When Turkish security forces moved in before dawn last Friday to crush a small environmental protest in downtown Istanbul, no one was happier than a man sitting 1,100 km away in Damascus.
For more than two years, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has been taking a beating in Western public opinion. He was the monster who unleashed his forces on Syrian demonstrators who sought to bring democracy to Syria. From those early clashes a full-fledged civil war broke out that has left about 80,000 Syrians dead.
For most of that time Mr. Assad has had to endure the rounds of criticism from the Arab League, United Nations and countries in the region. Often that criticism was led by his former friend, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who lectured him on the need to bring in democratic reforms.
It was to Turkey that many Syrians first fled to take refuge when fighting broke out; it was where the rebel Free Syrian Army set up its headquarters, and where Syrian opposition political groups convened their meetings and joined with others.
This week, the world's attention shifted from Syria to Turkey, its neighbour to the North. The fighting for crucial towns across Syria was all but ignored as protests broke out in communities all across Turkey, each one calling for the resignation of Mr. Erdogan. Even news of the use of chemical weapons in Syria was obscured by the news of Turkey using milder chemical weapons – tear gas – on its people.
As Turkish security forces dealt with each protest, often by the use of gas and water cannons, and two people were reported killed with hundreds injured, Mr. Assad must have smiled: Erdogan, the man who insisted on the merits of free expression, doesn't seem so freedom-loving after all.
In a moment of bitter irony that the Syrian President must have savoured, his foreign ministry issued a travel advisory this week: Syrian citizens were cautioned not to travel to Turkey as conditions there were not safe. The cause of the danger, the advisory said, was "the violence practiced by Erdogan's government against peaceful protesters." Ouch.
To make matters worse, while focus this week has been on protests in Turkey and Mr. Erdogan's shrill denouncements of critics of his government, forces loyal to Syria's President Assad retook the strategically important town of Qusair, a vital link between Damascus and the Alawite homeland in western Syria. The victory is a major setback for rebel forces who also have suffered reverses in areas south of Damascus. And it is a triumph for the united forces of Hezbollah, Lebanon's militant Shia movement, and Mr. Assad's still-potent army.
This is a moment of supreme embarrassment for Turkey's Prime Minister. His administration had been held up by countries in the region and by U.S. President Barack Obama, among others in the West, as a model of what an Islamic-oriented democracy can look like.
Suddenly, many of those admirers don't like what they see.