Erdogan eyes Libya after failures in Egypt, Syria

For Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan represents a revival of the Ottoman Empire and a rejection of the Ataturk secular state. As a result, Ikhwan ideology has been spreading across the Middle-East at a more rapid rate, with the Arab Spring initially providing perfect fuel for Erdogan's ambitions.

However, in Egypt and Syria in particular, Turkish support for the Ikhwan has backfired badly.

Though Egyptian Ikhwan leader Mohammed Morsi was elected in 2012, a year later he was overthrown in a military coup, a coup aided by the largest protests in history. Ikhwan had completely lost the support of the Egyptian people, and President Erdogan suffered a serious setback in his ambition to recreate the Ottoman Empire.

Though Libya looked promising for the Ikhwan and Turkey after the overthrow of Moammar Al-Qaddafi in 2011, military strongman Haftar Al-Khalifa broke ranks with the Islamist factions in Tripoli and set up a rival government in Tobruk in 2014. Since then, Haftar has regained much territory in Libya, with north-western Libya as the exception.

Syria was where the Turkish-Ikhwan policy was pushed hardest with the least results. Qatari-Turkish funding gave weapons to rebel groups so extreme they had more in common with ISIS than even the most extreme elements of Al-Qaeda. It is not hard to see, then, that these groups never had much support from the Syrian people.

With the regional shift caused by the impending peace process in Syria, President Erdogan is likely to lose much influence in Syria as well. Currently the Syrian Arab Army, Russia, Iran and Hezbollah are forcing many of the Syrian rebels out of other regions and into Idlib, which has caused an enormous receding of violence in the region.

However, what President Erdogan has lost in Syria and Egypt he has a chance to regain in Libya. Recently in Tunisia he boasted that he was planning a political settlement in Libya, while also refusing to accept Bashar Al-Assad as the legitimate ruler in Syria. To Russia, President Erdogan is sending a clear message: Assad only stays in Syria if Turkey receives enough compensation.

Such compensation for Turkey would include the dismantling of Kurdish militias in north-eastern Syria, and may even include the relocation of rebel fighters and armaments from Syrian Idlib province to Libya via Turkey.

The reason why such rebel fighters and armaments may be relocated to Libya is because Turkey has acted as a transit for jihad between Syria and Libya before. At the conclusion of the Libyan uprising against Moammar al-Qaddafi, many of the weapons used in Libya were relocated to Syria, to put more pressure on the Assad government:

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/440822/hillary-clinton-scandals-libya-prosecutions-undermined

Worryingly for Turkey, many of the fighters for the Syrian Opposition are foreigners. Should Turkey lose Idlib to President Assad in the peace settlement, those foreigners may turn their weapons on Turkey without another option.

Libyan strongman Haftar Al-Khalifa is exactly the sort of figure against which foreign fighters from Syria would desire to wage jihad. With relations improving between Turkey and the Libyan Government of National Accord - the UN-recognized Libyan government with ties to the Ikhwan - the war in Libya may be escalated by a concluded political settlement in Syria: one where Russia allows President Assad full control of Syria, while Turkey is allowed more influence in Libya.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has shown resilience in the face of setbacks to his original plans for control of the Middle-East. This resilience shows that Turkey under its present leadership cannot be trusted to act as a stabilizing force, and all its actions should be scrutinized as a means for further chaos in the region.