Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu denied the affiliation of the government of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP – Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi) to the Muslim Brotherhood, invoking its relationship with non-Islamist heads of state and officials, among them President Bashar Al-Assad, before the dispute between them. Davutoğlu's statements have come in response to criticism by the Left and the Right of the government's stance on the Syrian crisis and its turning Turkey into a “training base for Islamist fighters of various nationalities and driving them to Jihad in Syria, just as Pakistan had been a base for Jihadists in Afghanistan" (Turkish newspaper Milliyet). Yet, in responding to such criticism, the Foreign Minister also aimed at denying the news of disagreement between Ankara and Washington over the form the regime would take in “Post-Assad Syria". He similarly aimed at denying the claims of those in the ruling party opposed to Erdoğan's policy, as some of them had leaked to Yeni Şafak, a newspaper close to the AKP, news that several American envoys, and in particular Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey, has asked Ankara to participate in fighting the Taliban movement in Afghanistan, preparing to confront Al-Qaeda in Syria, and establishing a regime in Damascus that would not be restricted to Islamists and would not uproot the Baath Party, in exchange for unlimited US support to combat the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK – Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê), which has recently been intensifying its military activity. It is a disagreement between allies that will not hinder cooperation between them to achieve a single goal: that of including Syria in the Islamist, for Turkey, or moderate, as Washington says, camp. And because Davutoğlu still insists on applying his theory, which views Turkey as the center of progress in the Muslim World, he deemed it necessary to remind that the societies of the “Kurds, the Turks in the Balkan, [the] Caucas[us] and Middle Eastern nations (...) need renewing" and that “Turkey can be the center of this renewal". However, there are two ideologies hindering such an ambition, namely nationalist ideology in Syria and confessional ideology in Iran. And it is imperative to resolve this reality in order to overcome it. Thus it began with Syria, which is now drowning in the blood of its inhabitants, and which after all this destruction will need decades to be able to stand on its own two feet and regain its role in the region, and also to be able to say yes or no, especially as there can be seen on the horizon no Arab plans to save it from the predicament it finds itself in. Davutoğlu is also wagering on the fact that the region, which is heading towards political Islamization, will not allow Iran to be part of the formula of the new Middle East, which Ankara is working to shape in collaboration with the United States and its Western allies – a Middle East “reconciled with itself and with its religious and political history, of which Turkey represents an essential part", as one Turkish theorist close to the Prime Minister writes. Turkey's wager on Syria falling, and on Iran remaining ostracized in its neighborhood, makes no account of the wars that could result of this. In other words, Ankara is repeating its own mistakes, ever since it shifted from the policy of “zero problems" with its neighborhood to a policy of making followers out of this neighborhood, in order for Neo-Ottomanism to inherit the “new Middle East" from the Neoconservatives.
