NEWSWEEK
Turkey’s Growing Shadow Over Syria Threatens U.S. Security | Opinion
Published
Sep 01, 2026 at 05:00 AM EDT
The fall of Bashar al-Assad has freed Syria from decades of Iranian hegemony. But the vacuum left by Tehran is already drawing in a new set of regional powers. Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar are all moving to shape Syria’s political, economic, and security future—with Ankara increasingly positioned to translate its influence at the expense of U.S. national security policy.
The Israeli army strikes at the Abu al-Duhur airbase in Idlib, northwestern Syria—with the stated aim of preventing a potential Turkish troop deployments that Israel said would violate an agreed security status quo—serve as a stark reminder of the fragile contested landscape in post-Assad Syria.
For years, Israeli strikes in Syria were largely aimed at preventing Iranian military entrenchment. This time, the power Israel sought to keep out was Turkey.
Under Assad’s reign, Tehran poured billions into a so-called “Marshall Plan” for Syria to solidify its influence over the country. Secret embassy documents revealed that Iran viewed Syria’s reconstruction as a $400 billion opportunity, with plans spanning power plants, oil projects and religious soft power.
| Adem Altan/AFP
Those ambitions crumbled in December 2024, when Syrian opposition forces seized Damascus and ended the Assad family’s 53-year rule over the country.
Yet the alternative that filled the power vacuum left by Assad’s ousting is considerably worse. Earlier this week, the Trump Administration formally removed Syria from its state sponsor of terrorism list. This represents an extraordinary milestone for the current Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa, a former al-Qaeda affiliate commander under the nom de guerre Abu Mohammad al-Julani that the U.S. placed a $10 million bounty for his arrest that was rescinded in December 2024.
While Assad was careful to hide Iranian influence—in large part not to inflame Syria’s predominantly Sunni Muslim majority that resents Iran’s Shia Muslim regime as an occupying power—al-Sharaa does not hide Turkey’s overt and growing presence. Turkey shares a 560-mile border with Syria and backed the rebels, including the Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham forces now led by al-Sharaa who toppled Assad.
Although al-Sharaa declared that he does not want Syria to be a puppet of Tehran, his new government has become deeply intertwined with Ankara. Turkish diplomats were the first on the ground, embassies reopened and Turkish-backed forces deployed into Kurdish areas of the country.
Kurdish fighters who fought alongside the American forces against the Islamic State terrorist group are now being unwillingly absorbed into the new Syria, sparking a sense of U.S. betrayal and uncertain future under the influence of Turkey.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has invoked rhetoric praising the Ottoman Empire, determined to revive Turkey’s influence over lands it once occupied. This is not merely nostalgia.
While maintaining a military footprint in Syria well-beyond what is necessary to neutralize the Kurds along its southern flank, it occupies northern Cyprus, maintains a military foothold in Qatar and a now seven-year presence in Libya as part of its strategy to dominate energy corridors and enforce maritime claims.
Turkey’s mutual-defense pact with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan significantly expands its strategic reach by combining the partners’ financial and energy resources with one of the world’s largest militaries and nuclear capabilities under a new collective defense framework that parallels NATO’s Article 5 in which an attack against one member state is to be treated as an attack against all.
Is Turkey building infrastructure for genuine regional security? Or is it consolidating a sphere of influence that mirrors Iran’s ambitions? The 2025 Nagel Commission, an Israeli panel assessing long-term threats, warns that a Turkish-aligned Syria could even prove more dangerous than an Iranian one.
It recommends that Israel prepare for potential confrontation by boosting defense spending, citing Erdoğan’s Ottoman-style hegemonic dreams and the risk of Turkish proxies on Israel’s northern border. Coupled with President Donald Trump’s lifting of sanctions and willingness to sell F-35 fighter jets to Turkey: arming a NATO member with neo-imperial instincts in a volatile neighborhood is too heavy a cost to bear.
Saudi Arabia’s reconstruction of power grids, gas fields and transit hubs in Syria aiming to bypass the Strait of Hormuz offers some much-needed hope. But if it comes at the price of Turkish domination, the Trump Administration must understand that replacing Iran with Turkey as a regional hegemon at the expense of its allies is a threat to U.S. security. Israel’s recent strikes signal that it will not wait for the new order to solidify against it and neither will the rest of the region.
Bradley Martin is the Executive Director of the Near East Center for Strategic Studies.
Liram Koblentz-Stenzler is the Head of the Global Extremism and Antisemitism Desk at the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism at Reichman University, Herzliya, and a visiting scholar at Brandeis University.
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My reader comment posted to the above article:
38 min ago
A hardly surprising, slanted opinion piece coming from two Israelis. Bradley Martin, who was the Deputy Managing Editor at the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research and a journalist with the Jewish News Syndicate. And Liram Koblentz-Stenzler, Head of the Global Extremism and Antisemitism Desk at Reichman University in Israel.
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Page 29 of Israel's 2024-2025 Nagel Committee report referenced in the above article:
The unclassified version of the entire 138-page report can be viewed by clicking on the following link: https://online.fliphtml5.com/lymuw/swdc/#p=1
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