A cacophony of sound bites pounds Syria

Saudi Arabia’s Prince Turki al-Faisal yesterday called for Syrian rebels to be given anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons to “level the playing field” in their fight to remove President Bashar al-Assad.

“I’m not in government so I don’t have to be diplomatic. I assume we’re sending weapons and if we were not sending weapons it would be a terrible mistake on our part,” he said in a televised debate at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland.

Prince Turki, co-founder of the King Faisal Foundation and board chairman of the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies, is the son of the late King Faisal and brother of the kingdom’s foreign minister. He studied at Princeton, Cambridge and Georgetown universities before serving in succession over the years as adviser to royal court, intelligence chief, ambassador to the UK and Ireland, and finally ambassador to the United States.

“You have to level the playing field. Most of the weapons the rebels have come from captured Syrian stocks and defectors bringing their weapons,” he said.

“What is needed are sophisticated, high-level weapons that can bring down planes, can take out tanks at a distance. This is not getting through.”

But Prince Turki said foreign powers should have enough information on the many rebel brigades to ensure weapons only reached non-extremist groups.

Extremists are flowing into Syria from North Africa, Europe and other regions to fight with opposition forces, he said.

“Stop the killing and you won’t have these terrorists, they won’t have any place to go in Syria,” the Saudi prince said. Their presence was predicted from day one in the event of a prolonged crisis. The answer is to channel funds to “the good guys” among the opposition.

"You can select the good guys and give them these means and build their credibility," he said. "Now they don't have the means, and the extremists have the means and are getting the prestige."

“Sixty thousand people have been killed already,” Prince Turki said. “Do we have to wait for double or triple that number to die before Assad leaves?”

Pressed on the thorny issue whether the opposition’s allies are sending weapons into Syria, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said: “The Turkish people have helped the refugees with their humanitarian needs and also the Syrian people to defend themselves by the best means… The Syrian people know what we are doing, how we are helping.”

Panelists agreed there must be a political solution in Syria.

Syria has become a “proxy war” with different countries trying to defend or impose their own interests, said Ghassan Salamé, Dean of The Paris School of International Affairs. Any solution could take many years unless one of two things happens, he said. Either one side must prevail militarily, or a political solution must be imposed on the various players from outside. “I don’t see another way out of this,” he said.

“Europeans, Arabs, Chinese, Russians: we’re all committing a crime by watching people in Syria die,” Salamé said, warning the worst was yet to come if the battle for Damascus begins in earnest. That is likely to be devastating and send many thousands more refugees into Lebanon and Jordan.

Jordan’s Abdullah

Also speaking yesterday in Davos during a panel appearance with CNN's Fareed Zakaria, Jordan’s King Abdullah warned, “Anyone who says that Bashar’s regime has got weeks to live really doesn't know the reality on the ground."

“They still have capability. ... So (I expect) a strong showing for at least the first half of 2013,” he said.

Nonetheless, fears are growing Syria may implode as the protracted conflict gets nastier.

Any fragmentation of the country into small states would be “catastrophic and something that we would be reeling from for decades to come,” Abdullah said.

He also warned of the threat of foreign jihadist fighters now in Syria.

Al-Qaeda has been established there for the past year and is getting support “from certain quarters,” the king said.

“They are a force to contend with, so even if we got the best government into Damascus tomorrow, we have at least two or three years of securing our borders from them coming across and to clean them up,” he said.

Comparing the militant threat with that seen in Afghanistan, Abdullah said: "The new Taliban we are going to have to deal with will be in Syria.”

Abdullah appealed for greater international help for more than 300,000 Syrian refugees who have already fled over the border into Jordan and are suffering in the grip of a cruel winter.

He also urged the stockpiling of humanitarian supplies that could be taken across Syria's borders, to try to keep people from leaving -- and to win hearts and minds.

“If these people start to starve and they don't have fuel and electricity and water, and hospitals are not running, that's when radicalization comes in and take advantage,” the king said.

Henry Kissinger

Richard Nixon, Hafez Assad and Henry Kissinger (syrianhistory.com)

Also touching on Syria in his wide-ranging address to business leaders at the Forum in Davos earlier on Thursday was the Nixon Administration’s secretary of state Henry Kissinger, who brokered the Syria-Israel disengagement agreement with Bashar’s father Hafez Assad in March 1974.

Kissinger called on Washington and Moscow to work together to solve the Syria crisis.

He counseled “an American-Russian understanding as a first step towards defining what the objective is,” adding: “The Syrian problem would best be dealt with internationally by Russia and America not making it a contest of national interest.”

The Syrian conflict, initially seen as a fight of democracy against dictatorship, has transformed into a conflict between various ethnic groups, leaving the international community with a dilemma. “The outside world finds that if it intervenes militarily, it will be in the middle of a vast ethnic conflict; and if it doesn’t intervene militarily, it will be caught in a humanitarian tragedy,” said Kissinger.

While a number of outcomes are possible –- Assad staying in office, a total “Sunnite” victory, or an emergence of a loose federation of various ethnic groups –- what is clear is that “the more the outside world competes, the worse it gets,” he said.

John Kerry

John Kerry, the incoming secretary of state who met several times over the years with Bashar, did not mention Syria in his opening statement at his confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee on Thursday.

But when pressed by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., about getting more directly involved in helping the Syrian rebels, Kerry said he needs time to understand the situation better.

McCain, part of a bipartisan group of senators which just got back from a trip to the Middle East and visited Syrian refugees camps, told Kerry they feel “an anger and frustration” and believe the United States is indifferent to their suffering.

One Syrian teacher told McCain and the other senators, “This next generation of children will take revenge on those that did not help them.”

McCain added, “We are sowing the wind in Syria and we are going to reap the whirlwind.”

He said, “We can do a lot more, without putting boots on the ground” – such as a no-fly zone – and he complained that “all I get, frankly, from the (Obama) administration is the fall of Assad is, quote, ‘inevitable.’ I agree, but what about what happens in the meantime?”

Another member of the delegation that toured the Middle East, Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., complained to Kerry that U.S. humanitarian aid intended for Syrian refugees “has not reached the people on the ground.”

Kerry and McCain at the confirmation hearing

In response to both Coons and McCain, Kerry said “if you have a complete implosion of the state” in Syria after Assad’s fall, it would greatly increase the risk that Assad’s chemical weapons arsenal would fall into the wrong hands.

Asked about the personal bond he once had with Assad, Kerry said there was a moment where Syria reached out to the West but that the moment has long passed.

“Sometimes there are moments where you may be able to get something done in foreign policy, and if the moment somehow doesn’t ripen correctly or get seized, you miss major opportunities,” he said.

"History caught up to us. That never happened. And it's now moot, because he (Assad) has made a set of judgments that are inexcusable, that are reprehensible, and I think is not long for remaining as the head of state in Syria," the senator said. "I think the time is ticking."

Kerry also said: “We need to change Bashar Assad’s calculation. Right now President Assad doesn’t think he’s losing -- and the opposition thinks it is winning.”

Kerry said the goal of U.S. policy is a peaceful transition to a new government.

He said he hoped to confer with the Russians and with others and “increase the readiness of President Assad to see that the die is cast, the handwriting is on the wall….”

“I don’t want inquisitiveness or curiosity about what possibilities might exist with the Russians to be translated into optimism. I don’t have optimism. I have hope,” the senator said.

Coons told Kerry, “We frankly face a very narrow window to make a difference on the ground in support of the opposition.”  

“I get it,” Kerry answered, but he said he was worried about who would control the country if Assad were forced out of power.

Laurent Fabius

In Paris, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said in his annual New Year's address to the press there was no sign the Syria war was going to end anytime soon, in contrast to his prediction last month that the end was near for Assad.

"Things are not moving. The solution we had hoped for, and by that I mean the fall of Bashar and the arrival of the [opposition’s National] Coalition to power, has not happened," he said.

France was the first to recognize the Syrian National Coalition of Revolutionary and Opposition Forces as the sole legitimate representative of the Syrian people.

Fabius told RFI radio in December "the end is nearing" for Assad. On Thursday, he said international mediation and discussions about the crisis were not getting anywhere.

"There are no recent positive signs," he said.

He said National Coalition leaders and representatives of some 50 nations and organizations would meet in Paris on Monday to discuss how to fulfill previous commitments. He did not elaborate.

U.S., after Russia, is part of the problem in Syria

The Assads entertaining the Kerrys at dinner in a Damascus restaurant (File photo from syrianhistory.com)

Abdelwahhab Badrakhan, who holds a Master’s degree in Information Science from the Sorbonne, writes regularly for four regional newspapers and has a daily political analysis program on Radio Monte Carlo Doualiya (International). He wrote this think piece in Arabic for today’s al-Hayat

Russia’s position on Syria became hopeless months ago. Instead of evolving, its position became increasingly intransigent.

All the talk about Moscow being “unconcerned” about Bashar al-Assad’s fate was a smokescreen.

It was meant to conceal the reality that Moscow joins Iran in considering Assad a “red line.” Russia and Iran work hand in glove in arming the regime and mapping out its survival, pending a solution tailored to fit it.

To see the United States join the Russian-Iranian duet is no longer far-fetched.

Why? Because the Syria crisis now has a byname in Washington: “Jabhat al-Nusra” or the “War on Terror,” instead of “The people want an end to oppression and aspire to freedom.”

The massacre of hostages and hostage-takers in Algeria, the mixture of Afghanization and Somalization with a tint of al-Qaeda in northern Mali, and al-Qaeda’s role in the killing of the U.S. ambassador and two other American diplomats in Benghazi will certainly spur America’s belief that “better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.”

When John Kerry, the new U.S. secretary of state and old “friend” of the Syrian regime, meets his Russian opposite number Sergei Lavrov next month, the new Obama Administration’s foreign policy wouldn’t have jelled yet. But the new policy will be drawing nearer – not further from – Russia’s objectives. It will want to activate the Syria “understandings.”

You can forget Washington’s earlier blabber about “a transitional government with full powers” and the need for Assad to step down.

The two big powers will support whoever can stifle terror. They will stand shoulder to shoulder against any side impeding this priority.

Obviously, they will want to rely on the regime, which is far from being gullible. The regime will request U.S. guarantees for its survival.

The regime is aware, but has yet to acknowledge, that the Americans have already dried up the sources of financial and military assistance to the opposition, including the non-extremist side. But the regime would also request the resumption of ties with Washington and a visit by old friend “Kerry,” who would have by then forgotten his earlier counsel to Assad to step down.

Meantime, the regime is trying hard to prove its mettle by committing at least a daily massacre, and by targeting children, young men and a whole generation…

That’s what you call the “Game of Nations” and the amorality of power politics in its ugliest form.

Once American and Russian pragmatism converge and play ball with the brutal Assad regime, Syria can expect a muddier and more tempestuous chapter.

The “game of nations’ leaves no room for peoples’ rights and “aspirations.” The Palestinian people can attest to such historic injustice.

At best, the Syrian opposition will be cornered and told the balance of power leaves it no more than what the two great powers determined.

The Syrian people demanded the protection of civilians. They demanded a no-fly zone. They demanded qualitative weapons to redress the balance of forces. They demanded relief aid. They demanded that children not be left to die from cold or disease.

They got nothing from the international community. Whoever spoke of a “conspiracy” with the regime against the people was not far from the truth.

Of course, America’s turnaround was not, and will not, be by electric shock. Nor will it be an easy matter, free of hurdles.

Despite differences in their assessments, neither Washington nor Moscow are certain the regime can still be rehabilitated – albeit for the specific, camouflaged and seemingly-worthy task of “precluding the collapse of the state and the army.”

But the “game of nations” hardly ever yields peaceable balances…

As the Americans and Russians play up today the symptoms of Somalization in Syria, they are fully aware the regime created them.  In addition, Barack Obama’s “non-intervention doctrine” effectively produced the same fallouts in Syria as those of the “intervention doctrine” of George W. Bush in Iraq.

Russia, which justifies its intervention in Syria with a lesson in international law, gives a bad example of what the international community’s role should be. Indeed, the two powers would say anything to absolve them of any responsibility for creating the situation they now bemoan. They make it sound as though the Syrian people revolted, sacrificed and suffered simply to stack up al-Qaeda and other terrorists on their soil.

By encapsulating the crisis as a proliferation of extremism, and by mulling a plausible excuse for its about-face, the United States is prioritizing the side effects of the illness instead of treating its causes. It even seems prepared to overlook the violence, the bloodshed and the destruction meted out by the regime -- to the point of pondering reliance on the regime “to restore order.”

Why and how Washington’s U-turn?

The factors are threefold:

1. From the onset, Washington’s priority in addressing the Syria crisis was to protect Israel’s interests, which meant “reforming the regime” rather than “regime change.”

2. The obduracy of Russia, which exploited Syria’s plight to recover its “Great Power” status, thereby forcing the Obama administration to reluctantly choose between outright confrontation and a trade-off.

3. The Syrian opposition’s struggle to set up one or more viable alternatives to the regime, chiefly because of the [two Assads’] 42-year bulldozing of politics altogether…

The Americans have long been heard inviting the Russians to be part of the solution and not part of the problem. Here is America becoming part of the problem too.

Should the anticipated policy change come true, America, like Russia, would become responsible for the Syrians’ killing and the butchery of their revolution. 

Peace for Syria is a pipe dream for now

Russian evacuees from Syria, on the bus (top), to the plane in Beirut and on arrival in Moscow

Narrating the Syria logjam, Saudi Arabia and Russia believe a political settlement in the war-ravaged country is dead in the water.

President Bashar al-Assad’s actions make negotiations impossible, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal told a news conference in Riyadh last night.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov retorted at an annual news conference in Moscow this morning there could be no peace so long as Assad’s opponents refuse to negotiate with his administration and demand his exit from power as a precondition for peace talks.

“Damascus... which has been a city for the longest period of time, is carpet-bombed. How can you conceive of the possibility of a negotiated settlement with somebody who does that to his own country, to his own history, to his own people? It is inconceivable to us,” Prince Saud told reporters in Riyadh.

He was speaking after an Arab summit focusing on economic development, which was not attended by Syria.

Prince Saud said the UN Security Council needed to take urgent action to end the crisis.

“We have a call to make to the Security Council, to finally show the responsibility that they must show... or otherwise I think it is the duty of the General Assembly to censure the Security Council for failing in its duty,” he added.

Lavrov told the Moscow press conference, called to draw a line under 2012 events: “Everything runs up against the opposition members' obsession with the idea of overthrowing the Assad regime. As long as this irreconcilable position remains in force, nothing good will happen, armed action will continue, people will die.”

“Our priority is not reaching some kind of a geopolitical goal, which ousting the existing regime definitely is,” he said.

Speaking of naval war games Russia is holding in the Black Sea and in the Mediterranean, not far from Syria, Lavrov said the naval presence was a positive factor.

"Of course we have no interest in the Mediterranean region becoming even more destabilized. And the presence of our fleet there is undoubtedly a stabilizing factor," Lavrov said.

He also said Moscow was not beginning a mass evacuation of its citizens from Syria.

Lavrov was speaking a few hours after a total of 77 Russian citizens, mostly women and children, were flown back to Moscow from Beirut after fleeing Syria by land as the security situation in the war-torn country continues to deteriorate.

The evacuees were bused to Beirut and flown home from there because of persistent fighting near Damascus airport.

"We have plans (for an evacuation), as we have plans for any country, in case of an escalation of the internal situation... but there is no talk of implementing them," Lavrov said.

But if Russian citizens decide to leave the country, Russian Emergencies Ministry jets can fly them back to Russia since they deliver humanitarian help to Syria regularly, he added.

Lavrov said Russia had pulled out the families of diplomats but there were no immediate plans to reduce embassy staff -- and Russia's embassy in Damascus was functioning normally.

The embassy told RIA Novosti 8,008 Russian nationals are registered in its official lists, but diplomatic sources estimate about 25,000 more Russian women married to Syrians live in the country without registering at Russian consular services.

RIA Novosti said the first group of 28 evacuees was delivered by a Yak-42 passenger plane, followed by a larger group of 49 Russian nationals transported by an Il-76 aircraft.

The planes landed at Moscow’s Domodedovo airport where medical personnel, psychologists and immigration officials met the passengers.

The evacuees include Russian women who married Syrians, their children and husbands who acquired Russian citizenship.

Voice of Russia today quotes one evacuee, an unnamed Damascus University professor, as saying: “Rebel fighters engage in plundering and keep bombing the capital, including the city center.”

"It's very dangerous there. Rockets, planes, tanks," one man named as Albert Omar, told state TV.

A Russian woman, who was not named, said: "It had become impossible to live there. There is no money. No work. We have lost everything."

"Obama's failure in Syria"

The following appears today in the Washington Post

By Richard Cohen

There are two kinds of wars, we are told — wars of choice and wars of necessity. The former is to be avoided and the latter fought with appropriate reluctance. World War II was a good and necessary war but Vietnam was not. The war in Iraq was a matter of choice (also of imbecility) but Afghanistan was not — although it now may be. Wars can change over time. The one in Syria certainly has. It has gone from a war of choice to a war of necessity that President Obama did not choose to fight. A mountain of dead testifies to his mistake.

More than 60,000 people have been killed, most of them civilians. An estimated 650,000 refugees have fled across Syria’s various borders. They live in miserable conditions, soaked and frozen by the chilling rains of the Mediterranean winter, caked in mud. Children have died. More children will die.

The war threatens to destabilize a whole region. The Kurds in Syria’s north are restless. The Palestinians, refugees in Syria from their one-time homeland, are refugees yet again in Jordan. Lebanon is awash with Syrians, fellow Muslims but often of a different sort. The ethnic nitroglycerin of that country — an unstable mixture of Sunnis and Shiites, various Christians and Druze — looks increasingly fragile. All Lebanese are mental census takers: Has their group increased or decreased, and what does it mean?

And what of Bashar al-Assad, the unimpressive son of a frighteningly impressive father? Will he seek exile in Moscow, possibly rooming with that vulgarian, Gerard Depardieu? Not likely. Assad will retreat to the Alawite redoubt and the slaughter will continue. Bloodbath will follow bloodbath, a settling of scores from the recent past, the distant past and — just for good measure — the imagined future: Kill before you can be killed. It’s the earliest form of hedging.

I am talking about a misery that beggars description. I am talking of infants dying of dysentery and the old taking one last feeble step. I am talking about barbarity that always accompanies civil war and I am talking, finally, of a catastrophe that could have been avoided. A little muscle from NATO, which is to say the United States, could have put an end to this thing early on. The imposition of a no-fly zone, as was done in Libya, would not only have grounded Syrian airplanes and helicopters but also have convinced the military and intelligence services early on that Assad was doomed and the outcome was not in doubt. At that time there were places he could have gone.

But the White House was resolute in its irresolution. A presidential campaign was on, and it was no time for foreign adventures. Iraq was winding down; with any luck, Afghanistan would too. The United States had no dog in the Syrian fight and, besides, Washington — in an admission of incompetence — could not tell the good guys from the bad guys. Waiting cleared things up. Now the bad guys (jihadists and others) are more in control and the moderates have, as moderates usually do, lost out to radicals. Procrastination, as well as the prospect of one’s hanging, clarifies the mind.

In retrospect, this was a war of necessity. It was necessary to avoid a regional calamity, the spread of more violence to Lebanon and Iraq. It was necessary to avoid a humanitarian disaster; great suffering that could have been avoided or at least mitigated. It was necessary to take a stand against barbarity because this is — is it not? — a basic obligation. It was necessary to intervene because we could do so at very little cost. To do what you can when you can might not have the Metternichian ring of a Great Strategic Doctrine, but it has the force of common sense. It is both compelling and workable. We are talking, simply, of saving lives.

It was necessary, finally, because not only must the thugs of this world be held accountable by the world community, they must know they will be held accountable by the world community. The indiscriminate shelling of cities and towns must not be tolerated. The purposeful killing of journalists must not be tolerated. The people of any country are not chattel to be treated any way their government wants. This — a furious sense of moral indignation — must return to U.S. foreign policy and be the centerpiece of Obama’s second term. This is no longer a matter of choice. It is a necessity.

Pro-Assad daily expects “new gory chapter”

Syria's 14 provinces or governorates

On the day the Syrian opposition said it deferred a decision on forming a government-in-exile at its meeting in Istanbul, a newspaper close to Syria’s regime was anticipating an imminent and gory government campaign to jettison rebels from three of Syria 14 provinces: Damascus, “Rif Dimashq” (or Damascus suburbs) and Homs.   

The opposition said in a statement, “After studying the proposals and after deliberation on the question of creating an interim government, we decided to set up a five-member committee tasked with consulting with the forces of the revolution, the Free Syrian Army and friendly countries.”

The panel – which includes among others, National Coalition chief Moaz el-Khatib, Syrian National Council head George Sabra and former SNC leader Burhan Ghalioun -- would also be tasked with exploring the extent of Arab and international political and financial commitments needed to make an interim government viable.

The opposition is due to meet again on January 28 in Paris, along with representatives of some 20 countries that back the revolt against President Bashar al-Assad.

But Assad himself won’t be holding back meantime.

According to al-Akhbar daily, his mouthpiece in Beirut, it’s now “back to the battlefront.”

The paper explains, and I paraphrase in part:

In light of fresh reports about root changes in the Syrian army’s accomplishments and operations, and as a new round of diplomacy spurred by forces hostile to Syria gathers pace, fear of a bloodier conflict is mounting.

Syria is moving towards a new phase, politically and on the ground. The external diplomatic ambiance does not augur an impending settlement.

Lakhdar Brahimi urged “real change” in Syria, but failed to win concessions from either the regime or the opposition.

On the ground, the regular army’s efficacy has been going from strength to strength since the collapse of the rebels’ “Damascus foray.”

Several sources confirm Military Intelligence played a key role in the army’s recent successes in the Damascus suburbs and the Homs area.

After a reassessment of the situation, decisions were made to forsake efforts deemed futile. As a result, it was decided to abandon certain positions and not to engage in military confrontations in a range of areas, chiefly in the North.

The endeavors of players hostile to the Syrian regime are now focused on:

-- Lifting the Syrian National Coalition’s morale and lobbying for an interim government with promises of political and financial help.

-- Renewing the attempt to centralize the armed opposition under a single military command.

-- Putting on ice the issue of al-Nusra Front in the hope that all rebel groups would close ranks, particularly in the rural areas of Idlib and Aleppo.

-- Compensating for the “Damascus foray” fiasco with high-visibility blasts targeting regime political figures or a military push that would expand rebel control of this or that area.

On the battleground, reports from Damascus say regime forces will try to regain full control of the provinces of Damascus, Rif Dimashq and Homs. The implication is that military operations are expected to stretch from Eastern Ghouta southward to Qusayr and villages in the Homs rural area. The outcome of these confrontations will have far-reaching repercussions in the next stage.

Given the persisting internal split and intensifying outside pressures, Syria has a rendezvous with a new bloodstained chapter.

Birds do it, bees do it… and Iran officials do it

Four image grabs from the video clip. Top are file photos of Kamran and Azadeh

Social media in Iran is reportedly abuzz with rumors – supported by a 30-second video clip – about two senior officials smooching in a lift.

Sky News Arabia, which carries the news and blurred video, says locking lips up and down the lift are none other than Higher Education Minister Kamran Daneshjoo and Ms Azadeh Ardakani, director of the National Museum of Iran.

Are Turks in Somalia for the hajj or to sell beads?

Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi journalist and author now heading Al Arab News Channel, penned this think piece in Arabic for today’s al-Hayat

Erdogan and his wife Emine in Somalia in August 2011 

Next to us, we Saudis, and within our strategic security sphere, lies a country biting the dust for more than two decades.

Its collapse began when its last “effective” government, which was neither successful nor popularly elected, fell.

Even if that government had survived to this day, it surely would have been swept away by the Arab Spring.

Together with our neighbors in the region, we looked after it on one or two occasions, and then moved away.

Even the Americans ran out on it after a solitary attempt to save it in the wake of the war to liberate Kuwait. At the time, George Bush Sr. may have wanted to show his country was also ready to intervene and help a poverty-stricken Muslim country, unlike oil-rich Kuwait. It turned out to be a bitter American experience.

I am referring to Somalia.

Who wants to help Somalia? Its people are unruly, plagued by differences and internecine strife, and ruled by warlords. Al-Qaeda infested many of its citizens’ minds, adding to miseries and divisions even in single households.

In the end, Somalia became the hotbed of high sea piracy. The world came to shun both the state and its people. Somalis got to be a source of concern for Saudi Arabia and its Gulf partners after a rise in their illegal immigration across Yemen through a transnational network of organized crime in the smuggling of migrants.

Everyone lost hope in Somalia and no one believed the failed state would recover anytime soon.

Or so it seemed.

There is now a glimmer of hope looming on the horizon.

International organizations now say Somalia is on the mend. Its markets are beginning to recover, together with trade and construction activities. People who visited Somalia of late say there is money moving around in the impoverished country.

So, what happened?

The answer is Turkey and its Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is now the most popular leader there, with Somali mothers and fathers eager to name their newborns “Recep,” “Tayyip” and “Erdogan.”

So what is Turkey doing in Somalia and why? Is it on “a pilgrimage or selling beads” there -- which is a common expression used by Mecca residents well grounded in combining godliness and moneymaking?

One school of thought worth monitoring is known as “Turkey’s moderate Islam,” which combines advocacy with spreading the teachings of religion, economic development and trade.

It is capitalized on by dynamic Turkish businesses in carving out new markets.

There is a Turkish scholar, author and educator named Fethullah Gülen, who founded the Gülen movement that is believed to have 1,000 schools around the world and more than 10 million followers in Turkey alone. He currently lives in self-exile in Pennsylvania.

I was in Turkey some 25 years ago, trying to cover the rise of political Islam, when I first heard his name. But I didn’t get to meet him as he always shunned publicity and the media.

He had left Turkey for the United States when he was committed for trial in 2000 after the leaking of a video urging his followers to “move within the arteries of the system, without anyone noticing your existence, until you reach all the power centers. You must wait until such time as you have got all the state power.”

Originally charged with trying to undermine the secularity of the Turkish state, Gülen was acquitted in 2008 but continues to live in seclusion in Pennsylvania.

The Gülen movement is operating in Somalia through aid relief and development agencies, offering young Somali men and women scholarships for religious studies in Turkey. They would eventually replace Somali graduates of hard-line religious schools funded by Gulf charities.

By the time he flew to Somalia in August 2011, Erdogan had arranged for more than 1,200 Somali students to arrive in Turkey on full scholarship to study sciences, engineering, medicine and law at a cost of $70 million.

He then raised from Turkey’s private sector more than $365 in donations to Somalia, over and above his government’s $49 million contribution.

Today, Turkish traders and aid workers move freely across Somalia without needing to worry about being killed or kidnapped.

In contrast, UN and international aid workers remain holed up in their Somali offices or hotel rooms.

Is this happening because Turks, being Muslims, are familiar with the Somali people’s character and norms?

Julia Harte raises the question in her recent article, “Turkey Shocks Africa,” on which I relied to pen this think piece and which I strongly urge you to read.

Or does Turkey have a comprehensive plan – denied by the government – to marry advocacy and trade, thus help Turkish entrepreneurs and businesses gain favor among Somalis?

Or is energy-starved Turkey eyeing opportunities offered by the prospective find of 10 billion barrels of crude oil in Somalia’s northeastern Puntland province?

Alternatively, is Turkey mounting a smart charm offensive to increase its overall exports to Africa, which rose to $10.3 billion last year from $2.1 billion in 2003?

Turkey is now challenging China on African markets, but with a more humane face than the alienating method favored by the Chinese.

Regardless of Turkey’s motives, what happened benefited both the Turks and the Somalis.

And what about us?

It’s wrong to portray the Turks as competitors. They are friends who did what we should have done. It’s therefore good to catch up with them and participate in this benefaction. After all, we spearheaded the concept, “The Hajj…and the sale of beads.”