Turkey has been leading regional developments since Assad’s decline in Syria. With intensified military operations in the north, a reinforced presence in Damascus, and a strategic blow to its long-time rival—the PKK—through Abdulla Öcalan’s message and his call for disarmament, Ankara is reshaping the region to fit its neo-Ottomanist ambitions. But beneath this drive lies a deeper objective: the formation of a new ideological bloc that merges Islamism and leftist anti-liberalism to counter the evolving Middle Eastern order.
Turkey’s neo-Ottomanist project, driven by Sunni political currents, has been unmistakable. Its military incursions in Syria and Iraq have not been about securing its borders but rather about dismantling a critical regional divide—what can be termed a “ready platform” for a new regional order. This expansionism, in tandem with Iran’s regional influence, has targeted the Kurds, who have long struggled for political autonomy or independence in the four states of Iran, Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. Turkey and Iran claim to restore a so-called natural and imperial order through respectively the Sunni Brotherhood and the Shiite Axis of Resistance. Their model of Islamic integration and militarism seeks to stifle Kurdish aspirations and prevent the rise of a liberal-national political order in the Middle East.
The Kurds, uniquely positioned as a non-Islamist national movement, pose a challenge to Turkey and Iran’s ideological monopoly. Consequently, both Ankara and Tehran have pursued strategies to entrap the Kurds within an Islamic-leftist framework that opposes liberalization. Their objective is to prevent the Kurds from aligning with emerging Western-backed alliances, such as the Israeli-Saudi bloc and the geopolitical shifts under the Abraham Accords.
A deeper examination of Turkey’s opposition to the Abraham Accords and its proposed alternative to the IMEC Corridor reveals the complexity of this strategy. Turkey’s growing tensions with Israel, coupled with the historic affinity between Israel and Kurdish self-determination, have driven Ankara to employ similar tactics as seen in Syria under the Trump administration. This involves complicating issues on the ground to limit Washington’s unilateral decision-making, much like the Turkish incursion and subsequent occupation of the Kurdish city of Afrin in 2018. Yet, Israel’s support for Kurdish independence is not a recent phenomenon—it is a long-standing policy that predates the latest geopolitical realignments.
Historically, Turkey and Iran have employed polarization as a mechanism for sustaining their regional influence. Turkey’s model has centered on Sunni Islamism and, more recently, the rebranding of Jolani’s faction in Syria. Iran, on the other hand, has propagated Shiite resistance narratives and exported the Islamic Revolution. While these strategies may appear reactionary, they are fundamentally rooted in geopolitical imperatives and a rejection of the liberal international order.
By consolidating Islamic influence, Turkey and Iran seek to merge domestic control with regional expansion (“strategic depth”). However, because the Kurds do not frame their political identity through political Islam, these actors have resorted to leftist ideological integration as an alternative approach. The goal is not to empower Kurdish autonomy but to create a wedge between the Kurds and the West, thereby eroding Western trust in Kurdish political aspirations. The historic lack of consistent Western support for the Kurds has left them vulnerable to regional pressures and ideological infiltration.
The Kurdish struggle has never been part of the broader Islamic movement. Instead, Kurdish identity is rooted in national and democratic aspirations, making their case an anomaly in a region dominated by Islamist power structures. This is why Turkey and Iran aim to co-opt Kurdish movements through leftist ideological narratives. Turkey’s recent attempts to detach the Kurds from strategic opportunities in the new Middle East—through Ocalan’s message for the so-called “reconciliation project”—serve as an anti-Western maneuver to obstruct Kurdish alignment with U.S. and Israeli interests.
Turkey and Iran have effectively weaponized Islamism, wokism, and anti-Western rhetoric to undermine liberal democratic influences in the region. The alignment between Qatar, Turkey, and Iran serves as a nexus for anti-Semitic jihadist movements that disguise themselves as resistance against Western colonialism. Erdogan’s AKP and Iran’s Supreme Leader both position themselves as defenders of the oppressed while blaming the West for Islamophobia—a narrative that resonates across both Islamist and leftist ideological circles.
The question of securing an independent Kurdistan and breaking free from the Turkey-Iran binary is a matter of critical strategic importance for the United States and Israel. Without direct Western support, the Kurds risk being absorbed into the Islamic-leftist framework that Ankara and Tehran are constructing. This would not only stifle Kurdish self-determination but also pave the way for Turkey to operationalize a new ideological paradigm—one that merges Islamism and leftist anti-liberalism on the ground. If Washington fails to act decisively, Erdogan may succeed in reshaping the region’s ideological and geopolitical landscape in unprecedented ways.
[Photo by President.gov.ua, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons]
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect TGP’s editorial stance.
Dr Loqman Radpey, an expert on Kurdistan and the Middle East, is a fellow at the Middle East Forum with over a decade of experience analyzing the international legal and political dimensions of the right to self-determination for peoples and nations, including the case of Kurdistan. He is the author of ‘Towards an Independent Kurdistan: Self-Determination in International Law’ (published by Routledge, 2023), the first comprehensive historico-legal account of Kurdish aspirations for statehood from a Middle Eastern perspective within post-World War I peace agreements and the broader discourse of self-determination in international law literature over time. His upcoming work, ‘Self-Determination during the Cold War’ will appear in ‘The Cambridge History of International Law’ (Volume XI).
Read the full article here
