The collapse of the Assad regime in December 2024 was widely interpreted as a strategic defeat for the Iranian-led “Resistance Axis” and a corresponding victory for the West and its regional partners.
That interpretation is not wrong. It is, however, incomplete.
What has followed Assad’s fall is not the stabilization that Washington hoped for but the rapid consolidation of Turkish hegemony across the northern Levant, executed through a combination of Islamist network-building, economic monopolization, and emerging drone infrastructure that collectively represents the most sophisticated bid for regional dominance the Middle East has witnessed since the Ottoman withdrawal a century ago.
Ankara is assembling the architecture of permanent regional power, and it is doing so quietly enough that the alarm bells have yet to ring in most Western capitals.
The Brotherhood as an administrative infrastructure
Turkey’s encirclement of the Levant rests on three synchronized levers. The first is the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, which has functioned as Ankara’s ideological client since the Justice and Development Party (AKP) consolidated power under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
The Brotherhood survived the 1982 Hama massacre through tactical moderation, forging alliances with secular dissidents and presenting a pluralist face to Western interlocutors while maintaining Islam as the ultimate source of legal authority. In post-Assad Syria, this posture is being operationalized as the blueprint for governance.
Turkey has hosted Brotherhood leadership in Istanbul, financed its political infrastructure, and positioned it to dominate Syria’s emerging governing coalition. The arrangement suits Ankara precisely because it avoids the optics of direct colonial administration.
The Brotherhood provides local legitimacy, human capital, and ideological continuity. Turkey provides resources, security guarantees, and international cover. This is not a partnership of equals; it is a patron-client relationship in which Damascus will govern, and Ankara will decide.
The network extends westward into Lebanon, where Turkey is cultivating influence through Jamaa Islamiya, the local Brotherhood affiliate, and building a Sunni political base in Tripoli and the Akkar region capable of challenging Hezbollah on demographic and political terrain.
Lebanese security officials have already raised concerns about Turkish intelligence recruitment operations and the reported movement of cash and weapons into northern Lebanon. The goal is a permanent foothold on the Mediterranean coast, delivered not through military occupation but through the patient construction of a Sunni constituency beholden to Ankara.
The economic lock-in
The second lever is economic, and it is already operational. Five Turkish conglomerates with deep ties to the AKP, Cengiz, Limak, Kalyon, Kolin, and Makyol are positioned to lead Syrian reconstruction.
These firms built Istanbul Airport and the Trans-Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline. They are now moving equipment into Syria to rebuild airports, highways, and energy grids. Turkish exports to Syria in the construction and food sectors tripled in early 2025. The market integration is proceeding faster than international sanctions frameworks can track.
Alongside the private sector, Turkish state agencies, including AFAD and TIKA, are constructing schools, hospitals, and vocational training centers that replicate the Turkish institutional model. This is not development assistance in any conventional sense. It is generational dependency-building, designed to ensure that the next Syrian cohort of administrators, teachers, and engineers looks to Ankara for its professional formation and its political loyalties.
Reconstruction funds create infrastructure. Institutional replication creates subjects.
The drone corridor
The third lever is the least discussed in Western policy circles and the most consequential over a ten-year horizon.
Turkey is a global leader in unmanned aerial systems, and it is now constructing drone ports across northern Syria concurrent with its reconstruction projects. What is emerging is a dedicated aerial infrastructure linking the Turkish mainland southward through Syria and potentially into northern Lebanon, enabling cargo logistics, persistent surveillance, and asymmetric strike capability while bypassing naval interdiction and traditional border checkpoints.
Integrated with Ankara’s “Blue Homeland” maritime doctrine, which asserts Turkish sovereignty claims over 430,000 square kilometers of the Mediterranean and Aegean, the drone corridor creates a technological enclosure around the northern Levant. No previous regional actor, including Iran at the height of its influence, assembled anything comparable.
The corridor deliberately blurs the boundary between commercial and military activity. Cargo drones and surveillance drones share the same infrastructure. The transition from one to the other is a software update.
What comes next
Turkey’s encirclement presents a problem that kinetic instruments cannot solve. Ankara is a NATO member, a G20 economy, and a candidate state for EU accession. Its construction conglomerates operate under commercial law. Its Brotherhood affiliates present as civil society organizations. Its drone ports are dual-use by design.
Washington should work with Brussels to condition the lifting of Syrian sanctions on transparency requirements that prevent Turkish firms from monopolizing reconstruction contracts. Financial intelligence should be deployed to expose the documented overlap between AKP-linked business networks and Iranian sanctions evasion pipelines.
The framework linking the United States, Greece, Cyprus, and Israel should be formalized as a maritime security architecture specifically designed to contest Turkish overreach in the Eastern Mediterranean.
Iran announced its regional ambitions loudly and was met with coalitions, sanctions, and airstrikes.
Turkey is announcing nothing at all. That silence is not reassurance. It is methodical.
The writer, a fellow at the Middle East Forum, is a policy analyst and writer based in Morocco. Follow him on X: @amineayoubx