While the world obsesses over Israel, Recep Tayyip Erdogan is quietly appropriating land for Turkey, rewriting borders, and making a mockery of international law. The man who never misses a chance to denounce "occupation" and castigate Israel presides over two illegal occupations himself. And he is no longer simply occupying territory. He is positioning Turkey as the dominant Islamist power in the Middle East and the heir to Iran's self-appointed leadership of the anti-Israel “Axis of Resistance".
And if senior figures in his government are to be believed, his ambitions do not end in Cyprus or Syria. Erdogan’s sights are firmly fixed on Jerusalem.
Northern Cyprus has been under Turkish control for more than half a century, and northern Syria is rapidly going the same way. Yet the sanctimonious West, ever eager to moralise elsewhere, ignores these flagrant breaches of international law and treats Erdogan as a legitimate, valued partner.
Turkey’s occupation of northern Cyprus began in 1974, when its army invaded the island under the pretext of protecting Turkish Cypriots. They dropped napalm and burned villages. They stayed, and drove 170,000 Greek Cypriots from their homes. UN resolutions demand withdrawal. Ankara ignores them to this day. In reality, Turkey has seized 37 per cent of the island and split the capital, Nicosia, in two, making it the last divided capital in Europe.
The European Court of Human Rights has repeatedly ruled that Turkey exercises “effective control” over the north, making Ankara legally responsible for every violation of property and human rights there. None of that matters. In 2021, Erdogan personally toured the sealed-off resort town of Varosha, a virtual ghost town and symbol of occupation. He vowed to reopen it, in direct defiance of the UN Security Council. He brazenly declared, “There are two states in Cyprus, and the world will eventually recognise this reality.”
The reality is an illegal military occupation propped up by nearly 40,000 Turkish troops, fortified bases, and a growing Turkish “settler” population now outnumbering local Turkish Cypriots. Ankara has installed drone bases, new mosques, and schools teaching Turkish curricula. Erdogan hasn’t just preserved the occupation. He has institutionalised it.
Since 2016, Turkey has launched four invasions into northern Syria, Operations Euphrates Shield, Olive Branch, Peace Spring and Claw-Sword, claiming to fight terrorism and create “safe zones”. In reality, it is occupation by instalments, a creeping annexation.
According to Human Rights Watch’s 2024 report, Turkish forces and their allied militias are responsible for torture, sexual violence, enforced disappearances, looting, and property seizures across the region of Afrin, and the city districts of Ras al-Ayn and Tel Abyad.
Reports from the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic in 2023 and 2024 confirmed widespread abuses under Turkish control, including arbitrary arrests and the transfer of Syrian detainees into Turkey itself, a clear breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
In January 2024, Erdogan boasted that Turkish forces had destroyed “critical infrastructure” in northern Syria, including power stations, fuel depots, and water facilities. Satellite data and field reports from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights documented hundreds of strikes, crippling civilian services across the Kurdish-held north-east. The deliberate targeting of energy and water systems without cause, is collective punishment disguised as counter-terrorism.
Meanwhile, Turkey has replaced local governance with its own machinery. The Turkish lira circulates. The Turkish national postal service, PTT handles banking and post. Schools use Turkish textbooks, and local councils report directly to provincial governors in the Turkish cities of Gaziantep and Sanliurfa. Hospitals, police, and courts are financed by Ankara. The message is clear. Northern Syria is to be Turkish in everything but name.
Kurdish families who fled Afrin describe Arabs from other regions of Syria being resettled in their homes, a demographic swap that human rights groups openly call “ethnic engineering”. You may ask why not simply ethnic cleansing. “They changed our villages, our street names, even the language,” said one displaced Kurd from Jindires to The Guardian. “It’s as if we never existed.”
Turkey's ambitions in Syria have only grown. Ankara has no intention of withdrawing its troops. It is now training Syria's new armed forces while tightening its grip on Damascus. Kurdish autonomy is steadily being dismantled, and the Syrian Democratic Forces, the West's key ally against ISIS, have been abandoned.
Erdogan doesn’t need to annex every kilometre of Syria. The new government in Damascus is increasingly dependent on Ankara for its security and survival. Occupation is giving way to something more sophisticated, control without formal annexation.
In June 2026, Erdogan claimed Israeli operations in Syria and Lebanon had reached the point where they threatened Turkey itself. Turkey is now seeking a formal security role in Lebanon, while pledging military support and reconstruction assistance to Beirut. Presented as regional stability, it would place Turkish influence on yet another former Ottoman frontier, this time directly on Israel's northern border.
Erdogan sells this imperial project as piety. He wraps his ambitions in Islam, casting himself as the protector of Muslims and scourge of Israel. He calls Hamas “freedom fighters”, not terrorists. In October 2023, while the world reeled from Hamas’s massacre of Israeli civilians, Erdogan declared: “Hamas is not a terrorist organisation. It is a group of mujahideen fighting to protect their lands.” In May 2024, he proudly told reporters that Hamas members were being treated in Turkish hospitals.
He speaks of Gaza’s suffering with rehearsed outrage while presiding over brutal occupations of his own. He denounces Western double standards, as he practices them as state policy. He uses the Muslim Brotherhood’s global network, much of which has found a home in Istanbul following Egypt’s crackdown, to project and consolidate influence across the region.
In November 2025, in a display of moral inversion that would make Orwell blush, Turkish prosecutors issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and dozens of other Israeli officials, accusing them of genocide and crimes against humanity in Gaza. The Hamas leadership, hosted and celebrated in Ankara, as well as Qatar, rushed to applaud. A state that bombs Kurdish towns indiscriminately, empties and “ethnically engineers” Syrian villages, has occupied and ethnically cleansed more than a third of Cyprus for over fifty years, now presumes to lecture the world on justice. It’s the height of hypocrisy that makes a mockery the law, of morality, and truth itself.
Erdogan’s ideology is not nationalism. It is a blend of Islamism and neo-Ottoman revivalism. It’s the belief that the map of 1918 was an insult that needs redressing. Cyprus and northern Syria are just a start.
With Iran weakened, Erdogan increasingly presents Turkey as the natural leader of the Islamist "resistance" against Israel. Senior figures in Erdogan's government now openly speak of the "liberation" of Jerusalem by Turkey. Interior Minister Mustafa Çiftçi even declared his ambition to one day serve as Governor of Jerusalem, describing the city's return to Turkish rule as the natural continuation of Ankara's growing influence across the region. And in case you missed it, Turkey wants Jerusalem for Turkey. The Palestinians are convenient pretext. Jerusalem is the prize.
Why does he get away with it? Europe needs him to hold back migrants. NATO needs him to host bases and block Russia in the Black Sea. Washington needs him to keep grain corridors open. So, as long as Erdogan remains “useful”, no one dares hold him to account.
That is not wilful ignorance. It’s the worst kind of indulgence. The UN acknowledges that Cyprus is occupied. It says so every year. The EU knows Kurdish civilians are being slaughtered and displaced. Its own parliament declared Turkey’s actions “in violation of international law”. But words are cheap, and Erdogan knows it. He plays all sides and wins almost every hand.
He buys Russian S-400 missiles, then demands American F-16s. He warns Greece, bullies Cyprus, shelters Hamas, threatens Kurds, and still collects billions in EU funding and US arms. It’s not diplomacy. It’s a racket, and a highly successful one at that.
Late last year, Britain decided it too wants in on the action. In October 2025, the UK signed an £8 billion deal to sell twenty Eurofighter Typhoon jets to Turkey. It was hailed in London as the biggest fighter-jet export in a generation and a triumph for “defence jobs and partnership”. In reality, it’s another shameful transaction with a regime that is forcibly occupying two neighbouring countries, arming Islamist proxies, and jailing its own journalists. Those aircraft and missile systems won’t defend democracy. They’ll simply help entrench a dictator. The photographs of handshakes and smiles between, now ex-Prime Minister, Keir Starmer and Erdogan should shame every politician who still dares to speak of “British values”.
As if that weren't enough, Donald Trump is now preparing to lift sanctions imposed over Turkey's purchase of Russian S-400 missile systems, has approved the sale of F16, fighter jet engines, and is openly considering Turkey's return to the F-35 programme. Occupy your neighbours, shelter Hamas, threaten Israel, buy Russian weapons and undermine NATO from within, and Washington will line up to sell you the world's most advanced stealth fighter.
Each time Erdogan acts with impunity, international law exposes itself as nothing more than theatre. Cyprus remains occupied. Turkey is quietly carving out its own piece of Syria. The Kurds, once the West’s allies against ISIS, have been betrayed once more, abandoned to the mercy, or lack thereof, of Turkish drones. The message to every aspiring autocrat is clear. As long as you are not Israel, do it quietly, call it security, and no one will say a word.
Erdogan has turned occupation into a business model. He exports Islamism and buys the world’s silence with leverage, confident in the West’s cowardice and the UN’s impotence. As long as the world keeps pandering to his ego, borders will continue to shift in his favour, one ignored atrocity at a time.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan is neither misunderstood nor misrepresented.
He is a ruthless dictator and master manipulator who thrives on deceit, feeds on naiveté and cowardice, and calls it diplomacy. He is slowly, methodically, and ever so quietly expanding his empire while the international community chooses to look the other way. He preaches justice and praises resistance while brutally occupying his neighbours, ethnically cleansing and stealing their land. He invokes faith to disguise greed and freedom to mask oppression.
The Turkish dictator has grand plans for his empire, plans the world continues to ignore at its peril.
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