By 2016, five years into the Syrian civil war, the conflict had metastasised into a complex mosaic of foreign interventions and competing non-state actors.
The Assad regime, weakened by years of attrition but sustained by external support yet remained entrenched in the West. Daesh dominated Raqqa and the Euphrates Valley.
Meanwhile, the PYD/YPG, dominated by the PKK terror group and supported by Western countries, was steadily expanding its influence in northern Syria.
This fragmentation of Syria’s political and territorial landscape had direct and immediate consequences for Türkiye. By the summer of 2016, Ankara found itself at the centre of a rapidly deteriorating regional order.
As state authority collapsed along its southern border and non-state actors and terrorist groups entrenched themselves in the resulting vacuum, the threat to Türkiye’s national security became increasingly tangible.
From Ankara’s perspective, this patchwork of de facto authorities did not represent a new balance, but the gradual emergence of strategic encirclement.
Along its southern frontier, Daesh was targeting Turkish towns and civilians with suicide bombings and rocket attacks.
To the north of Aleppo, the PYD/YPG was attempting to establish a contiguous terror corridor, an outcome that threatened regional stability.
No other NATO member faced a threat landscape as immediate, multidimensional, and geographically proximate as Türkiye.
In an effort to pre-empt further destabilisation, Ankara repeatedly proposed the establishment of a safe zone in northern Syria.
Repeated Turkish proposals presented to international organisations and major actors in the conflict as a means to secure its borders and protect displaced civilians did not gain meaningful support.
Confronted with overlapping threats and absent any credible multilateral response, Ankara judged that a direct military operation was the only viable path to safeguard its national security.
On August 24, 2016, Türkiye launched Operation Euphrates Shield, invoking Article 51 of the UN Charter, which affirms the inherent right to self-defence.
The operation had two immediate objectives: to clear Daesh from a critical stretch of the border zone, and to block the PYD/YPG’s effort to consolidate control across northern Syria.
Strategic success
In operational terms, the results of Operation Euphrates Shield were clear and immediate.
Over the course of seven months, Turkish forces secured more than 2,000 square kilometres of territory in northern Syria, liberated 243 towns and villages, and neutralised or captured over 3,000 Daesh members.
Nearly 20,000 Daesh targets were engaged, culminating in the capture of al-Bab on 24 February 2017, a town of high strategic value. This made Türkiye the only NATO member state to launch a ground operation and directly fight Daesh on the battlefield.
Yet the operation’s true significance lay beyond the battlefield.
Euphrates Shield was a turning point, launched at a time of significant internal and external pressure on the Turkish state.
Following the 15 July coup attempt and facing simultaneous threats from FETO, Daesh and PYD/YPG terror organisations, the operation became a necessary strategic response.
The operation marked the start of a new, more assertive approach to regional policy for Türkiye, putting an end to a period of strategic drift and reinforcing the country's deterrence capacity.
First and foremost, Euphrates Shield laid the foundation for Türkiye’s evolving military doctrine of “forward defence.” In the years that followed, this approach matured into a structured model, underpinning subsequent cross-border operations, including Olive Branch (2018), Peace Spring (2019), and Spring Shield (2020).
Like the Euphrates Shield operation, these subsequent operations reflected Türkiye’s strategic shift towards projecting power beyond its borders in order to address threats at their source.
Strategically, the operation significantly altered the trajectory of the Syrian conflict.
The presence of Turkish troops keeping peace in northern Syria, disrupted the ambitions of both the Assad regime and the PYD/YPG.
The secured area—though modest in size relative to Syria’s overall geography—created a buffer zone that prevented regime and PYD/YPG consolidation.
By carving out a buffer zone, Operation Euphrates Shield gave the Syrian opposition a safe space in which to regroup and maintain operational continuity, giving them a foothold from which to challenge the regime's control.
In this context, the operation can be seen as a pivotal milestone and one of the crucial initial steps that set in motion the chain of events which ultimately led to the fall of the Assad regime and the opposition's rise to power in 2025.
Need for enduring stability
Operation Euphrates Shield was a turning point that reshaped both the Syrian conflict and Türkiye’s regional policy. It provided a blueprint for Ankara’s more proactive strategy, demonstrating that robust action could protect national interests when diplomacy had failed.
Nearly a decade later, the impact of this approach is clear: the Assad regime has fallen, and Syria is now closer to achieving peace and ensuring responsible governance than it has been since the war began.
These outcomes validate Türkiye's initial stance that the current trajectory was unsustainable and that terrorism, fragmentation and foreign influence would only exacerbate the conflict.
But the path to lasting peace remains elusive.
The Assad regime has gone, yet the PYD/YPG continues to resist dismantling its parallel structures despite its March 2025 agreement to integrate.
For Türkiye and the new Syrian government, this refusal poses a serious threat to state integrity and the credibility of the peace process.
In order to realise the full strategic potential of the process set in motion by Operation Euphrates Shield and convert military success into lasting peace, the international community must abandon the ambiguities of the past. A lasting resolution requires acknowledging the legitimate security concerns of both Türkiye and Syria.
Turkish officials have made this position unmistakably clear. Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan denounced the YPG’s tactics, stating:
“At this point, we are beginning to witness developments that we are finding increasingly difficult to tolerate. The upper echelons of the YPG need to stop playing for time because the chaos they’re waiting for (in Syria) will not take place, and even if it does, it will not be to their advantage. We have good intentions, but that doesn’t mean we will turn a blind eye to your mischievous or devious ways.”
The question now is whether the narrow opening created by Euphrates Shield can be transformed into lasting stability, or will the PYD/YPG undermine it with their autonomous and separatist ambitions?
