Report: Turkey’s Erdogan Aware of Plan to Topple Assad for Half a Year

The Syrian jihadist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) notified the Islamist government of Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan six months ago that it had a plan of conquest to overthrow former Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, Reuters reported on Monday.

HTS is a Sunni jihadist militia formerly known as the Nusra Front with close ties to al-Qaeda. The U.S. government has a $10 million bounty on the head of the group, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani. The group launched a surprise siege of Assad-held areas in the country in late November, taking control of the nation’s second-largest city, Aleppo, before the end of November and forcing Assad out of the country in the early morning hours of Sunday. Assad reportedly landed in Moscow, Russia, shortly thereafter.

Turkey, which shares hundreds of miles of border with Syria, has long been a pivotal actor in the country, repeatedly invading and bombing it allegedly to protect its national security interests from American-allied Kurdish forces. Turkish officials have kept their distance from the end of the war in Syria, although Erdogan publicly expressed hope that the Assad regime would end.

“Idlib, Hama, Homs, and the target, of course, is Damascus. The opposition’s march continues. Our wish is that this march in Syria continues without accidents,” Erdogan said last week, according to the Turkish state-run Anadolu Agency.

According to Reuters, Erdogan was one of the few international actors aware of the impending offensive long before it began. “Sources with knowledge” of the plan to topple Assad told the news agency that, “about six months ago,” in June 2024, HTS representatives approached Ankara with their plan.

“There was no way the rebels could go ahead without first notifying Turkey, which has been a main backer of the Syrian opposition from the war’s earliest days, said the sources,” Reuters reported, identifying the sources as “a diplomat in the region and a member of the Syrian opposition.”
The opposition source said that Turkish officials were privy to “details of the planning” and that HTS attempted to convince the Turks that “that other path hasn’t worked for years – so try ours. You don’t have to do anything, just don’t intervene.”

HTS and the Turkish government, despite both being Sunni Islamist entities, have not historically maintained close ties. Reuters noted that Turkey considers HTS a terrorist organization. They both shared the goal of overthrowing Assad, however.

“Why did we enter? We do not have an eye on Syrian soil,” Erdogan said, explaining a Turkish invasion of Syrian land in 2016. “The issue is to provide lands to their real owners. That is to say we are there for the establishment of justice. We entered there to end the rule of the tyrant al-Assad who terrorizes with state terror.”

The Reuters report is particularly explosive given that Erdogan made a loud public overture in July – apparently after being notified of the HTS operation – to make peace with Assad. Erdogan said he would invite Assad to Ankara.

“With this invitation, we want to restore Turkey-Syria relations to the same level as in the past. Our invitation may be extended at any time,” he promised in July.

It is not clear if Erdogan ever privately spoke to Assad. Multiple reports in Turkish state media suggested that part of Erdogan’s reasoning for celebrating Assad’s downfall is that Assad did not respond favorably to the invite.

“We said: ‘Come, let’s determine the future of Syria together.’ Unfortunately, we did not receive a positive response to this,” Erdogan said last week, claiming to have reached out to Damascus.

Turkey also operates its own proxy force, the Syrian National Army (SNA), which evolved out of the formerly U.S.-backed Free Syrian Army. The SNA launched a campaign shortly after HTS took Aleppo against Syrian Kurdish forces in northwest Syria.

The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), primarily led by the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG/YPJ), is a U.S.-backed militia coalition that was pivotal in the fall of the Islamic State “caliphate” in Raqqa. Erdogan considers the YPG indistinguishable from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a Marxist terrorist organization, and has supported and encouraged efforts to eradicate the Kurdish presence on its border.

Reuters’ sources claimed that the SNA and HTS have “limited” communication, apparently only meant to ensure that they did not kill each other’s forces, but are not actively colluding to build a new Syrian government. The SNA claimed to expel the Kurdish forces from the Turkish border city of Manbij on Monday, which the SDF had controlled since the fall of the Islamic State “caliphate.” Notably, the Turkish state news outlet Anadolu Agency reported that the “Syrian Interim Government,” by which it appears to mean HTS, sent a message of congratulations to the SNA for reportedly defeating the Kurds.

Mazloum Abdi, the commander of the SDF, said on Friday that his group has not experienced any hostility from HTS.

“We have contact with Tahrir al-Sham through many channels, typically regarding the protection of our people in Aleppo. Apparently, we have never clashed with them,” Abdi said at a press conference, according to the Kurdish outlet Rudaw.

“There is a new situation on the ground. We know that Hayat Tahrir al-Sham has taken away many areas from the Syrian regime,” Abdi continued. “What concerns us is that our region in northeast Syria should not be targeted. If we are attacked we will defend ourselves.”

Follow Frances Martel on Facebook and Twitter.