Current General Studies Magazine (February 2016)

General Studies - III "Security Based Article" (Turkey’s Failed Double Game)

If Ankara acts firmly against the IS, this would undermine its own Syria policy, but if it doesn’t, the threat from the IS to its domestic securitywill grow

The January 12 suicide bombing in Istanbul that killed 10 people is yet another violent reminder that something is terribly wrong with Turkey’s regional and security policies. This is the third bombing in Turkey by suspected Islamic State (IS) militants in six months. In July 2015, a suicide bomber killed more than 30 people in Suruc, a Kurdish town on the Turkish-Syrian border. In October, in one of the deadliest terror attacks in the country, suicide bombers blew themselves up outside the central railway station in the capital, Ankara, killing more than a 100 people and injuring over 400. If the attacks in Suruc and Ankara primarily targeted Kurds, the victims of the Istanbul bombing were tourists, mostly foreigners.

Over the past few years, the security situation in Turkey has steadily deteriorated. The ceasefire with the Kurdish rebels has broken and a full-fledged war is taking place in the border areas. Several cities in the south-east districts, where most of the country’s Kurdish minorities live, have been turned into virtual battlefields, and the IS has now, as the bombings show, grown into a major security threat. How did Turkey reach here, after a long period of relative calm and stability?

The Syrian morass

Much of the blame should lie with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. After becoming Prime Minister in 2003, Mr. Erdogan adopted an assertive foreign policy. He opposed the Iraq war, grew critical of Israel’s atrocities on the Palestinians, and presented Turkey as a regional power in West Asia. But his approach also pandered to sectarian Sunni sentiments and to Islamist Turkish nationalism, which counterposed the Kemalist secular order. When the dictators in Tunisia and Egypt were overthrown by popular protests in early 2011, Mr. Erdogan found it an opportunity to expand Turkish influence. In both countries, the direct beneficiaries of the regime change were the Muslim Brotherhood or its offshoots, the brethren of Mr. Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party. He expected the “Arab Spring” would radically change the political landscape of the Arab street. But his calculations went wrong. In Egypt, the Brotherhood rule was crushed by the army. In Tunisia, the Islamist Ennahda party is competing with the secularists for political power. Libya, which Mr. Erdogan visited and hailed the “advent of democracy” soon after Muammar el-Qaddafi was overthrown, is at war with itself. Mr. Erdogan’s biggest mistake yet was Syria. He expected Syria to follow Egypt and Tunisia. He was among the first global leaders to call for President Bashar al-Assad to quit. Ankara wanted to replace Mr. Assad, an Alawite and an ally of Iran, with a Sunni ruler, possibly from the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood. That would not only strengthen the Turkish influence in the region, but also help the Sunni bloc to curtail Iran’s rise.

When it was evident that the Assad regime was stronger than its counterparts in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, Turkey started supporting anti-Assad rebels. Until recently, it kept its long border with Syria open so that rebels and jihadists could come to Turkey first and then cross into Syria to join various anti-Assad forces. Hard-core jihadists, particularly the IS and Jabhat al-Nusra militants, were the biggest beneficiaries of this open door policy. American investigative reporter Seymour Hersh recently wrote in the London Review of Books that Turkey, along with Saudi Arabia and Qatar, had provided direct financial and logistical support to IS and al-Nusra. Russia has also accused Ankara of having deep ties with the IS. There were several independent reports about Turkish middlemen being involved in people smuggling and oil trade along the Syrian border. Despite international outcry, Ankara didn’t do much to seal the border or act tough against the jihadists, as Mr. Erdogan was ready to go to any extent to see the fall of President Assad.

The Kurdish momentum

This approach, however, had an undesirable outcome. The Syrian government had withdrawn its troops from the Kurdish-populated border regions in the initial phase of the civil war. When IS militants, after capturing Raqqa, moved towards border towns, Kurdish rebels took out a strong resistance. The People’s Protection Units, the armed wing of the Syrian Kurdistan, defeated the IS in Kobane and Tal Abyad. The YPG is closely associated with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, the insurgent group which has been fighting the Turkish army for years over autonomy. Their glorious resistance did not just bring the Kurdish cause once again to global attention, but also prompted the U.S. to coordinate with them in the fight against the IS. On the Syrian border, Kurds, after throwing the IS out of their towns, formed autonomous enclaves, which created a new nightmare for Turkey. Ankara feared that the Kurdish momentum, unless it was broken, would strengthen demands for autonomy among Kurds in Turkey. Besides, in the June election, a Kurdish political party made history by winning enough votes to gain seats in Parliament for the first time, multiplying the ruling elites’ anti-Kurdish paranoia.

On the other side, Turkey was under enormous international pressure to do more against the IS and other jihadists in Syria. The pressure mounted from domestic quarters as well after the Suruc bombing. It was against this backdrop that Mr. Erdogan declared war against the IS. Though his government took some steps to control movements across the border and let the U.S. use its Incirlik airbase to bomb IS targets, the focus of Ankara’s bombing campaign remained on the Kurds. But Ankara’s increased collaboration with the American coalition and the domestic crackdown on jihadist networks seem to have angered the IS, which established a strong logistical and organisational network within Turkey, thanks to Mr. Erdogan’s open door policy.

Turkey is now trapped in a complex tri-directional war. If Ankara acts firmly against the IS, it would undermine its own Syria policy. If it doesn’t act, the threat from the IS to domestic security will grow as will the international efforts to co-opt the Kurds in a larger fight against extremism. This is a foreign policy dilemma for Ankara — whatever it is doing to maximise its interests is actually diminishing its foreign policy prospects. The worsening security situation at home and the growing global consensus that a forceful removal of President Assad would be catastrophic for the region demonstrate that Mr. Erdogan’s double game has failed miserably.
There are no easy ways out. Ideally, President Erdogan has to resume peace talks with the Kurds, step up attacks against the IS and pave the war for a larger anti-IS coalition by including the Kurds to take on the jihadists on the ground. But for that, he has to give up his neo-Islamist regional ambitions and sectarian tendencies and start thinking like a statesman. This is something unimaginable, given Mr. Erdogan’s recent record.

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