Turkey

“What’s going on in Syria can only go on for so long. At some point it has to change,” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told reporters on a plane back to Turkey from Latin America over the weekend.

As we’ve documented extensively over the past several days, Ankara, Riyadh, and Doha have their backs against the wall when it comes to the effort to oust Bashar al-Assad and perpetuate Sunni hegemony in the Arabian Peninsula.

If there’s anything we’ve learned over the past twelve months it’s that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is prepared to employ all manner of nefarious tactics in order to preserve his grip on power in Ankara.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has warned the U.S. that they need to decide who their ally is, Turkey or the Kurdish people in Syria.  The ultimatum was given over the weekend to journalists as Erdogan made his way back to Turkey from a Latin America trip. Dailysabah.com reports: He said a security summit would be held when he returned to Turkey. “I don’t want the mistakes committed in Iraq repeated in Syria,” adding that he saw the rejection of the resolution allowing U.S.

On Thursday we brought you the latest from Syria, where Hezbollah and the IRGC have encircled Aleppo and cut off rebel supply lines to Turkey.

It was months in the making, but it now appears that the city - Syria’s second largest - will soon be retaken by forces loyal to Bashar al-Assad. As we’ve explained in the past, that would effectively restore the President’s grip on power as he would effectively control most of the country’s urban centers - even if that “control” is tenuous.

The Russian Defense Ministry said that developments on the Turkish-Syrian border have given them serious grounds to suspect that Turkey is planning a military invasion in Syria. Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov told journalists: “We have good reasons to believe that Turkey is actively preparing for a military invasion of a sovereign state – the Syrian Arab Republic.