Turkey between Qatar and Saudi Arabia: Changing Regional and Bilateral Relations/Katar ve Suudi Arabistan Arasinda Turkiye: Degisen Bolgesel ve Ikili Iliskiler.

• Author: Baskan, Birol
• Position: Report

"They will not be able to divide as long as there is a king called King Salman bin Abdul Aziz and a crown prince named Muhammed bin Salman, and a president in Turkey named Erdogan." This was the first ever reaction of Muhammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia's powerful crown prince, to the gruesome murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a prominent Saudi journalist, in the consulate of his own country in Istanbul on 2 October 2018. The prince, who was then, and still is, widely criticized and even held directly responsible for the journalist's murder, must have been sarcastic. At the time he uttered the above statement Turkey-Saudi Arabia relations had been at their historical lows. To use the prince's metaphor, there was already a divide between Turkey and Saudi Arabia and that divide was widening and deepening. Consider that Saudi Arabia established communication with Turkey-designated terrorist group, the YPG, (1) in May 2018 and even pledged to contribute $100 million to the US for use in the YPG-controlled Northeast Syria three months later. (2)

Eight years ago, however, things were entirely different: Turkey-Saudi Arabia relations had been in their historical highs, a bright future in the bilateral relations seemed to be laying ahead. In March 2010, Turkey's then prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, received from the hands of the then king of Saudi Arabia, Abdullah bin Abdulaziz, the Kingdom's highly prestigious 'King Faisal International Prize for Service to Islam'. The press release announcing the prize boasted Erdogan for his "judicious leadership in the Islamic world," and "unyielding position on various Islamic and global issues." The press release also stated that Erdogan gained "the respect of the entire Islamic nation and the rest of the world" and "rendered an outstanding service to Islam by fiercely defending the rights and just causes of the Islamic nation, particularly the rights of the Palestinian people." (3) Almost two years after this award ceremony, both countries, joined by Qatar, began to collude to overthrow the Assad regime in Syria.

As Turkey-Saudi Arabia relations have been deteriorated in the last eight years, Turkey-Qatar relations have improved almost beyond recognition: the two countries can safely be considered each other's closest allies in the region. When Saudi Arabia imposed a total blockade on Qatar in June 2017, Turkey strongly stood by the tiny emirate, sending planes of food supplies and speedily passing a law in the parliament to deploy troops in Qatar. In spite of Saudi Arabia's dislike, Turkey still keeps a military base in Qatar and Qatar heavily invests in Turkey (4)

This paper traces how and why Turkey's bilateral relations with Saudi Arabia and Qatar have taken different paths in the last eight years and assesses how the Syrian crisis impacted the relations. The paper claims that if Turkey and Saudi Arabia had not colluded to overthrow the Assad regime in Syria, Turkey-Saudi Arabia relations would have taken a downturn much earlier than they actually did in the post-Arab spring geopolitical landscape. To put it in another way, the fact that Turkey and Saudi Arabia colluded in the Syrian crisis alleviated the deleterious impact on Saudi-Turkey relations of the new geopolitical realities that the Arab Spring created. The same geopolitical landscape also pushed Turkey and Qatar closer.

After Russia militarily intervened in Syria in September 2015 and effectively negated all the progress Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey made towards realizing their objective of overthrowing the Assad regime in Syria, the Syrian crisis became by and large irrelevant in driving Turkey's bilateral relations with both Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Since then the broader geopolitical context is almost singly responsible for the turns the relations have taken.

The paper first briefly discusses Turkey's relations with Saudi Arabia and Qatar in the 2000s. It then takes a look at how Turkey Qatar and Saudi Arabia came to collude to overthrow the Assad regime in Syria. Finally the paper elaborates how the bilateral relations among the three countries have changed in response to some major developments in Syria and elsewhere in the region.

Before the Arab Spring

Turkey had worked to nurture robust relations with both Saudi Arabia and Qatar in the 2000s. (5) Until the end of 2010, for example, Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan visited Saudi Arabia nine times, once in 2004, 2005, 2007, and 2009, and twice in 2006 and 2010 and Qatar thrice in 2005, 2008 and 2010. Turkey's president Abdullah Gul also paid visits to Saudi Arabia in 2009 and Qatar in 2008. The rulers of both countries reciprocated these visits: King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia visited Turkey twice in 2006 and 2007 and Sheikh Hamad of Qatar once in 2009. (6) It is noteworthy that King Abdullah's visit in 2006 came forty years after the last visit of any Saudi king.

In the same period Turkey could expand its trade with these two Gulf countries. (7) Turkey's exports to Saudi Arabia, for example, increased fourfold from $554 million in 2002 to $2.2 billion and imports from Saudi Arabia tenfold from $120 million in 2002 to $1.3 billion in 2010. Turkey's exports to Qatar, on the other hand, increased close to eleven fold from $15 million in 2002 to $162 million in 2010 and imports from Qatar seventeen fold from $10 million in 2002 to $177 million in 2010. Turkey also succeeded to attract foreign capital from these two countries: Saudi Arabia and Qatar had been in the top 20 top countries that had directly invested in Turkey in the period 2002-2010. (8)

Since the 1980s Turkey especially sought to strengthen its trade relations with Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other Gulf countries to expand its exports and attract capital from the region. (9) Therefore the JDP had simply worked to expand the already existing relations Turkey had. But, the Justice and Development Party (JDP) governments had also strived to expand Turkey's relations with Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other Gulf countries beyond economic relations. In 2004, for example, Turkey led the launching of a NATO initiative, known as the Istanbul Initiative, to develop close cooperation in the field of security with the Middle East. Among those invited to join the initiative were also Saudi Arabia and Qatar, only the latter responding positively. (10)

A historical milestone in the relations, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), of which Saudi Arabia and Qatar are members, declared Turkey a strategic partner on September 2, 2008. It is noteworthy that this was the GCC's first such declaration of any country as a strategic partner. The GCC also signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Turkey, which instituted annual meetings of High Level Strategic Dialogue to consult on political, economic, defense, security and cultural matters. (11)

It should be added, however, that in the 2000s Turkey and Qatar had actually shared more than what they shared with Saudi Arabia. For example, both Turkey and Qatar had exceptional relations with the Muslim Brotherhood movement, developed working and even cordial relations with Iran, recognized Hamas as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people and finally nurtured outstanding relations with the Assad regime in Syria. Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, differed from both Turkey and Qatar on all these issues. It had suspected the Muslim Brotherhood and its ideology at least since the 1990s, saw in Iran a geopolitical rival and was alarmed by its nuclear program and increasing sphere of influence in places such as Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen, was more pro-Fatah than Hamas in Palestine and finally had tension-full relations with the Assad regime for being Iran's main Arab ally and its meddling in Lebanon. (12)

Throughout the 2000s these differences had visibly no negative impact on Turkey's relations with Saudi Arabia. With the Arab Spring the contrast began to matter and eventually affected the relations. What prevented a total deterioration in Turkey-Saudi Arabia relations was their collusion in the Syrian crisis/civil war.

The Arab Spring and the Formation of the Tripartite Alliance in Syria

The Arab Spring, as it came to be so called, first erupted in Tunisia in December 2010 and then spread to other Arab countries in the succeeding months. Its waves also reached Syria, street protests first erupting in early March 2011 in a peripheral town, Daraa and then spreading to others with some time lag. The regime introduced some limited reforms to appease the protestors, but eventually resorted to violence. By late April the regime's violence had already been fully unleashed.

Yet, the regime's brutality triggered mass defection of especially Sunni soldiers and officers from the army. The defecting officers and soldiers had not dropped their weapons, but rather turned them against the regime, leading the formation of armed rebel groups. Civilians also joined these rebel groups or formed their own rebel groups. As armed rebel groups formed in Syria several defected officers founded in summer of 2011 the Free Syrian Army (FSA) to coordinate rebel groups against the regime, with which many rebel groups inside Syria eventually came to associate themselves. (13)

There also emerged other rebel groups, which had remained outside the Free Syrian Army (FSA) all along. Most significant rebel groups in this category were ideologically Salafi-Jihadist, most significant ones to be Ahrar al-Sham (the freemen of the Levant) and Jabhat al-Nusra (the Victory Front). (14) Jabhat Al-Nusra is to be further distinguished within this category as an extension of Al-Qaedah (the Base), or more correctly, of Al-Qaedah's Iraq branch, which later became the notorious the Islamic State, or ISIS. Yet many other Salafi-Jihadist groups, most notably Ahrar al-Sham, were home grown, formed predominantly by the Syrian Salafis, some of whom, however, might have personal histories and connections with...