kurdish population in Syria to be more similar to that in Türkiye, in terms of internal cultural imperialism? Although the ongoing çözüm süreci now could be used as evidence against the persistence of internal cultural imperialism in Türkiye (although I would not agree with this sentiment), the Turkish goal of preventing an autonomous Kurdish region in the north of Syria suggests the possibility of the utilization of internal cultural imperialism by the Syrian government to appease Turkish wishes. I would love to know what your thoughts on this possibility are.