For some American allies, such as the UK, whose parliament seemed to reject any armed involvement in Syria on Thursday, punitive airstrikes against the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad might be too much to stomach. For others, it may be too little. As the U.S. readies to proceed with limited missile strikes against Syria in response to a chemical weapons attack that killed over a thousand people last week, Turkey, a key regional ally and Syria’s neighbor, seems to want more than Washington is willing to give. The Obama administration signaled Friday that any action against Syria would be brief and measured. Turkey, however, having declared it would join any international coalition against Assad, with or without U.N. backing, has made it equally clear it wants a more robust intervention. On Wednesday, according to Turkish media, Ahmet Davutoglu, the country’s Foreign Minister, counseled his US counterpart John Kerry that any action should be forceful enough to bring Assad’s regime to the negotiating table. A Turkish foreign ministry official, speaking to TIME anonymously, fleshed out Davutoglu’s remarks. “Any intervention should be designed to clear the way for a solution,” he says, “rather than maintaining, or rather worse, aggravating the uncertainties prevalent right now.” Since the beginning of the two-year-long civil war in Syria, Turkey, which shares a 560-mile border with its southern neighbor, has grown increasingly vulnerable to the conflict’s violent spillover. To date, almost half a million Syrians have found shelter in the country, including about 200,000 in refugee camps. Turkish soldiers manning the border have recently had to fight off thousands of heavily armed petrol smugglers near the town Reyhanli, where a car bombing earlier this year that Ankara links to Syrian intelligence agents claimed 53 lives. Further east, they have looked on helplessly as a Kurdish militia that has waged war against Turkey for the last 30 years has taken control over an area stretching from Ras al-Ayn, just south of the border in Syria, to northern Iraq. The kind of intervention the Americans envision doesn’t address![]()
