1 Volume 9, Number 21 December 10, 2015 The Sultan versus the Tsar and the Syrian War Brandon Friedman and Hay Eytan Cohen Yanarocak On November 24, 2015, a Turkish F-16 warplane downed a Russian Su-24 Sukhoi/Fencer jet that had entered Turkish airspace, leading to a very public confrontation between Russia and Turkey. The incident is the most recent example of the multidimensional nature of the Syrian war, and carries the potential for escalation that threatens to overshadow and exacerbate the local dimension of the conflict. This incident is playing out as a modern revival of the centuries-old conflict between the Russian tsar versus the Turkish sultan, but, looking beyond the strong personalities, its immediate importance lies in how the simmering confrontation will affect the Syrian war. )n its early stages, the conflict in Syria was often characterized as a Dzproxy war.dz This referred to external actors such as Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, who were fueling the conflict by pursuing their interests in Syria through local actors, state and non-state. However, the proxy characterization quickly became outdated, if it ever really applied, because in some cases the patrons were fighting and dying alongside their proxies on the ground. Hizballah and Iranian forces were fighting in Syria in 2013, if not earlier. More recently, the conflict has been referred to as a Dzcivil war,dz which is also misleading, because while this conflict may ultimately come to define what it means to be a Syrian, the war itself has become much more than a civil war. It encompasses international and regional actors, both state and non-state—such as Hizballah, the Islamic State (IS), the various Kurdish factions, Iran, Israel, Jordan, Qatar, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the United States, and Russia—and their competing interests. The Syrian war, therefore, is multilayered and includes three levels of conflict — local, regional, and international. Russia and Turkey are historical rivals. Their imperial predecessors fought twelve wars over the domination of the Black Sea, Caucasia, and the Balkans. The collapse of these imperial powers at the end of World War I did not improve