MIDDLE EAST FORUM
The Empty Runway: What a war with Turkey would look like, and how to hold Syria’s sky without fighting one
Gregg Roman
August 23, 2026
At dawn on Tuesday, Israeli aircraft put eight strikes into the runway and storage sheds of Abu al-Duhur, a mothballed Syrian airbase in Idlib about 70 kilometers from the Turkish border. Nobody died. The base has not operated as a working military airfield in over a decade. That is the point: Israel was not bombing an army. It was bombing a possibility. The possibility had visited the day before. Syrian officials told the Associated Press that a Turkish delegation had toured the base on Monday to review rehabilitation work and left hours before the bombs arrived, the first confirmed Turkish presence at the site. Jerusalem confirmed the strike and said Syria was on the verge of breaching an agreed security status quo by letting Turkish troops deploy there. Ankara denied any delegation was at the base before or during the strike, called the raid a violation of Syrian sovereignty, and accused Israel of expansionist politics timed to an election. Damascus said the Turkish visits were ordinary military contact and that no Turkish base is planned. Carry all of it; the gap between those tellings is exactly where wars are born. READ MORE
i24NEWS Trump’s envoy to i24NEWS: We were ‘a step away’ from military confrontation between Turkey and Israel The US Ambassador to Turkey, Tom Barrack, who also serves as President Donald Trump’s envoy to Syria, told i24NEWS on Wednesday that the Israeli airstrike on the Abu al-Duhur military airbase in Syria “carried a real risk of rapidly escalating to a direct military confrontation between Israel and Turkey, as well as with Syria.” “The Turkish forces did not know that Israeli aircraft were on their way to this specific Syrian base, nor did they know what their objective was. Therefore, they might have decided to scramble their own fighter jets, believing they themselves were under attack,” Barrack said in an interview with i24NEWS. He added, “Yesterday’s events were serious and worrying. However, we are relieved that no lives were lost and that the situation did not escalate.”
FDD Syria-Israel Talks Will Face a Turkish Test Syria and Israel are back at the negotiating table after a seven-month pause in talks over a potential security agreement. On August 23, Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani met with Mossad Director Roman Gofman in Jordan. The meeting, held under U.S. mediation, was aimed at defusing tensions following Israel’s August 18 strike on the Abu Duhur Air Base in northwestern Syria. The strike reportedly followed Israeli intelligence indicating that Turkey was seeking to deploy troops and radar systems at the base. Israeli concerns about Turkish entrenchment in Syria have been clear since the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in December 2024, given Ankara’s support for Hamas and its increasingly hostile rhetoric toward Israel.
