By strengthening its control in northern Syria, Turkey wants to increase its influence in the Sunni world

 The Turkish armed forces have penetrated into Syrian territory, without declaring any state of belligerence against Damascus, since 2016 with the official reason of opposing the militias of the Islamic State, which, it is suspected, had been used by Ankara in an anti-Assad function, with reasons that can also be traced back to the opposition between Shiites and Sunnis. In reality, it immediately became clear that the goal was to avert the Kurdish danger on the Turkish borders; the presence of the inhabitants of these areas, until that moment was characterized by a majority of Kurdish ethnicity and by the presence of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, an organization considered as terrorist, not only by Ankara, but also by Brussels and Washington. The fact that the Kurds had represented the troops operating on the ground against the Islamic State, which made it possible not to involve Western soldiers directly on the ground, was not enough to gain the protection of the Americans, who sacrificed them to an alliance, like that with Turkey, on which there are many doubts about the real opportunity, given the recent developments taken by the Erdogan presidency. In any case, the United Nations data speak of more than 150,000 Kurds forced to leave their lands since the actions of the Turkish army, together with the Syrian national army, a set of Islamist militias opposed to the Assad regime, in 2018, they developed in the areas close to the border with the territory of Ankara. The ethnic composition of the Syrian national army is interesting because it is made up of about 90% of Arabs and the remaining 10% of Turkmen and fits perfectly into the Turkish strategy of replacing the original Kurdish population with ethnic groups more favorable to Ankara, a practice similar to that exercised by Beijing in Tibet and Xinjiang, where the local population that has not assimilated to the integration process is replaced by the Han Chinese ethnic group through deportations and forced re-education practices; moreover, the militias of the Syrian national army, according to various humanitarian organizations, were guilty of war crimes, including kidnapping of Kurdish officials, who would later end up in Turkish prisons. It should be remembered that the Turkish military forces occupy about 60% of the Syrian territory that is on the Turkish border and the replacement of the population, with Syrian refugees of Arab ethnicity, is the logical consequence of the strategy of securing their southern borders, a program that it allowed Erdogan to overcome internal political problems, such as the economic crisis and the protest against the Islamization of society and who enjoyed, albeit with different nuances, the support of both the extreme right in the government and the opposition forces. From the international point of view, the Turkish presence is seen in various circles as a deterrent to the presence and action of Russia and Shiites, essentially a stabilizing factor in the Syrian question. Turkey has not limited itself to a military commitment, but has invested huge sums in the construction of infrastructures, such as schools and hospitals and has connected its own electricity grid to that of the occupied territories, while the currency in circulation has become the Turkish lira. It is necessary to specify that the Turkish action is encountering several positive opinions, which must be placed within the favorable sentiments for the pan-Islamic action of Ankara, which increasingly coincides with Erdogan's project of a new Ottoman course, which sees the Turkey at the center of a system beyond its borders, on which to exercise its influence, even as an alternative to Saudi or Egyptian prestige in the same Sunni area. The Kurdish territories now occupied, according to international law, will not be able to enter into the effective Turkish sovereignty, however it is reasonable to think of a positioning on the model of the Turkish part of Cyprus and Azerbaijan, which are in the sphere of influence of Ankara. The question is how far Turkey is willing to go ahead with these practices and how much this does not affect the judgment of Ankara’s retention within the Atlantic Alliance, whose aims have now too often appeared at odds with Turkey. There remains the profound negative evaluation of Ankara's behavior towards the Kurds, as an example of transgression of the norms of international law, to which, sooner or later, an adequate sanction will have to be found at a general level.