Turkey faces existential hurdles

Compelled by Saudi Arabia, Qatar to keep funnelling arms to the jihadis, Erdogan has become an enabler.

Turkey faces three separate existential challenges: the Islamic State (IS), the fundamentalist movement led by US-based cleric Fetullah Gulen and separatist Kurds. All three are branded terrorists by Ankara although only the Islamic State and the leftist Kurdish Workers’ Party have been designated as such by the international community.

None of these challenges would have existed if Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had followed different policies. The IS and its offshoot Jabhat Fatah al-Sham (the rebranded affiliate of al-Qaeda) would never have come into existence without Erdogan. Four months after protests erupted in Syria in 2011, he began a campaign to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Under Erdogan's direction, Turkey recruited defected Syrian army officers and formed, trained and armed the rebel Free Syrian Army. Ankara also joined forces with the outlawed Syrian Muslim Brotherhood to create the expatriate opposition Syrian National Council, based in Instanbul. Erdogan’s fantasy objective was to lead a region governed by the Brotherhood, an ally of his Justice and Development Party (AKP).

Assad did not fall, his army battled the insurgents and the Council, which had no support in Syria, was factional and fractious. Jihadi volunteers from across the globe were funnelled into Syria through Turkey. In early 2012, al-Qaeda in Iraq formed Jabhat al-Nusra and sent bombers and fighters into Syria.

Seeing Syria as a land of opportunity, al-Qaeda in Iraq transformed itself into Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), crossed the border into Syria in 2013 and fought  both rebel and government forces. Between 27,000 and 31,000 jihadis from 86 countries flowed into Syria, most via Turkey, and seized the city of Raqqa in the north and oil-rich Deir al-Zor province in the east. The ISIS morphed into Islamic State with its capital at Raqqa.

Western and West Asian powers supported different and competing armed groups, including Nusra and IS until the latter swept across the border the seized Iraq’s second city, Mosul in June 2014. Although Turkey was its benefactor, IS set up underground cells across the country and launched attacks on both Kurdish and Turkish ta-rgets. Erdogan’s Syria policy was a deadly and dangerous gamble that blew back on Turkey.

Erdogan formed a partnership with Gulen, a moderate preacher who in the 1970s established schools and charitable institutions in Turkey and other Muslim countries. Although Gulen disavowed Erdogan’s “political Islam,” the two collaborated in trying to transform secular Turkey into a religion-oriented, conservative, nationalist state. 

After the AKP came to power in 2002, Gulenists were encouraged to infiltrate the judiciary, prosecution service, police, administration and military. However, the partnership soured and in 2013 it broke apart when Gulenists in the legal system accused members of Erdogan's circle of corruption.

Since then, Erdogen has been gunning for the Gulenists who are charged with organising the failed military coup mounted on July 15. He has detained thousands connected with the coup and demanded Gulen’s extradition from the US where he has lived for many years.

Full-scale warfare

After losing his party’s parliamentary majority in the June 2015 election due to Kurdish voter desertion in favour of a progressive Kurdish party, Erdogan turned against the Kurds.

After he bombed Turkish Kurdish fighters in northern Iraq, the Kurds declared an end to the ceasefire, in place since 2013, and full-scale warfare resumed. Erdogan exploited widespread anti-Kurdish feeling among ethnic Turks to regain lost seats in the snap November parliamentary poll and stepped up attacks on Kurdish areas.

Turkey’s terrorists have been Erdogan’s partners. If he had adhered to the “zero problems with neighbours” policy adopted early in his rule, Erdogan would have refrained from intervening in Syrian unrest and prevented jihadis from crossing into Syria. Compelled by oil rich Saudi Arabia and Qatar to continue funnelling arms and ammunition to the jihadis, Erdogan remains an enabler of terrorists who since 2014 have mounted suicide bombings in Turkey.

If the increasingly autocratic Erdogan had disciplined party stalwarts engaged in flagrant corruption, he might not have fallen out with Gulen whose movement preaches high ethical and moral standards. The collapse of the Erdogan-Gulen partnership has led to mass purges since 2013. These were accelerated after the July coup. 

Senior army officers, officials, academics and media figures have been detained or dismissed from their jobs. Although Erdogan is replacing them with loyalists, the purge has weakened not only Turkey’s military but also the state.

Finally, because of close connections between Syrian and dissident Turkish Kurds, Erdogan has been bombing US-supported Syrian Kurds battling IS in northern Syria. He has also ordered his jihadi allies in Jabhat Fatah al-Sham (Front for the Conquest of Greater Syria) to attack the Syrian Kurds in the Turkish-Syrian border region.

Erdogan’s aim is to prevent Syrian Kurds from establishing an autonomous region in northern Syria, fearing Turkish Kurds would follow suit in Turkey’s south-eastern provinces.