President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is riding high. Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the former Al Qaeda affiliate Turkey subsidized, armed, and advised, rampaged through Syria and sent President Bashar al-Assad fleeing to a Moscow exile.
While HTS leader Ahmed al-Sharaa has shed his nom de guerre Abu Muhammad al-Jawlani and adopted a moderate face, at least rhetorically, he deftly sidesteps questions about the imposition of his brand of radical Sunni Islamism on society. Regarding questions about alcohol, for example, he said a constitutional council will decide later. Christians and liberals demonstrate freedom from religious rule not because they expect freedom but because they fear the direction Sharaa is leading the country. Much of the diplomatic drive to win moderation has less to do with sincere conversion away from Al Qaeda’s core ideology and more to do with a desire to become the conduit for billions of dollars in international reconstruction funds.
While Turkish nationalists celebrate Erdogan as he promotes terrorism against Israel, threatens genocide against Syria’s Kurds, and begins to piece together the former components of the Ottoman Empire, they may soon come to understand that Turkey’s victory in Syria is Pyrrhic. Whenever regimes promote Islamist extremism as a tool of foreign policy or for export only, invariably, they suffer blowback.
A History Lesson
Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, the true power behind the state, began to promote Islamist extremism in 1971 after East Pakistan seceded from the country to form Bangladesh.
The logic was simple: Pakistan was an ethnic jigsaw puzzle—Pashtuns, Punjabis, Baluchis, Sindhis, among others—and the Bengalis were not the only dissatisfied minority. The Pashtuns, for example, long sought reunification between Afghanistan and Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province (since renamed Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) after the British divided the two regions with the Durand Line in 1893 while still colonial masters of India. The ISI believed that if they could substitute Islam for ethnicity as the primary source of identity, they could unite their fissiparous country.
After the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the ISI leveraged the Pakistani gateway to landlocked Afghanistan to channel aid only to those groups that embraced Islamism, ensuring that more traditional Afghan groups starved for lack of funds and supplies within just a few months; the result was a permanent transformation of the Afghan landscape so only Islamist groups survived, be they the traditional groups associated with the Northern Alliance or, after 1994, the Taliban.
Pakistani officials were gleeful as the Taliban triumphed over U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, leaving Afghanistan fully under the grips of Islamists for the first time. ISI sponsorship of Kashmiri terrorists and then the Taliban, however, enabled Islamist infiltration that slowly radicalized many Pakistanis against their own more secular government. When Pakistani diplomats say Pakistan suffered greatly during the war on terror because of the terrorism spread by the Pakistani Taliban, they are being truthful; they just omit that the Pakistani government’s cynicism is responsible for the dynamic.
The prognosis for Pakistan is only growing worse as the Taliban in Afghanistan now turns its sites on Pakistan, where it plans an offensive to end the rule of suit-wearing whisky jihadists who profess Islam while drinking alcohol in the Islamabad Club, believing somehow, they can promote the most radical interpretations of Islam but then somehow sidestep its prescriptions. Expect tens of thousands more Pakistanis to die as extremists within turn their guns on their countrymen, beginning with religious minorities before moving on to those who simply desire a more liberal lifestyle.
Saudi Arabia is Exhibit B in the danger of Islamist backlash. The Kingdom long used its oil riches to fund a network of Salafi mosques from Berlin to Brunei and from Cape Town to Copenhagen. Even after the September 11, 2001 Al Qaeda attacks, Saudi authorities paid only lip service to ceasing terror finance. Only after extremists began attacking Saudi officials in the Kingdom itself did the country’s monarchy grow serious.
Syria presents the latest example of how export-only Islamism blows back on its sponsor. New York Times correspondent Thomas Friedman once described Syrian President Hafez al-Assad’s bloody 1982 crackdown on Sunni Islamists in Hama as “Hama Rules.” The concept was simple: Secularists could maintain power with overwhelming force against Islamists. As usual, however, Friedman’s take was superficial. Assad did not simply defeat the Islamists; he co-opted them. He enabled their continued jihadism on the condition they direct their violence outside Syria. A quarter century later, Hafez’s son Bashar Assad’s nominally secular state became the underground railroad for suicide bombers seeking to unleash Islamist chaos in Iraq. When outrage erupted in 2011, however, the Islamists turned their guns once again on the Syrian regime itself, with devastating consequences.
What Happens Next?
Turkey will be the next epicenter of Islamist blowback. The Turkish blowback could be as destructive to society as that Pakistan and Syria have experienced. First, Turkey enabled, if not directly supported, the Islamic State. Those radicals are contained at al-Hol, but they have already indoctrinated a new generation. Turkey has already experienced limited Islamic State backlash as some militants did not get the message they should pass Turkey over in their selection of targets. It is conceivable that the Islamic State terrorists, if freed, could wreak havoc on Turkey, including its Western-looking tourist districts.
Syria simply adds kindling to the inevitable fire. HTS is largely a Turkish creation. It may claim to be entirely Syrian, but even that does not protect Turkey as the country is home to several million Syrians, few of whom plan to return to Syria proper. As Syria embrace the governance of a “reformed” Al Qaeda group, its religious prescriptions will spread to Turks via television, radio, and trade; the days of Turkish laicism are over, even of Turkish diplomats in Western capitals or merchants in Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar want to maintain the illusion. If it becomes acceptable, for example, for HTS to kill heterodox Alawis in Syria, for example, why should the same not happen to Alevis in Turkey proper? And if unveiled women can have acid thrown in their faces in Aleppo or Idlib, why not in Ankara or Istanbul?
Sharaa’s punt about alcohol’s legality was unnecessary if he were prepared to accept it. Syria’s future will likely be the Taliban’,s with those selling or consuming alcohol left to face the punishment of radicals if not the government. Why should such extremists treat Turkey any differently, even more so since Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, modern Turkey’s father, was an alcoholic who died of cirrhosis of the liver?
Atatürk famously promoted the slogan, “Peace at home, peace in the world.” Due to Erdogan’s sponsorship of extremist Sunni Islamism on his borders, Turkey will have neither. Turks should be prepared. The subsequent Islamist insurgency will be fought along the Bosphorus and the shores of the Mediterranean.
About the Author: Dr. Michael Rubin
Michael Rubin is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and director of policy analysis at the Middle East Forum. A former Pentagon official, Dr. Rubin has lived in post-revolution Iran, Yemen, and both pre- and postwar Iraq. He also spent time with the Taliban before 9/11. For more than a decade, he taught classes at sea about the Horn of Africa and Middle East conflicts, culture, and terrorism, to deployed US Navy and Marine units. Dr. Rubin is the author, coauthor, and coeditor of several books exploring diplomacy, Iranian history, Arab culture, Kurdish studies, and Shi’ite politics. The author’s views are his own.
