Phew! “Turkey sends tanks into Syria …,”
CNN headlined on Thursday. “The goal is to crush ISIS.” It’s about time Turkey joined the war against Islamist terror. Some had suspected Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan of having a soft spot for ISIS, even of letting his country be used as a supply base. So what explains his newfound zeal? Is he chastened by the failed July 15 coup? Is it that, since the battles around Kobani almost two years ago, ISIS has suffered a string of reversals?

The answer is more troubling. As the German weekly Der Spiegel put it: “Isis is the pretext. The Kurds are the target.” Turkey’s strategic objective is not to “crush” ISIS. It is to crush the most effective part of the anti-ISIS coalition: the Syrian-Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) and People’s Protection Units (YPG). Kurdish nationalism has itself led frequently to terrorism over the years and is an abiding national-security obsession for the Turks. The Istanbul daily Sabah ran a headline Thursday that
said nothing about ISIS. It read: “Turkish forces shell YPG positions in northern Manbij.”