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Syrian refugees are already sheltering inside Turkey, as are numerous
Syrian army defectors. Possibly anticipating Syrian retaliation, the
newspaper Hürriyet reported that President Abdullah Gül recently
warned Assad would pay a heavy price for stirring up trouble in
Turkey's Kurdish south-east.
Fears that a Syrian meltdown could seriously destabilise the wider
neighbourhood are also driving Turkey's hardening response. Such a
scenario could affect Iraq, where security concerns are rising as the
US withdrawal nears completion, and even Iran, a close Assad ally.
For its part, the Syrian regime has pressing reasons to fear Ankara's
animosity, as Gökhan Bacik pointed out in Today's Zaman. Unlike
many Muslim countries, Turkey identifies strongly with Europe, the
US and Nato. And in the past decade, Erdogan's Justice and
Development party has made its brand of moderate Islamist politics
acceptable to previously blinkered western eyes.
In other words, Turkey, with its majority Sunni Muslim population,
furnishes a role model for the disenfranchised Sunni majority in Syria
(and other Arab spring countries). Not only is Ankara encouraging
revolution in Damascus, it is also living proof that Assad's politics of
fear are outdated, that Syrians have before them a workable
alternative paradigm, and that, after the revolution, the country's
secular, Islamist and other sectarian traditions could fairly hope to co-
exist peacefully, Turkish-style.

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