Ankara occupies Syria and then lectures Israel about sovereignty

Before dawn on August 18, Israeli aircraft cratered the runway and storage facilities at the Abu al-Duhur airbase in eastern Idlib, approximately 70 kilometers from the Turkish border, resulting in eight strikes, significant material damage, but no casualties.

Condemnations arrived faster than the damage assessment after Damascus declared the operation a flagrant violation of its sovereignty. Ankara accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of pursuing “expansionist and destabilizing” policies ahead of Israel’s October 27 election. Washington’s own ambassador, Tom Barrack, in Ankara pronounced it an “unnecessary escalation” that does nothing for regional peace.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office confirmed that Jerusalem and Damascus had agreed to a security status quo, but that Syria was “on the verge of breaching” it by permitting Turkish troops to deploy at an airbase near Aleppo. Israel had warned Damascus repeatedly, but Damascus chose to proceed anyway.

No one should take Turkey or Barrack’s protestations seriously.

In March 2025, Turkish military teams surveyed runways and hangars at the T4 and Palmyra airbases in Homs province and the main airfield in Hama, as Ankara negotiated a joint defense arrangement with Syria’s new rulers. A follow-up inspection scheduled for March 25 never happened, because Israeli jets had struck both sites hours earlier. Israel then struck T4 again in early April, leaving it, by one regional intelligence assessment, unusable. The message was identical then and now: Israel will not permit another air force, particularly one belonging to a government that has threatened it with invasion, to erode its freedom of action over Syria. Israel’s perception that Ankara’s military footprint in Syria endangers Israeli security is not a novel proposition in Jerusalem. The Israeli government has argued this for well over a year.

Israel’s red lines in Syria are not a mystery, and they are not about Ahmad al-Sharaa’s rhetoric. They are about capability and trust. Sharaa is a former al-Qaeda commander who has been received warmly in Western capitals on the hope that he has changed. Perhaps he has. But his army still houses foreign jihadist formations, including units drawn from the Turkistan Islamic Party, whose leadership has been linked to al-Qaeda’s Shura Council. Islamic State is meanwhile reconstituting as the American footprint shrinks. Israel does not have the luxury of assuming that a state built on those foundations, armed and air-covered by Ankara, will remain permanently non-belligerent. Sober analysts have remarked that a functional Syria-Israel security understanding is achievable — which is precisely why a Turkish garrison inside the deal’s perimeter is so corrosive.

Ankara’s rebuttal is that its presence in Syria is lawful because Damascus consents, while Israel’s is not. Turkey has also flatly denied that any deployment to Abu al-Duhur was underway, calling the Israeli claim a manufactured pretext, though Israeli officials say highly sensitive intelligence on that deployment was shared with Washington beforehand. The consent argument still deserves scrutiny on its own terms, because it is a remarkable piece of retroactive legalism.

Turkey has seldom waited for permission when it entered Syria. It launched three major cross-border operations — Euphrates Shield in 2016, Olive Branch against Afrin in 2018, and Peace Spring across Ras al-Ain and Tell Abyad in 2019 — each justified by Ankara as self-defense against terrorism, each conducted over Damascus’s explicit objection. It armed and paid Islamist and jihadist militias throughout the war. It still effectively controls swaths of the north and continues paying the salaries of former Syrian National Army factions now folded into the new Syrian military — factions documented as detaining, extorting, and abusing civilians.

So the operative Turkish doctrine is this: Ankara may cross borders and occupy foreign territory when it perceives a national security threat, and everyone else must accept it, however, Israel may not. Turkey spent a decade dismantling Syrian sovereignty and has spent the past twenty months invoking Syria’s “territorial integrity” as though it were a founding principle. This is not law, but regional positioning dressed as law.

We do not know precisely what specific asset or activity the IDF destroyed at Abu al-Duhur. Israel has stated its rationale without exposing its intelligence, which is standard practice when sources and methods are at stake. But the Turkish general staff almost certainly knows exactly what was there, knows Israel would not tolerate it, and has strong reasons to prefer the conversation stay at the level of Netanyahu’s electoral motives. The election argument, notably, is Ankara’s centerpiece, and it conveniently substitutes a claim about Israeli intent for any account of Turkish conduct.

Ankara also prefers not to discuss a Syrian constituency. In July 2024, anti-Turkish riots swept the Turkish-controlled north; protesters burned Turkish facilities and five people were killed. That resentment has not evaporated. Ordinary Syrians increasingly grasp that Turkish expansion inside their country reliably invites Israeli bombs onto Syrian runways, and that they absorb the costs of a rivalry they did not choose.

Consent from Damascus, in any case, settles nothing regarding Israel. A NATO member that refuses to designate Hamas, hosts its leadership, and on whose soil Israeli intelligence recently exposed an Iranian-directed Hamas finance network moving hundreds of millions of dollars, does not get to lecture a state which has legitimate terrorism concerns. Nor is Erdogan’s escalatory rhetoric a product of October 7. It runs from the “one minute” confrontation with Shimon Peres at Davos in 2009, through the Mavi Marmara, to his 2024 boast that Turkey might enter Israel “just as we entered Karabakh, just as we entered Libya” — a line he repeated in April 2026.

Washington’s instinct to de-escalate is sound, and a trilateral deconfliction mechanism is worth building; however, earlier attempts produced little. But reflexively blaming Jerusalem, before the intelligence picture is public, tells Ankara that escalation is cost-free and that American pressure flows in one direction. Erdogan has spent years being told his threats are mere rhetoric. Israel declined to make that assumption at T4, and declined again at Abu al-Duhur. Tom Barrack should ask why a base near Aleppo mattered enough to strike before concluding it should not have been struck.

Sinan Ciddi is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and director of the Turkey program.