هذا التقرير متاح أيضًا بـ العربية
Since the 19th century, Lebanon has been one of the most prominent arenas of European pressure on the Ottoman Empire. European intervention was not limited to humanitarian or religious considerations, but was also tied to redrawing the balance of power within the empire. Since the events of 1860, which ended with the establishment of the Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate under international oversight, Lebanon became a space where Ottoman administration and European will overlapped a legacy that remains present in Turkish political memory when discussing foreign interventions in the Levant.
That period also produced population movements between Anatolia and the Levant, though not all of them were political in nature. Families from Mardin and its surroundings moved to Lebanon in search of work opportunities, benefiting from the prosperity of the Port of Beirut and its transformation into a major commercial hub in the eastern Mediterranean.
Large groups of them settled in Beirut and the Bekaa, gradually forming a community that preserved its family and cultural ties to its original homeland. Recent Turkish studies estimate the number of people in Lebanon of Mardin origin at tens of thousands, and some of them still hold Turkish citizenship or maintain legal ties to it.
The migrations included Muslims, Christians, Syriacs, Armenians, and Arabs, among them the family of the singer Fairuz, which left the region fleeing the turmoil that accompanied the years of the empire’s collapse.
With the start of the new millennium and its opening to the Arab world, Türkiye revived this cultural legacy and these social ties. But during that period, its activity in Lebanon was limited to a cultural and developmental presence that often preceded its diplomatic presence.
Ankara redefines Lebanon’s place after Assad’s fall
For many years, Türkiye dealt with Lebanon as part of Syrian influence more than as an independent file in its foreign policy. Even after the Syrian withdrawal in 2005, Damascus remained the most influential player in Lebanese decision-making, and in the following years, Ankara’s priorities shifted to the repercussions of the Syrian revolution, the Kurdish issue, Iraq, the eastern Mediterranean, and terrorist threats. Lebanon, meanwhile, remained present mostly as an arena where the roles of Iran, France, and Syria intersected, without becoming an independent axis in Turkish strategy.
After the fall of Bashar Assad’s regime, Lebanon became part of the security and political environment on which the success of Syria’s post-Assad phase depends. The issues of Syrian border security and demarcation, arms smuggling, refugee returns, and regulating relations between Beirut and Damascus have moved to the core of Ankara’s vision of regional stability, whose broad headline is Syria’s stability especially since Türkiye believes that the security of its southern border begins with rebuilding Syrian state institutions and bringing its territory and borders under control.
Researcher Suhaib Jawhar told NoonPost that “the current Turkish understanding is that the new Syria has a direct interest in Lebanon’s stability, because any security disturbance will immediately affect the Syrian border and reconstruction projects and the regional economy.” He added that Ankara “encourages Damascus to play a political and diplomatic role that eases tensions among Lebanese forces, but it does not support the return of Syrian security or military influence to Lebanon, or the reproduction of the previous model.”
The SETA research center argued that Türkiye’s security environment extends beyond its borders through an interconnected network stretching from Iraq and Syria to the eastern Mediterranean, where security, energy, and trade corridor issues overlap. Within this framework, Lebanon’s stability becomes part of the stability of the regional sphere surrounding Türkiye. In one of his speeches, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said his country’s security does not begin in Hatay province, but in Aleppo, Damascus, and Beirut.
This approach reveals a shift in Turkish strategic thinking, as Ankara seeks to secure its place in the new regional arrangements taking shape after the US-Iran war. Any security or political vacuum in Lebanon would affect Syria’s stability, while Türkiye is working to prevent the emergence of a geopolitical vacuum that could reproduce cycles of unrest or allow other powers to redraw the balance of power in the Levant in ways that run counter to its interests.
Türkiye’s interests also extend to economic and geopolitical files, foremost among them maritime border demarcation, energy projects, and transport corridors in the eastern Mediterranean. Jawhar noted that the recent talks held by Lebanese Deputy Prime Minister Tarek Mitri in Ankara reflected this approach, as they were built around four main headings: consolidating Lebanon’s stability, the future of security arrangements in the south, Lebanese-Syrian relations after the change in Damascus, and reactivating economic cooperation by linking it to Syria’s reconstruction and to transport and energy projects.
How is Türkiye building its presence in Lebanon?
Since the mid-2000s, Türkiye has relied more on soft-power tools than on direct political engagement in Lebanon. While political and security files remained largely governed by complex internal and regional balances, Ankara expanded its presence through the Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency (TIKA), which began implementing projects in Lebanon in 2006 before opening its Beirut office in 2012. Its projects initially focused on northern Lebanon, then expanded to include education, health, agriculture, restoration of historical sites, and vocational training.
Türkiye’s presence also included government university scholarships, activities by the Yunus Emre Institute, and programs run by the Presidency for Turks Abroad and Related Communities (YTB), as well as granting Turkish citizenship to Lebanese of Turkish or Ottoman origin after they proved their family ties. Ankara officially reaffirmed this path in 2020, when Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu announced his country’s readiness to grant citizenship to those in Lebanon of Turkish and Turkmen origin who wished to obtain it.
Evacuation operations carried out by Türkiye from Lebanon in 2024 also revealed the presence of a number of Lebanese citizens who also hold Turkish citizenship.
With the regional shifts that followed the fall of the Assad regime, the Turkish presence began moving toward economic and logistical infrastructure. In February 2025, TIKA opened a project to develop facilities at the Port of Tripoli, underscoring the port’s importance in trade movement between Türkiye and Lebanon. Lebanese officials said during the opening that the maritime shipping line between Mersin and Tripoli sees more than 100 trucks crossing each week, reinforcing its position as a regional logistics corridor.
Ankara’s interest in the project to operate Rene Mouawad Airport reflected the same direction. On June 27, 2026, Turkish Ambassador to Beirut Murat Lutem visited the airport and reviewed plans for its operation, pointing to the strategic and economic importance of its location because of its proximity to the Port of Tripoli and the Syrian border, and noting that Turkish airlines were following the project closely.
How does Ankara define the solution in Lebanon?
Ankara rejects approaches based on military resolution or the reproduction of external tutelage. Instead, it offers a vision that links Lebanon’s stability to the existence of a state capable of managing internal balances without the collapse of its institutions. It also views Israeli escalation as the biggest obstacle to any political solution.
Alongside its repeated condemnation of strikes on Lebanon, the Turkish Foreign Ministry escalated its rhetoric in June 2026, accusing Israel of seeking to expand its occupation in the south and impose new facts on the ground by making border areas unlivable and forcing their residents to flee. It said this policy aims to reshape the regional balance of power through military force, undermining any chance of rebuilding regional stability.
Jawhar said that “the Turkish approach is based on balancing security and politics,” explaining that Ankara “considers the Israeli threat the most urgent external threat to Lebanon’s stability, while also seeing the continued existence of weapons outside the framework of the state as weakening its institutions and leaving the country vulnerable to crises.”
He added that Türkiye “rejects disarmament by force or the imposition of external solutions, and also sees the continuation of the current situation as an unsustainable option”, pushing instead for “a gradual path based on internal dialogue, strengthening the capabilities of the Lebanese army, and providing mutual security guarantees that would allow an orderly transition toward confining weapons to the hands of the state.”
Ankara avoids public discussions of how to address Hezbollah’s weapons file, limiting itself in its official discourse to affirming support for Lebanese state institutions and sovereignty, and rejecting any steps that would expand the war or undermine stability. This discourse reflects Türkiye’s desire not to become involved in Lebanon’s internal polarization, while keeping its focus on halting Israeli escalation and strengthening the Lebanese state as the only framework capable of addressing contentious issues.
Türkiye is not seeking to inherit Iranian influence in Lebanon as much as it wants to prevent the balance of power from shifting to “Israel”. It is keen not to be excluded from the new security arrangements in the Levant, and today views Lebanon as one link in the regional balance being reshaped since Oct. 7, then the fall of the Assad regime, and even more rapidly after the war on Iran.
These transformations have weakened Iran’s network of influence in the Levant and opened the door to a redistribution of roles among regional powers, at a time when Israel is trying to translate its military superiority into political and security realities stretching from Gaza and Syria to Lebanon and the eastern Mediterranean.
This Turkish orientation carries a historical dimension. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the Turkish Republic withdrew for decades from the affairs of the Levant, focusing on building the new state and consolidating its borders, before turning westward during the Cold War. Today, however, Ankara is acting from the conviction that absence during periods of regional reconfiguration allows other powers to draw maps of influence, and leaves Türkiye later forced to deal with equations it had no part in shaping.
That is why it is keen to entrench its presence in the Levant and prevent “Israel” from unilaterally shaping its new security and political balances, without reviving old models of influence.
From this perspective, Turkish interest in border issues, energy, Lebanese-Syrian relations, and support for Lebanese state institutions cannot be separated from a broader vision that sees Lebanon as having become part of the new geopolitical map that regional powers are competing to draw.