Don't forget the Syrians

In Turkey, this month will not be remembered for its constructive, future-oriented initiatives but for the aggressive campaign of the government to suppress all efforts to unveil a massive corruption scandal. With hindsight, this could well be a crucial period in which a successful coalition of conservative forces was splintered, a break-up that led to years of economic and democratic volatility.

The real drama of these times, however, is not taking place in Ankara or İstanbul and it does not figure prominently in the Christmas speeches and prayers of Western leaders. Yes, of course, many in Turkey and abroad know that bad things are happening in Syria. But most have stopped trying to understand exactly who is linked to which crimes. From a distance, it seems there are only bad guys, albeit from different religious and political backgrounds, who are killing each other and ruining the country. Nothing much the rest of the word can do about that, it seems, except pray and hope for the best. As American President Barack Obama recently put it, the Syrian conflict has become "someone else's civil war."

Looking at the facts on the ground in Syria, that is an extremely depressing truth. In the last 10 days, nearly 500 people have been killed in Aleppo only, as a result of air raids in which barrel bombs were used, drums packed with explosives and shrapnel. Local opposition groups, quoted by CNN, reported about hospitals running out of beds and people dying on the floors. It is the kind of news that makes it to page 13 in the papers or a few flashes in the television news.

Other developments in the ongoing war don't even make it to the main media and are only reported on specialized websites. Diplomats are working on a conference scheduled for Jan. 22, referred to as Geneva 2, with the aim of stopping the violence and preparing a solution acceptable to the Assad regime, the rebels and the key outside powers. A growing number of analysts is convinced, as one of them put it on Twitter this week, that, alas, "Geneva 2 is more about Assad-Western reconciliation than Assad-Syrian opposition negotiation."

This unwelcome change of direction is a direct result of a fundamental change in the balance of power on the ground within Syria's insurgent opposition. In a detailed article in Foreign Policy this week, Charles Lister, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Doha Center in Qatar, showed how Western (and Turkey)-backed groups like the Syrian National Council and its armed wing have lost power and influence. Syrian Salafists and global jihadists have the upper hand now, especially in the western border areas with Turkey, which means, as Lister puts it, "that meaningful Western influence on the nature and direction of the opposition is under real and genuine threat."

In an op-ed in The New York Times, Emile Hokayem, Middle East analysts at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, explained what this shift has meant for the upcoming conference. There is a growing trend in Western capitals to see Assad as the lesser evil and see him as a potential partner in fighting the jihadi terrorists in Syria. The Syrian dictator is cleverly exploiting this readiness to view Syria primarily and uniquely through a counterterrorism lens and hopes that by being pragmatic and cooperative in that field, he can shore up his legitimacy and further demoralize his internal foes. As Hokayem correctly observes, "ultimately, Mr. Assad expects that the fear of future jihadi terrorism will make the world forget his massacres."

If Hokayem's predictions turn out to be correct, it will be the result of an indifferent world opinion that gave up on the Syrians. That is not a very comforting thought at the end of this year.