Turkey’s entrance into the fight against the Islamic State may seem like a victory for President Obama in the face of criticism that his strategy has lagged behind the militant group’s gains, especially in Syria.
After more than a year of prodding from Washington, Ankara has finally taken an active role against the Islamic State, agreeing to let U.S. warplanes use NATO bases on Turkish soil and to aid in the creation of a “safe zone” for Syrian refugees and rebels along its border.
But Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has his own agenda that may clash with U.S. goals as much as it meshes with them, mirroring Washington’s problems with Pakistan in Afghanistan and Sunni Gulf allies in Iraq.
“American diplomats thought they secured, at long last, Turkey’s cooperation against the Islamic State. Instead, they gave Erdogan a pretense to unleash a conflict that could tear apart Turkey and its neighbors,” said Blaise Misztal, director of national security at the Bipartisan Policy Center think tank in Washington.
On the surface, the shift in Turkish policy is a reaction to a suicide attack July 20 in the Syrian border town of Suruc that killed 32 people and wounded 100, along with the success of Syria’s Kurds in pushing back the Islamic State along the Turkish border.
Brett McGurk, the deputy U.S. special envoy to the anti-Islamic State coalition, told Charlie Rose of PBS in a July 28 interview that a conversation between Obama and Erdogan in October after the administration decided to resupply the besieged Kurdish town of Kobani by air, along with subsequent negotiations to allow Iraqi Kurds safe passage, helped pave the way for last month’s decision by Ankara to join the fight.
“So that really started a very in-depth process with Turkey and that ended up actually being a real success,” McGurk said. “So we built from there. We then [agreed to work with Turkey] on the train-and-equip program for the moderate Syrian opposition. There is a ways to go in that program. But we’ve had good cooperation with Turkey. And we had a number of steps.
“They had an election, so our discussion slowed down a bit. And then it was really about three weeks ago where the talks accelerated. And Turkey agreed to open up their bases for our aircraft to strike ISIS targets in Syria and in Iraq with Turkish F-16s flying alongside us.”
But Turkey’s recent strikes against the Islamic State have masked a broader campaign against an enemy seen by Erdogan’s government as an equal or greater threat: the Kurds. Specifically, Ankara is targeting the Syrian Kurdish People’s Democratic Union, or PYD, a secular leftist group aligned with the PKK, a Marxist Kurdish group in Turkey that has waged a decades-long guerrilla war against the Turkish government.
The PYD’s military arm, the YPG, has been the most effective of Syrian rebel groups against the Islamic State, and its gains have alarmed Erdogan, who declared in June that he would prevent establishment of a Kurdish state in northern Syria “no matter what it costs.”
Domestic politics also play a role, with Erdogan trying to cope with the loss of his Islamist AK Party’s parliamentary majority in the June 7 elections. The elections also saw a Kurdish party, the HDP, gaining seats for the first time as Turkish Kurds became more nationalistic in the wake of the YPG’s successes in Syria.
“It’s not a long-term, well-planned, well-intentioned anti-terror campaign. This is mostly a politician in survival mode,” said Aykan Erdemir, a former member of the Turkish Parliament who’s now a nonresident fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
Erdogan and his allies are seeking new elections and “assume that the current political climate of armed conflict will harm the HDP’s electoral prospects and provide the AKP the single-party majority it desires,” Erdemir said.
Religious zealotry is strong among Turkey’s Kurds, who make up about 20 percent of the nation’s population. In the past, most have supported Erdogan’s Sunni Islamist policies rather than the PKK’s secular, leftist agenda, Erdemir said. But the defense of Kobani over the past year and Ankara’s passive response stirred nationalistic feelings.
“I think Kobani did really change a lot vis-a-vis the Kurds,” he said. “Kurds are beginning to prioritize ethnic solidarity over religious solidarity.”
This leaves the United States in a bind. Turkey, a fellow NATO member, last week invoked Article 4 of the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty, which requires consultations among alliance members “whenever, in the opinion of any of them, the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the parties is threatened,” to secure formal alliance backing for its fight.
And though the United States and many European countries consider the PKK a terrorist organization, Syria’s Kurdish groups are not only the most effective of a very thin presence against the Islamic State on the ground in that country, their fight has brought them emotional support from many Americans, including lawmakers in Congress.
Erdogan’s policy of using the fight against the Islamic State to take on the Kurds is a major mistake that puts NATO in a bad position, Erdemir said.
“No NATO member would choose to be part of this game of Erdogan’s,” he said. “Now there’s a lot of sympathy in the West for PYD.”
