Amid a vacuum of power in the Middle East resulting from a weakened Iran, the Islamist regime of Turkish President Recep Erdogan has begun encroaching into Syria, provoking a response from the Israeli military last week in which it struck an airbase near the Turkish border.

On August 18, Israel carried out eight airstrikes on the Abu Duhur military airbase in Syria, which is located approximately 43 miles south of the Turkish border. There were no reports of casualties as a result of the strike. The base was briefly held by the forces of current President Ahmed al-Sharaa after he took control of the country in December 2024 from former dictator Bashar al-Assad. But al-Sharaa’s shaky hold on power in the country has left vying factions competing for territory, chief among them Turkey.

This has left Israel deeply concerned over the Islamist regime’s motives there, as it shares a sizable border with Syria in the north of the country. In a statement regarding the strikes, the Jewish state remarked: “Israel and Syria agreed to a status quo in security matters, which Syria was on the verge of breaching by permitting Turkish troops to deploy at an airbase near Aleppo.” While Turkey denied Israel’s claim, the past actions of the Erdogan regime prove it likely.

In January, Turkey backed a Syrian military operation that attacked the Kurdish minority in the country’s autonomous northeast region, in which Syrian forces beheaded women and committed dozens of other war crimes and atrocities. This came amid a sustained campaign of bitter accusations that Erdogan has directed against Israel and its prime minister, in which he has called the Jewish state a “terrorist state” and accused it of committing “genocide” in Gaza. Last week, Turkey went further by issuing an international arrest warrant for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for detaining a flotilla headed toward Gaza.

Experts have further pointed to Erdogan’s past history of consolidating power within Turkey, squelching political opponents, co-opting the press, purging the military, supporting designated terrorist organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, and undermining religious freedom and women’s rights in the country.

For U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, Israel’s recent strike on the Syrian airbase was a signal to Turkey that it must stay in check and was not intended as a provocation.

“[W]hen [Israel] sees Turkey beginning to move south of their current position with military assets, they wonder, ‘Why are they doing that?’ I mean, it’s not because Israel is threatening or attacking them,” he noted during “This Week on Capitol Hill” over the weekend. “… [The strike] was not intended to inflict a great deal of damage. … What we really saw was that the Israelis said, ‘Okay, Turkey, you’re crowding the plate, you’re moving south, you’re putting assets where you know they’re not supposed to be,’ and they sent a warning. I think that things are calmed down. I believe that we are working toward a deconfliction mechanism so that we don’t have to go through kinetic military activity. … [T]his was not the run up to a war or a conflict. It was a clear message to Turkey that we don’t need escalating military presence in Syria right now.”

Huckabee went on to contend that Israel’s strong presence in the region is vitally important for sustaining religious freedom in the Middle East.

“It’s one of the reasons that America’s alliance with Israel is so incredibly, incredibly important because Israel is one of the few places in this entire region where there is religious freedom,” he emphasized. “A person can be Christian, Muslim, … Druze. Hindu religious freedom exists here. And for those who pretend that it doesn’t, they clearly haven’t been to Israel. … I know people who are Arab. They’re Christian. I know people who are Palestinian. They’re Christian. I know people who are Jewish. I know people who are Muslim, and they have the freedom of movement and the freedom of worship within Israel. That is not true anywhere else in the region.”