Turkey spent years allowing jihadists to flourish - The Independent

[TaiShang]

Turkey has spent years allowing jihadist groups to flourish - so beware its real reasons for shooting down a Russian plane | Voices | The Independent

Turkey has spent years allowing jihadist groups to flourish - so beware its real reasons for shooting down a Russian plane

Turkey has no interest in the peaceful settlement to the conflict in Syria that world powers are negotiating. As Erdogan gets desperate, he will attempt to bring focus back to Assad.

Turkey is getting desperate. Under President Recep Tayip Erdogan and his party, the Justice and Development Party (AKP), its policies toward the conflict in Syria over the past four years have been misguided and costly. When conflict broke out in 2011, Ankara mistakenly under-estimated the strength of the Assad regime and supported hardline Islamist groups seeking its downfall. In the process, Turkey also marginalised the Kurds and alienated regional powers like Iran.

Four years on, Assad looks set to hold onto power and his regime will be a central part of a transition plan, one that foreign powers were negotiating last weekend. Turkey’s regional rival, Iran, is a key player which can no longer be ignored by the West. Not only does the pro-Assad alliance now have Russian support firmly on its side, but the international community is no longer focused on defeating the regime – instead, it is concerned with defeating jihadist groups like Isis.

The shift in focus is a significant drawback for Erdogan. Years of support for, and investment in, Islamic fundamentalist groups like Jabhat al-Nusra (Al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria) and Ahrar al-Sham are about to go to waste. Ankara has played a significant role in allowing Isis and other jihadists to flourish in Syria and the region. Turkey has acquiesced to jihadist groups entering Syria via Turkey as well as their use of Turkey as a transit point for smuggling arms and funds into Syria.

The Kurds in Syria, meanwhile, have established themselves as a reliable Western ally and have created, in the process, an autonomous Kurdish region that has reinvigorated Kurdish nationalism in Turkey and across the region - much to Turkey’s dismay as it continues a brutal military campaign to repress the Kurds.

In other words, Turkey has no interest in the peaceful settlement to the conflict in Syria that world powers are negotiating. As it gets desperate, Turkey will attempt to bring focus back on the Assad regime and reverse the losses it has made both in Syria and geopolitically. The decision to bring down the Russian jet is, therefore, likely to have had other political factors behind it - particularly since the jet, as far as we know, posed no immediate threat to Turkey’s national security.

Domestically, Erdogan thrives on a climate of fear and uncertainty. This worked for him in the country’s snap elections earlier this month, during which he regained the majority he lost in June after months of bombings, violence and divisive rhetoric.

Ankara’s downing of the Russian jet may provide a useful diversion as it seeks to intensify its military campaign against the Kurds, particularly in the Kurdish-dominated Mardin province, where MPs were assaulted in recent days. Two days ago, Selahattin Demirtas, head of the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP) who shot to international acclaim in the country’s national elections, survived an assassination attempt in Kurdish-dominated Diyarbakir.

These tactics will not be without long-term costs and will undermine the chances of peace in Syria as well as the West’s effort to defeat Isis.

The West appeased and bolstered Erdogan in Turkey in the run-up to the country’s elections, with the aim of securing a deal with Ankara on the refugee crisis. It may now regret that. Erdogan is not only likely to drive a hard bargain but he may also walk away.

He has never cared much for the EU and has only sought engagement with the West when under pressure at home. But Turkey is not an indispensable ally and should not be considered as such. Unless the West starts to seriously exert pressure, Erdogan will have little incentive to stop his damaging policies.

 

[khakhi_chaddi]

What the hell is China doing. Support Shia muslims all over the world & then support Pakistan. These two are conflicting relations & cannot be managed simultaneously.

 

[UniverseWatcher]

What the hell is China doing. Support Shia muslims all over the world & then support Pakistan. These two are conflicting relations & cannot be managed simultaneously.

that butt hurting in the comment really speaks for itself

 

[TaiShang]

Turkey Overtly Supports ISIL to Oust Assad - Former State Dep't Advisor

07:26 26.11.2015

Turkey has blatantly provided material support to the Islamic State because they share an ideological connection along with a common foe in Syrian President Bashar Assad, former US Department of State senior advisor David Phillips told Sputnik.

WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — On Wednesday, Russian Ambassador to France Alexander Orlov said that Turkey has played an "ambiguous" role in the campaign against the Islamic State while acting as an accomplice to the terrorist group’s activities.

"Turkey’s role has not been ambiguous — it has overtly supported the Islamic State," Phillips, currently Director of Columbia University’s Peace-building and Rights Program, told Sputnik on Wednesday. "It has provided logistical support, money, weapons, transport and healthcare to wounded warriors."

Phillips explained that Turkey has been supporting the Islamic State to remove Syrian President Bashar Assad from power and because of a "spiritual bond" that exists between Turkey’s governing party and the jihadists.

"When the Deputy Prime Minister of Turkey says women shouldn’t smile or laugh in public because it draws attention to themselves, that is something you would expect from [Islamic State leader Abu Bakr] Baghdadi," Phillips added.

Moscow Cancels Russia-Turkey Summit Planned for December - Reports

Phillips also said that Russia’s support for Assad has not been helpful to resolving the problem, and he is not surprised that Russia and Turkey ended up in a live fire incident considering their conflicting goals.

In September, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told reporters at the UN General Assembly that Russia was not wedded to anyone in Syria nor concerned with any one personality, but Russia is concerned with keeping Syria sovereign, independent and secular.

On Tuesday, a Turkish F-16 fighter jet shot down a Russian Su-24 aircraft operating in Syria, which Russian President Vladimir Putin described as a stab in the back carried out by accomplices of terrorists.

Russia commenced precision airstrikes against the Islamic State in Syria on September 30, following a request from Syrian President Bashar Assad, and has destroyed more than 3,000 terrorist targets.

 

[oproh]

Erdogan needs emotional support from all his terrorists brothers, it must be hard for him to see thousands of his jihadi sons biting the dust in Syria.

 

[noksss]

Ankara: Turkey and Russia promised on Wednesday not to go to war over the downing of a Russian fighter jet, leaving Turkey's still-nervous NATO allies and just about everyone else wondering why the country decided to risk such a serious confrontation.

The reply from the Turkish government so far has been consistent: Don't say we didn't warn you.

Though minor airspace violations are fairly common and usually tolerated, Turkey had repeatedly called in Russia's ambassador to complain about aircraft intrusions and about bombing raids in Syria near the border. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Tuesday evening - and a Pentagon spokesman later confirmed - that before a Turkish F-16 shot down the Russian Su-24 jet, Turkish forces had warned the Russian plane 10 times in 5 minutes to steer away.

"I personally was expecting something like this, because in the past months there have been so many incidents like that," Ismail Demir, Turkey's undersecretary of national defense, said in an interview. "Our engagement rules were very clear, and any sovereign nation has a right to defend its airspace."

While that may be true, analysts said Erdogan had several more nuanced reasons to allow Turkish pilots to open fire. These include his frustration with Russia over a range of issues even beyond Syria, the Gordian knot of figuring out what to do with Syria itself and Turkey's strong ethnic ties to the Turkmen villages Russia has been bombing lately in the area of the crash.

Turkey has been quietly seething ever since Russia began military operations against Syrian rebels two months ago, wrecking Ankara's policy of ousting the government of President Bashar Assad. The Turks were forced to downgrade their ambitions from the ouster of Assad to simply maintaining a seat at the negotiating table when the time comes, said Soner Cagaptay, a Turkish analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a nonpartisan research group.

"That would require Turkey-backed rebels to be present in Syria, and I think Turkey was alarmed that Russia's bombing of positions held by Turkey-backed rebels in northern Syria was hurting their positions and therefore Turkey's future stakes in Syria," Cagaptay said. "So this is also an aggressive Turkey posture in the Syrian civil war to prevent the defeat of Turkey-backed rebels so they can hold onto territory and have a say in the future of Syria."

But the fate of the particular rebels the Russians were bombing in the mountainous Bayirbucak area where the plane was shot down is more than just a policy matter to the Turks. Erdogan particularly emphasized the ethnic tie in a speech Tuesday evening, saying, "We strongly condemn attacks focusing on areas inhabited by Bayirbucak Turkmen - we have our relatives, our kin there."

The Turkish prime minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, said as much Wednesday while dismissing Russia's explanation that it was fighting a common enemy, the Islamic State. "No one," he said, "can legitimize attacks on Turkmens in Syria using the pretext of fighting the Islamic State."

The bombing was creating political problems for Erdogan, Cagaptay said. "In the days leading up to the incident, many newspapers, especially the pro-government publications, were running headlines highlighting the suffering of the Turkmens, who are closely related to Anatolian Turks," he said. "I think the government felt that, in terms of domestic politics, it had to do something to ease some of this pressure that had resulted from the Russian bombardment against Turkmens in northern Syria."

Russia's bombing of Turkmen villages was to be the principal issue Turkey raised with Russia's foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, in talks that had been set for Wednesday but were canceled after the shooting down of the plane.

Erdogan's emphasis on helping the Turkmens has another important political dimension in Turkey. Erdogan's political party emphasized Turkish ethnic identity and Sunni Muslim faith in the campaign leading up to critical elections on Nov. 1, as it competed with one rival party heavily composed of Turkey's Kurdish minority and another committed to preserving Turkey's status as a secular society and state.

Erdogan managed an important victory in that election, preserving his chances of winning legislative approval to change the constitution and turn the country's parliamentary system into a presidential one.

Complicating matters further, Turkey and Syria have a long-standing border dispute in exactly the area where the Russian plane, a Sukhoi Su-24, was shot down, and Russia has sometimes voiced support for Syria's claim. It is a narrow strip of territory, the Hatay province of Turkey, that runs south along the Mediterranean Sea, deep into Syria.

The province is a melting pot of ethnic Turks and Arabs. It is also a religious mélange, with many Muslims but also a large Christian population, as Hatay includes the biblical city of Antioch. And the province has an acrimonious history.

The League of Nations granted Hatay province to France after World War I as part of France's legal mandate over Syria. Ethnic Turks led the province's secession from Syria and declaration of an independent republic in 1938, and that republic then joined Turkey the next year - much as Texas seceded from Mexico a century earlier, became a republic and soon joined the United States.

Syria has periodically questioned the loss of Hatay over the years. "If you look at Syrian maps, that province, that chunk of territory, is shown as belonging to Syria," said Altay Atli, an international relations specialist at Bogazici University.

When Hatay seceded from the French mandate of Syria, Hatay's borders did not encompass all of the ethnic Turks in the area; many Turkmens remained just across the border in what is now northernmost Syria. For decades, it was difficult for families divided on either side of the border by the secession of Hatay to even visit one another. Tensions finally began to ease during the years immediately before the Arab Spring, but they have resumed in the last several years as Turkey has led calls for the removal of Assad.

The fact that Russia has over the years expressed sympathy for Syria's claim to Hatay makes the province even more delicate for Turkey, and Tuesday's incident with the Russian jet even more important, said James F. Jeffrey, a former American ambassador to Turkey who is now a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

He questioned whether the Russian jet had strayed into Hatay province's airspace accidentally or whether Russia might have been deliberately allowing incursions by its jets during military activities in Syria because of Hatay's tangled history.

"Turkey was tired of Russia's intimidating Turkey," he said.

The Russian and Ottoman Empires battled for centuries for control over the area from the Balkans to the Black Sea, and vestiges of that bloody rivalry keep arising. One of those is reflected in Turkey's deep concern about Russia's annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, said Murat Yesiltas, director of security studies at the Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research, a large research group in Ankara with close government links.

Turkey now faces across the Black Sea a much wider arc of territory occupied by Russian forces. Many in Turkey are further upset by Russia's treatment of the Crimean Tatars, who speak a Turkic language and have opposed the Russian annexation. Most of the Crimean Tatars' leaders have been forced into exile by Russia, and this week Tatars have been blocking repair crews from restringing crucial power lines to Crimea that were mysteriously blown up over the weekend, producing a nearly total blackout on the peninsula.

"Turkey wants to protect the territorial integrity of Ukraine," Yesiltas said. Turkey has already provided economic assistance to Ukraine, but it has been reluctant to confront Moscow more publicly because Russia is one of Turkey's biggest export markets and supplies three-fifths of Turkey's natural gas.

With President Vladimir Putin of Russia saying things about the jet's downing like, "We will never tolerate such crimes like the one committed today" and warning of "serious consequences," the biggest question perhaps is what comes next.

Russia on Wednesday announced plans to deploy its most modern air-defense system, the S-400 mobile anti-aircraft missile, to its airbase outside Latakia. But while most experts - and Erdogan himself, in remarks Wednesday - play down concerns of a wider confrontation, many worry that the biggest losers from Tuesday's incident could be the Turkmens.

While the jet's two crew members were able to eject from the plane, Russia said that one of them was killed - possibly by fire from the ground as he floated to earth - as was a marine sent in a helicopter that was shot down by local ground forces while trying to rescue the pilots; the Kremlin said the second crew member had been rescued by Russian special forces.

Several experts warned that Putin may step up his country's attacks on the Turkmens in retaliation.

"They're the real target," Jeffrey said. "He can just plaster them."

Range of Frustrations Reached Boil as Turkey Shot Down Russian Jet