Simon Tisdall - Turkey paying a price for Erdoğan's wilful blindness to Isis threat
The President’s preference for blaming
everything bad that happens on the Kurds is no longer working
Turkish officials, led
by the prime minister, Binali Yildirim, have initially blamed the Istanbul
airport attack on Islamic State, and it is true that this latest murderous
outrage closely resembles last October’s Isis bombing of a peace
rally in Ankara that killed 103 people, the deadliest such attack in modern
Turkish history. Assuming the official
claim turns out to be accurate, it once again raises the murky question of
Turkish government attitudes towards the Isis militants who control or are
contesting large swaths of territory adjacent to Turkey’s southern border with
Syria and Iraq and are said to maintain networks of supporters inside Turkey.
The basic problem is
that Recep
Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s president, believes indigenous Kurds in those
areas and in south-east Turkey pose a bigger threat than does Isis. This
perceived ambivalence has led to numerous accusations of tacit Turkish support
for or, worse still, complicity in Isis’s activities since the group swept to
prominence in 2014 – all flatly denied by Erdoğan and his ministers. The mostly unproven
accusations, listed in a research paper published by New York’s Columbia
University, include claims that predominantly Sunni Muslim Turkey has covertly
supplied, trained, financed and assisted the recruitment of Isis’s Sunni
fighters in their battles with the Kurds, with Iraq’s Shia-led
government, and with the Syrian government, which Turkey opposes. Some of the
accusations, such as the government’s direct arming of Isis, seem far-fetched.
But other claims, including suggestions that Turkish middlemen were involved in
lucrative Isis oil smuggling from Iraq to Turkey, are widely believed.
Kemal Kiliçdaroglu,
leader of the main Turkish opposition Republican People’s party (CHP), produced
documents and transcripts in 2014 purporting to show that Turkey supplied
weapons to terror groups inside Syria. It was suggested the arms went to ethnic
Turkmen fighters opposed to Syria’s leader, Bashar al-Assad, not Isis.
Erdoğan’s government
has also been accused of supporting – by what means is unclear – an
al-Qaida-affiliated Syrian rebel force, Jabhat
al-Nusra, which is said to be backed by Turkey’s ally Saudi Arabia but
which is proscribed as a terrorist outfit by the US and Britain, also Ankara’s
allies. When in May 2015 the
Cumhuriyet daily published material and footage alleging that Turkish MIT
intelligence agents had tried to smuggle arms into Syria and been intercepted
by border guards, the paper’s editor, Can Dündar, was arrested
and charged with security offences and the border guards were
dismissed. Such official pressure tactics have inhibited subsequent independent
reporting.
Specific allegations
aside, Erdoğan is accused by his opponents of indirectly helping Isis by
thwarting, and refusing to support, efforts by Kurdish militias and their
western backers to combat the jihadis in Syria and Iraq. Erdoğan has repeatedly
dismissed the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union party (PYD) and the Iraqi
peshmerga as being no better than terrorists themselves, in league with
Turkey’s Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK).
Erdoğan renewed the
Turkish state’s long-running conflict with the PKK last summer after his ruling
Justice and Development party unexpectedly
lost its parliamentary majority, largely due to the electoral success of
the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic party (HDP). He has since sought
effectively to ban most HDP MPs from parliament while seeking to extend his
presidential powers. Large-scale crackdowns
and curfews in Kurdish towns in the south-east have led to numerous
deaths on both sides and mass civilian displacement. The violence provoked a
spate of terrorist attacks on soft targets in Istanbul and Ankara by a militant
PKK offshoot known as the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons (TAK).
The government says
the TAK outrages prove the truth of its contention that the PKK is a purely
terrorist organisation lacking legitimate cause that must be mercilessly
extirpated. In recent months, conforming to this preferred narrative, attacks
launched by Isis have been officially blamed, initially at least, on the Kurds,
thereby confusing the overall picture and complicating the counter-terrorism
response to Isis. Incontrovertible
evidence has now emerged that Isis operatives planned the Ankara attack last
October. A total of 36 suspects are facing a total of up to 11,750 years in
jail, according to the Ankara public prosecutor. It seems probable that Tuesday
evening’s attack in Istanbul was Isis’s response to a recent wave of arrests
and artillery bombardments targeting the group inside Turkey and across the
border in Syria. Although it may not have thought so at the outset, Isis seems
ever more persuaded in its view of Turkey as a hostile member of the US-led
“crusader alliance”, and is punishing it accordingly.
Ministers have
hitherto resisted suggestions that Isis runs cells and networks inside Turkey,
but given the arrests this position is hardly tenable. The government is also
unwilling to accept that its security and counter-terror intelligence-gathering
arrangements are faulty, or that by degrees the country is being sucked ever
further into Syria’s civil war – although both conclusions appear increasingly
inescapable.
It seems plain that
Erdoğan’s preference for blaming everything bad that happens on the Kurds is no
longer working, that Turkish civilians are paying a terrible price for his
wilful blindness to the jihadi threat, and that Turkey’s leaders must banish
any remaining ambivalence and confront the Isis menace full on. This week Ankara
patched up relations with Russia and Israel, both strong anti-Isis actors, and
stepped up border cooperation with Nato air patrols – an indication that
attitudes may be changing. The logical corollary of such a shift is for Erdoğan
to halt his war of choice against the PKK, reinstitute last year’s ceasefire,
and accept that the price for a united front to defeat Isis terror and halt the
Syrian carnage is a comprehensive settlement with the Kurds.
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