ANKARA: The steps taken by the Turkish and German governments toward reconciliation after a months-long war of words seem to be beginning to put their relations back on track. The road ahead is, however, a long one.
On Oct. 3, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu spoke by phone to his German counterpart, Sigmar Gabriel, for the second time since the German elections on Sept. 24.
Following the elections, Angela Merkel walked into her historic fourth consecutive term in office when her party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), won. Turkish Premier Binali Yildirim sent a congratulatory letter to the German chancellor right after her victory.
On Sept. 22, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan also hinted at the government’s willingness to reconcile with Germany by saying that bilateral relations would “go back to normal after the German elections.” This is despite his having called the CDU before the elections “enemies of Turkey” and urged the Turkish diaspora in Germany not to vote for its candidates.
This new rhetoric regarding bilateral ties is not limited to Turkish politicians. Germany does not seem to dwell on the issue as Merkel said at a press conference in Berlin on Aug. 29. She pointed out that although Berlin-Ankara relations were passing through a very complicated phase, she wanted to improve relations with Turkey.
Only a few weeks ago, such a positive statement would have seemed far-fetched. She had earlier promised to veto the modernization of the EU-Turkey Customs Union and to discuss with her EU partners the possibility of ending accession talks with Ankara.
Turkish politicians’ repeated suggestions of “Nazi-style practices” in Germany when local German authorities banned pro-referendum rallies which Turkish politicians planned to attend, and the arrest of German citizens, including a journalist and a human rights activist, left an unforgettable stain on the relationship during the past few months.
On Wednesday, a German-Turkish national jailed in Turkey four months ago was released; however, 11 Germans are still detained in Turkey for what Berlin sees as politicized charges.
Nonetheless, in the short term, experts do not expect any major change in relations despite the recent steps taken toward reconciliation.
Dr. Magdalena Kirchner, Mercator-IPC fellow at the Istanbul Policy Center, thinks that given the outcome of the election, Germany will be looking inward for the next few weeks, if not months, until a government can be formed. Turkey’s focus has, however, shifted dramatically to the east because of the KRG referendum.
“Even if relations returned to a ‘business as usual’ mode, especially in terms of economic and security cooperation, there would be no joint momentum regarding the question of Turkey’s EU accession,” Kirchner told Arab News.
“All German parties have expressed their expectations that German citizens detained in Turkey should be released swiftly and access to German authorities for those remaining in prison should be granted. Yesterday’s release of a German detainee could be another small step in that direction,” she added.
Turkish Industry and Business Association (TUSIAD) Berlin representative Alper Ucok agrees. “After the Lower Saxony elections and the EU summit on Oct. 19-20, the coalition negotiations will begin in Germany. They will take longer than the average coalition building. This period might give some space and time in both countries for good will/trust building until the end of this year,” Ucok told Arab News.
However, Ucok added: “If both countries do not use this transition period for further de-escalation, from the beginning of 2018 with the new German government in place, there is a great risk of even more escalation.”
“As Germany leans toward the right after the elections, one should expect that to have some impact on its policy-making in the medium term,” he said.
In terms of trust building steps from the German side, Kirchner does not expect much agreement concerning Ankara’s demands of Berlin, especially extraditing coup suspects who fled to Germany.
“But the bilateral discussions about counterterrorism, extradition, and Turkish asylum seekers in EU countries will stay on the agenda,” she noted.
Although the two NATO allies have many common interests, such as economic cooperation, the joint fight against terrorism, and managing global migration, Kirchner thinks that meaningful alliances require an understanding that going it together is better than going it alone but that is unfortunately not always the case.
Berlin recently transferred its reconnaissance and refueling aircraft from Incirlik air base in southern Turkey to Jordan due to the rising tensions in recent months. The base is also used by the US-led anti-Daesh coalition as a staging post for the air campaign in Syria and Iraq.
“But, at this point, it is the key to restoring trust lost in the past months and coordinating more closely on common challenges,” she added.
As Germany is home to nearly three and half million Turks, the election of 14 Turkish-origin Germans to the Bundestag — an increase of three — is also considered a matter of pride in some circles in Turkey.
According to Ucok, there is a need for more content-based dialogue for trust building in German-Turkish relations.
“There are many tools which have not been not used recently. A Turkish-German intergovernmental joint Cabinet meeting should be convened in early 2018,” he said.
Ankara, Berlin struggle to repair ties
Ankara, Berlin struggle to repair ties
A year after Bashar Assad fled, Syria struggles to heal
HOMS, Syria: A year ago, Mohammad Marwan found himself stumbling, barefoot and dazed, out of Syria’s notorious Saydnaya prison on the outskirts of Damascus as rebel forces pushing toward the capital threw open its doors to release the prisoners.
Arrested in 2018 for fleeing compulsory military service, the father of three had cycled through four other lockups before landing in Saydnaya, a sprawling complex just north of Damascus that became synonymous with some of the worst atrocities committed under the rule of now ousted President Bashar Assad.
He recalled guards waiting to welcome new prisoners with a gauntlet of beatings and electric shocks. “They said, ‘You have no rights here, and we’re not calling an ambulance unless we have a dead body,’” Marwan said.
His Dec. 8, 2024 homecoming to a house full of relatives and friends in his village in Homs province was joyful.
But in the year since then, he has struggled to overcome the physical and psychological effects of his six-year imprisonment. He suffered from chest pain and difficulty breathing that turned out to be the result of tuberculosis. He was beset by crippling anxiety and difficulty sleeping.
He’s now undergoing treatment for tuberculosis and attending therapy sessions at a center in Homs focused on rehabilitating former prisoners, and Marwan said his physical and mental situations have gradually improved.
“We were in something like a state of death” in Saydnaya, he said. “Now we’ve come back to life.”
A country struggling to heal
Marwan’s country is also struggling to heal a year after the Assad dynasty’s repressive 50-year reign came to an end following 14 years of civil war that left an estimated half a million people dead, millions more displaced, and the country battered and divided.
Assad’s downfall came as a shock, even to the insurgents who unseated him. In late November 2024, groups in the country’s northwest — led by Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham, an Islamist rebel group whose then-leader, Ahmad Al-Sharaa, is now the country’s interim president — launched an offensive on the city of Aleppo, aiming to take it back from Assad’s forces.
They were startled when the Syrian army collapsed with little resistance, first in Aleppo, then the key cities of Hama and Homs, leaving the road to Damascus open. Meanwhile, insurgent groups in the country’s south mobilized to make their own push toward the capital.
The rebels took Damascus on Dec. 8 while Assad was whisked away by Russian forces and remains in exile in Moscow. But Russia, a longtime Assad ally, did not intervene militarily to defend him and has since established ties with the country’s new rulers and maintained its bases on the Syrian coast.
Hassan Abdul Ghani, spokesperson for Syrian Ministry of Defense, said HTS and its allies had launched a major organizational overhaul after suffering heavy losses in 2019 and 2020, when Assad’s forces regained control of a number of formerly rebel-controlled areas.
The rebel offensive in November 2024 was not initially aimed at seizing Damascus but was meant to preempt an expected offensive by Assad’s forces in opposition-held Idlib, Abdul Ghani said.
“The defunct regime was preparing a very large campaign against the liberated areas, and it wanted to finish the Idlib file,” he said. Launching an attack on Aleppo “was a military solution to expand the radius of the battle and thus safeguard the liberated interior areas.”
In timing the attack, the insurgents also aimed to take advantage of the fact that Russia was distracted by its war in Ukraine and that the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, another Assad ally, was licking its wounds after a damaging war with Israel.
When the Syrian army’s defenses collapsed, the rebels pressed on, “taking advantage of every golden opportunity,” Abdul Ghani said.
Successes abroad, challenges at home
Since his sudden ascent to power, Al-Sharaa has launched a diplomatic charm offensive, building ties with Western and Arab countries that shunned Assad and that once considered Al-Sharaa a terrorist.
A crowning moment of his success in the international arena: in November, he became the first Syrian president since the country’s independence in 1946 to visit Washington.
But the diplomatic successes have been offset by outbreaks of sectarian violence in which hundreds of civilians from the Alawite and Druze minorities were killed by pro-government Sunni fighters. Local Druze groups have now set up their own de facto government and military in the southern Sweida province.
There are ongoing tensions between the new government in Damascus and Kurdish-led forces controlling the country’s northeast, despite an agreement inked in March that was supposed to lead to a merger of their forces.
Israel is wary of Syria’s new Islamist-led government even though Al-Sharaa has said he wants no conflict with the country. Israel has seized a formerly UN-patrolled buffer zone in southern Syria and launched regular airstrikes and incursions since Assad’s fall. Negotiations for a security agreement have stalled.
Meanwhile, the country’s economy has remained sluggish, despite the lifting of most Western sanctions. While Gulf countries have promised to invest in reconstruction projects, little has materialized on the ground. The World Bank estimates that rebuilding the country’s war-damaged areas will cost $216 billion.
Rebuilding largely an individual effort
The rebuilding that has taken place so far has largely been on a small scale, with individual owners paying to fix their own damaged houses and businesses.
On the outskirts of Damascus, the once-vibrant Yarmouk Palestinian camp today largely resembles a moonscape. Taken over by a series of militant groups then bombarded by government planes, the camp was all but abandoned after 2018.
Since Assad’s fall, a steady stream of former residents have been coming back.
The most heavily damaged areas remain largely deserted but on the main street leading into the camp, bit by bit, blasted-out walls have been replaced in the buildings that remain structurally sound. Shops have reopened and families have come back to their apartments. But any sort of larger reconstruction initiative appears to still be far off.
“It’s been a year since the regime fell. I would hope they could remove the old destroyed houses and build towers,” said Maher Al-Homsi, who is fixing his damaged home to move back to it even though the area doesn’t even have a water connection.
His neighbor, Etab Al-Hawari, was willing to cut the new authorities some slack.
“They inherited an empty country — the banks are empty, the infrastructure was robbed, the homes were robbed,” she said.
Bassam Dimashqi, a dentist from Damascus, said of the country after Assad’s fall, “Of course it’s better, there’s freedom of some sort.”
But he remains anxious about the still-precarious security situation and its impact on the still-flagging economy.
“The job of the state is to impose security, and once you impose security, everything else will come,” he said. “The security situation is what encourages investors to come and do projects.”
Marwan, the former prisoner, says the post-Assad situation in Syria is “far better” than before. But he has also been struggling economically.
From time to time, he picks up labor that pays only 50,000 or 60,000 Syrian pounds daily, the equivalent of about $5.
Once he finishes his tuberculosis treatment, he said, he plans to leave to Lebanon in search of better-paid work.
