Turkish Enter Syria, Relocate Tomb of Suleyman Shah
Before dawn on Sunday, February 22, just under 600 Turkish soldiers, along with a caravan of 39 tanks and 57 armored cars, crossed the Syrian border and completed an operation aimed at exhuming and transporting the remains of Suleyman Shah, as well as evacuating around 40 Turkish special forces stationed in and around his tomb. The operation was conducted amid fears that the tomb and its guards were under threat from Islamic State (IS) fighters, and was the first major Turkish incursion since the start of the Syrian conflict in 2011.
Suleyman Shah (d. 1236), who is believed to have drowned in the Euphrates close to the site of where he is buried, was the grandfather of Osman I, the founder and first sultan of the Ottoman Empire.
Ahead of the weekend’s operation, Turkey notified the US-led coalition, Syrian authorities, local Kurdish militias, as well as Islamic State militants. Despite reports that IS fighters had gathered near the site of the tomb and shouted slogans, no clashes were reported. Turkish officials confirmed that one soldier was in fact killed, but claimed that his death was the result of an accident.
In March of last year, the Islamic State issued a three-day ultimatum demanding that Turkey lower its flag and withdraw its soldiers from the site. The Turkish government responded with a warning that an attack on the tomb of Suleyman Shah would be treated as no less than an attack on Turkish soil—echoing the words of then-Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in 2012 when he warned that an attack on the monument would be considered, “an attack on our territory, as well as an attack on NATO land.”
The longstanding tomb of Suleyman Shah, located in a Turkish exclave within Syria's Aleppo Governorate, lies along a critical travel and supply route and sits less than 30 km from the border. Islamic State fighters are particularly dependent upon this route when it comes to transporting supplies and personnel between their major population centers such as Raqqa and Aleppo.
Suleyman Shah’s remains were relocated to the town of Esmeler, just meters from the Turkish border but still technically within Syria, in a move that the Foreign Ministry described as “the temporary relocation of the tomb, conducted on the basis of security assessments.” The Ministry added that the move “does not constitute any change in the status of the tomb and its annex stated by the agreements.”
These “agreements” establish Turkey’s rights to and custodianship of the tomb under Article 9 of the Treaty of Ankara. While Turkey claims the land around the tomb to be sovereign Turkish territory, and the operation to have been in accordance with international agreements, the Syrian government strongly rejected this claim and called the move a “flagrant aggression” that indicated Turkey’s “deep connection” to groups like IS and Jabhat al-Nusra.
Timing and Symbolism
A number of recent developments may have contributed to the particular timing of this operation.
Turkey’s incursion comes just days after an end of months of negotiations with the United States and the signage of a deal committed to training and arming Syrian opposition fighters who would fight both IS and Syrian government forces.
This “train-and-equip” deal includes plans to train and arm some 15,000 Syrian opposition fighters by 2018. Scheduled to begin in March, the program would be hosted in Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, and would include a bolstered training force of an additional 400 US troops.
While the US has priority interest in winning its fight against IS, Turkey has remained insistent on the indispensability of plans to remove Syrian President Bashar al-Assad as well.
Additionally, given the Islamic State’s penchant for explosive shrine and mausoleum destruction, an overrunning of the tomb of Suleyman Shah would likely spell major embarrassment for the Erdoğan government in the form of an IS propaganda video. The decision to temporarily relocate the remains of Suleyman Shah to the border village of Esmesi just a couple hundred meters away from the Turkish border but still within Syria—instead of Turkey—indicate that the government also likely sought to avoid the embarrassment of losing its claim to the last piece of land beyond its national boundaries.
Other recent factors that pertain to Turkey’s actions include major shifts on the ground with respect to Turkey’s engagement with the anti-IS coalition, the defeat of IS in the city of Kobanî, and fear that the tomb site and its military personnel might come to be used as leverage to further bind Ankara.