A Test of Turkey's Pragmatism

It appears as though Turkey has established its priorities in the Syrian civil war. Algerian newspaper El Watan said April 8 that Algiers has been mediating a back-channel dialogue between Syria and Turkey, a report that a Stratfor source has since corroborated. The discussions centered primarily on Ankara's concerns over the creation of an independent Kurdish state in Syria. The source, moreover, said Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu raised the same concerns on a March 4-5 visit to Tehran, during which the prime minister proposed a plan to communicate with Damascus about Kurdish containment in Syria.

Turkey's decision to engage with Damascus does not fundamentally alter its goal in Syria; it still wants to replace the government of Bashar al Assad with a moderate, Sunni-led government that it can influence. But it does show that Ankara is more preoccupied by the Syrian Kurds than by the Syrian government.