Getting a Big Turkey before Thanksgiving

Turkey has been battling Kurdish separatists in the southeastern part of that nation for years. Violence and terrorist activities between the Turkish military and these separatists have ebbed and flowed over the years, but one particular faction, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (“PKK,” their flag is above) has been recognized as a terrorist organization by even the United States. The PKK dreams of a united Kurdistan, embracing the Kurdish areas of Turkey, Iraq and Syria. While open insurrection was supposed to have ceased in in March of 2013 with an announcement of an “end to the armed struggle,” there are signs that the struggles are anything but over.

Primarily Sunni nation – ostensibly secular but rapidly moving towards a government under Sunni values – Turkey has been at odds with the neighboring Shiite al-Assad regime that governs Syria, a nation that is 80% Sunni. With a mere 3% of its land mass in Europe (the rest in Asia), Turkey has flirted with joining the European Union and remains a member of NATO. Nevertheless, in the current struggle against the Islamic State, Turkish President Recep Erdogan has resisted much more than allowing allied aircraft to attack ISIL positions from Turkish-based airfields. He agreed with ISIL leaders to remain passive during these initial stages of hostilities to secure release of captured Turkish diplomatic personnel (“mission accomplished”), but he has staunchly resisted using Turkish forces, in the air or on the ground, to attack ISIL troops.

His view of the world is to crush the al-Assad regime by arming the Sunni Syrian rebels to accomplish that feat – perhaps with a little help from Turkey and the West with airstrikes – and then letting the new Syrian state attack ISIL. CIA reports suggest that many of those Syrian rebels are ISIL sympathizers and are wary of Erdogan’s plan. Erdogan has also suggested that a neutralized buffer zone between Syria and Turkey – which necessitate a direct military confrontation with the incumbent regime in Damascus – is also a possible strategy he might support.

But as world and regional leaders gathered to discuss a coordinated response, and as airstrikes seemed to have little effect at first (without adequate ground support) in protecting the Syrian border town of Kobani from being about to be overwhelmed my ISIL, Erdogan insisted to the relevant allied leadership that the PPK had to be treated as equally evil as ISIL itself, which many felt to be a diversion of efforts desperately need to stem the rising tide of ISIL forces now threatening to take Baghdad itself.

The fact is that some of the Kurdish forces defending against ISIL have allegiance to the PKK (including some of the defenders of Kobani), and there is mounting pressure to arm Kurdish forces with the heavy weapons they need to be the only truly effective ground deterrent to ISIL created a cacophony of confusion. And as the ISIL fighters were finally being turned out at Kobani, it was Kurdish fighters (with allied air support) that made the difference. They appear to be the most effective anti-ISIL forces on the ground, but they need better “equalizing” weapons. Arming Kurds, however, is particularly distasteful to Erdogan, fearing that eventually many of those weapons would be turned against Turkey. But matters had gone from horrible to much, much worse as Turkey took this moment to strike back at the PKK.

“In the face of increasing international pressure, Turkey took decisive military action on [October 13^th] — not against the Islamic State militants that Turkey’s Western allies have urged it to fight, but rather against the Kurdish militant group that has been battling the Islamic State.

“Turkish warplanes struck positions of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, known as the P.K.K., in southeastern Turkey late [on October 13^th]. The group, long an enemy of the Turkish state, had put down its weapons last year to talk peace. But on [October 14^th], Turkish officials said the Kurdish militants had attacked a military outpost, leading to the government’s first airstrikes against the group in nearly two years…

“Turkey’s actions against the Kurds and its refusal to allow the P.K.K. to shuttle reinforcements through Turkish territory to fight ISIS have led many analysts to this conclusion: that Turkey’s leaders see the battle for Kobani mostly as a chance to let two of its enemies duke it out, rather than as a cause for alarm… ‘It’s a consistent approach to the conflict,’ said Aaron Stein, a Turkey expert and a fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based research organization. ‘And I think they are happy to have them kill each other.’

“Turkey’s posture is one piece of what has become a tangled web of alliances and conflicting goals among the many countries who want to see Islamic State eradicated. The United States, for instance, has found itself sharing the battlefield in Iraq with Iranian-backed Shiite militias that once killed American soldiers. In Syria, the United States and Iran diverge, as Iran is a stalwart ally of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, while the United States would prefer to see Mr. Assad leave power.” New York Times, October 14^th. With Kurdish forces proving to be the most effective fighters on the ground, something has to change.

As the United States watches this situation spiral out of control, current and former U.S. administration officials continue to sidestep responsibility for that fact that the 2003 American-enforced ouster of the Saddam Hussein regime and U.S.-imposed “democracy” that allowed an angry Shiite majority to crush their former Sunni masters, thus upsetting a rather delicate balance and truce between regional Sunnis and Shiites, helped create a fertile soil for the rise of this malevolent Islamic State. Indeed, ISIL openly states its dreams not only of regional domination but of the possibility of a head-on confrontation with the United States itself. You see, they believe passionate that God is on their side. Like it or not, we’re in this one much more deeply that we can possibly imagine.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I wonder exactly what it will take for American leaders to look deeply at regions where they wish to interfere, understand the local realities (vs. American mythology), before taking actions that almost always seem to backfire.