Israel\u2019s decision to strike a Syrian airbase at Abu al-Duhur on August 18\u2014after Syrian officials reported, and T\u00fcrkiye later denied, that a Turkish military delegation had visited the facility\u2014provided the latest evidence of a deepening rivalry between the two powers across a region in flux. Both Israel and T\u00fcrkiye have expanded their footprints inside Syria since the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024, but their visions for the country\u2014and the broader regional order\u2014stand in stark contrast.<\/p>\n
The rivalry is real but bounded: It is militarized most clearly in Syria, reinforced by disputes over Gaza and the Eastern Mediterranean, and still contained by deconfliction channels and a mutual interest in avoiding war. Yet the turbulence produced by the Iran war, new security alignments, and increasingly personalized rhetoric has made a limited confrontation more conceivable than before.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
A Strike before the Threat Materialized<\/p>\n
Abu al-Duhur matters less for the runway Israel damaged than for what the strike exposed. Israel justified its actions by claiming that Damascus was preparing to host Turkish forces at the site\u2014including radar and air-defense systems<\/a>\u2014roughly 70 kilometers from the border. Netanyahu called the strike a warning, while Defense Minister Israel Katz accused<\/a> Erdogan of \u201cdangerous adventures.\u201d Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani said Turkish officers had inspected rehabilitation work but denied any plan for a permanent deployment. T\u00fcrkiye\u2019s Defense Ministry subsequently denied<\/a> that a Turkish delegation had visited the base at all. Israel has not publicly produced evidence of an imminent deployment.<\/p>\n In an interview<\/a>, U.S. envoy to Syria Tom Barrack said Israel had raised the issue with Washington six days earlier, and that American intelligence agencies found neither Turkish assets in place nor an imminent deployment. \u201cWe all did our due diligence,\u201d he said. \u201cThe answer we got is, no, that\u2019s not happening. \u00a0Mossad chief Roman Gofman had separately spent two hours with al-Shaibani days earlier and received the same denial. Israel struck anyway, without notifying Washington or Ankara. Barrack offered three possible explanations\u2014faulty intelligence, institutional confusion between Israel\u2019s diplomatic and military channels, or an attempt to \u201cbait\u201d T\u00fcrkiye before Israel\u2019s October 27 election\u2014and warned that a Turkish interception could have widened the conflict. The exchange revealed two things at once: the domestic value to Israel\u2019s government of presenting T\u00fcrkiye as a threat, and a degree of public friction with Washington that Israeli officials rarely allow into the open.<\/p>\n The runway dispute sits inside a larger contest over regional order. Ankara fears that unchecked Israeli military freedom could frustrate Syrian consolidation and reactivate T\u00fcrkiye\u2019s Kurdish vulnerability, both of which it is trying to prevent. Israel fears that Turkish military access, political influence, and new regional alignments will narrow its own operational freedom and flexibility. At least three connected fronts now carry that competition: the military map in Syria, the Kurdish peace process, and the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement signed on August 7.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Competing Military Footprints in Syria<\/p>\n The Turkish government is seeking an integrated Syrian state closely tied to Ankara, and it supports Ahmad al-Sharaa\u2019s transitional administration through training, logistics, reconstruction, and institutional cooperation. Israel increasingly treats this as part of a wider Turkish military network<\/a>, rather than a dispute confined to one possible base.<\/p>\n Inside Syria, Turkish forces remain concentrated in the northern zones created by earlier operations and around the city of Idlib. What has actually changed since Assad\u2019s fall in 2024 is Ankara\u2019s formal relationship with Damascus. An August 2025 accord<\/a> covers training and military assistance, and Syrian personnel use Turkish facilities and academies<\/a>. Abu al-Duhur raised the prospect for Israel of a permanent Turkish role farther south. That Israel had already struck airbases in Hama and Homs<\/a> after Turkish teams surveyed them shows that this concern predates August\u2014and Israel is targeting a trajectory rather than any deployment that exists.<\/p>\n Israel\u2019s aim\u2019s in Syria run in stark contrast to its Turkish counterpart: to preserve its freedom of action in a neighboring state, including along a key strike corridor to Iran, by keeping the Syrian state too weak to contest it. Since Assad\u2019s fall, Israeli forces have crossed the 1974 disengagement line, seized territory well beyond it, and destroyed much of what remained of Syrian military infrastructure.<\/p>\n Nonetheless, Israel\u2019s military tactics can deny its adversaries specific assets but cannot produce a political settlement that advances strategic interests. Damascus has therefore held out hope for negotiations, even if it is skeptical of their outcome. On August 23, U.S.-mediated Israeli-Syrian talks resumed in Jordan<\/a> with an explicit objective of preventing Israeli-Turkish competition from being fought on Syrian territory. Damascus demanded an Israeli withdrawal to its pre-December 2024 positions, restoration of the 1974 disengagement framework, and freedom to rebuild its institutions and alliances.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n The Kurdish Peace Process and Israel<\/p>\n There is also concern across Turkish political camps that the country\u2019s unsettled Kurdish file could provide leverage for external interference. Indeed, according to some analysts, the ongoing peace process is at least partially driven by \u201cthe Israel factor<\/a>,\u201d as Ankara is keen to prevent its rival from exploiting Kurdish nationalism for its own ends as political authority is reordered across Syria, Iraq, and Iran.<\/p>\n In August, the Turkish parliament passed<\/a> a reintegration law that moved the PKK process onto a harder-to-reverse institutional track, while the dissolution of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in Syria announced on August 28 advanced the integration process there. Together, the two developments reduce the space that Ankara fears Israel could exploit.<\/p>\n Erdogan\u2019s description of regional Kurds as \u201cour brothers\u201d<\/a> signals the ambition behind this: to recast Kurdish actors as stakeholders in an Ankara-centered regional order, rather than as a security problem managed at arm\u2019s length.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n The Mecca Agreement<\/p>\n The August 7 Mecca Joint Defense Agreement among T\u00fcrkiye, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan adds another layer of strategic insulation, with planned political and military coordination mechanisms<\/a> giving it more substance than a symbolic declaration. Its significance is also political: After the Iran war deepened doubts about American security guarantees, three regional powers chose to organize deterrence together. The pact is not formally directed at Israel, yet it emerged amid shared concerns about increasingly assertive Israeli and Iranian military postures<\/a>. It embodies a search for predictable regional security at a moment when Israel is widely seen as producing instability through its desire to reshape the region in its interests. Its relevance to the bounded strategic rivalry between T\u00fcrkiye and Israel lies in its potential to give T\u00fcrkiye additional partners, interoperability, and political weight when bargaining over Syria and the wider regional order.<\/p>\n Some Turkish commentators have read Abu al-Duhur as an early Israeli response to the pact. Interconnectedly, Syrian Foreign Minister al-Shaibani called T\u00fcrkiye a key reconstruction partner and said Syria was considering whether to join the pact<\/a>. The strike therefore tested not only Turkish military access, but also how far that emerging alignment could extend into Syria.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Why Rivalry Is More Likely than War<\/p>\n These measures are designed to strengthen T\u00fcrkiye within a contested order, not to prepare for war with Israel. Neither government appears to want direct conflict, and Israel\u2019s foreign minister insists it has \u201cno interest in escalation.\u201d<\/a> Both countries retain a covert channel on Syria. Red lines are enforced in public while communication manages their consequences in private.<\/p>\n Washington and its Western partners have reasons to contain the rivalry because, as The Economist has argued<\/a>, geography and energy (and NATO politics) still pull the two states together. Yet Israel\u2019s conduct in Gaza, and the genocide allegations it faces, have devastated its image inside T\u00fcrkiye and made renewed cooperation difficult to sell to the public. This strengthens Ankara diplomatically but narrows the space for rapprochement.<\/p>\n