Turkey's Tarnished Trap
"[The locals] didn't give the Western guys money, but they would find them apartments to stay in."
Mehmet, Sisli, Turkey, cafe owner
"Abu Azzam was a Canadian of South Asian decent belonging to Jund Al-Aqsa. He was very quiet softly spoken; he appeared middle class, educated. He was proud of the fact that his family were devout and he had never really integrated [in Canada] and kept his morals."
"He had very little problem with [Canada] except that they were making a mistake siding with the U.S."
Tam Hussein, Swedish video journalist, Turkey
"I think the government contributed to the rise of extremism when it employed a harsh discourse against opponents, currying favour with the political Islamist base, and employed anti-
Western discourse to survive political scandals."
"When the Syria crisis started, the young attracted to radical groups in Syria were in the dozens. It went to hundreds and even thousands now. There is definitely a pattern formed here. Yet we have not seen a comprehensive plan to attack ISIS ideology."
Abdullah Bozkurt, columnist, Today's Zaman, Turkey
The AKP [Erdogan's Justice and Development Party] provided arms, money, recruits and training to anyone who claimed to be fighting against Assad. This disastrous policy turned Syria into an open field of radical terrorists and similarly increased the appetite or groups like ISIS in Iraq."
"This dreadful policy has turned Turkey into a country highly vulnerable to terrorist attacks."
Faruk Logoglu, opposition Republican People's Party, Turkey
| Syrian rebels enter Kobani from Turkey: video |
Certainly the Turkey that up to two decades earlier was modelled on the Ataturk vision of a Westward-looking, progressive liberal state whose economy would be more closely linked and modelled with and upon Europe than with the Middle East, a secular-governed country that had turned away from the Islam of the Ottoman Empire, no longer resembles that model. With the ascension of the AKP and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan Turkey became an Islamist state.
That part of the Turkish population that has chafed under the new religious autocracy that their president and his party represent have been subjected to the oppression of news shutdowns and violence meted out to protesters. The military had been purged of its Ataturkian stalwarts and the judiciary had been infiltrated by Islamists, but even within their ranks dissent arose as a result of corruption in the Erdogan government and another purge took place.
President Erdogan is a man given to seemingly sudden changes of heart; when he assigns enemy status to those he considers have become a liability to his version of Islamist Turkey, his loathing for them leads to irrational political determinations that have turned Turkey in a direction diametrically opposed to its last 80 years of administration. His sympathy for Sunni terror groups stands in stark contrast to his raging antipathy toward the Kurds and toward Israel.
He has moved Turkey slowly but inevitably from the values of the past and although he still values NATO membership, Turkey under the AKP has moved a polarizing distance from NATO and the United States, let alone the European Union which has put off membership for Turkey citing its human rights violations. Turkey has latterly presented as a friendly gateway into Syria for those willing to join the conflict against the Syrian dictator President Bashar al-Assad.
For the past three years aspiring jihadists from Britain, Germany, Canada and a bevy of Arab countries have gathered in Turkey for the purpose of moving on into Syria to join the Syrian Free Army, and more ominously, the Islamist jihadists wreaking havoc in Syria. Members of Islamic
State were among those who also received haven in Turkey by government design. People in Sisli, a crossing point for jihadists en route to Syria and Iraq recall foreigners "dressed in jihadist clothing drinking tea on the side of the streets."
Their presence is now infinitely more discreet. But many of the locals, conservative in their Islamist outlook, are in full sympathy with those influenced by the call to jihad, and more than content to discreetly help them pass through to alleviate the plight of Syrians whose own government has been slaughtering them. If the only purpose of the Islamists was to free Sunni Syrians from the Shia Alawite oppression of the regime, it would seem fair enough. The end game, however, is to bring strict and severe Sharia to Syria. And now, through ISIS, to link Syria and Iraq in a caliphate.
Foreign jihadists in Sisli, according to Mehmet, have now gone underground since the viral successes and international appeal of the Islamic State of Iran and Al-Sham. The unwanted attention of the international community to Turkish complicity with the Islamists has not been welcomed. Which hasn't altered the empathy evinced by the locals for jihad being carried out over the border. Made respectable by Turkey's increasingly Islamist government, dividing the sympathies of the Turkish population itself.
Before the appearance of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2002, Turkish polls were split evenly on Islam having a role in the country's politics. At the present time, a Pew Research Center poll revealed that 69% of Turks feel Islam is and should remain the dominant force in Turkish political life. In January, Bilal, Mr. Erdogan's son, was accused of meeting with a Saudi businessman believed to be an al-Qaeda financier. Just adding to the reputation for corruption of the man and his father.
In the backdrop of the sectarian war in Syria, Turkish extremists sympathetic and in support of ISIS, have stepped up in public, not averse to showing their presence, and engaging in violent clashes with university students at Istanbul University, attempting to hold anti-jihad demonstrations. The resulting violence doesn't appear to have bothered the administration, which has done nothing to condemn the attacks nor assign security the task of removing their presence.
The AKP's and President Erdogan's raging aversion to placating the demands of Turkish Kurds has ensured nothing would be done on the border with Syria to aid the Syrian Kurds in retaining the embattled town of Kobani. Turkey's official position of doing nothing to overcome the ISIS militias on its very border, waiting out the hope that the Syrian Kurds would be defeated by ISIS, even while the U.S. and its allies are bombing the ISIS militias by air, has resulted in the country's diplomatic isolation.
Along with the growing possibility that while it once expressed great concern that Syrian troops would enter Turkey and destabilize it in revenge for Turkey's support for the rebels in the civil war, Turkey instead might now be susceptible to internal terrorist attacks from the very Sunny Islamist forces of terror it had so latterly given support to.
Labels: Civil War, Conflict, Islamic State, Islamism, Syria, Turkey
posted by Pieface @ Monday, November 03, 2014
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