By Deniz Torcu
According to the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “Turkey is aware of the necessity to foster the linkages between political stability, economic welfare and cultural harmony in order to attain sustainable global peace.”
While promoting the notion of “zero problems”, what Turkey has in fact achieved over the past decade under the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government has been the creation of new problems and the rupture of long-lived alliances in the Middle East, such as the alliance with Israel. It has recently refused to join the coalition forces led by the US to fight the Islamic State. Rumours that Turkey has been selling weaponry to extremists in Syria fighting against Bashar Al-Assad have been around for some years now.
For the past few years, kicking Assad out of Syria has been one of the main priorities of Turkish foreign policy in the Middle East, even if it meant looking the other way while monstrosities were committed by the Islamic State (IS), whose fighters would keep crossing the Turkish border in and out of Syria. Policy-makers committed the gravest error of believing that, by solely looking the other way, Turkey would be spared any serious harm from those extremists.
We have seen footage of people from all over the world crossing the Turkish border into Syria to join the IS forces, and we have seen footage of the same people traveling back to their own countries via Turkey to commit massacres and bombings against the “unfaithfuls” and the “sinners”. We even have seen footage of IS sympathizers in Turkey publically threatening to take over Istanbul if the Turkish government remains idle.
We have seen all of this. However, Turkey has been looking the other way, ignoring this and hoping for the best. This is possibly the gravest error in Turkish foreign policy under AKP so far.
As of Monday, 20 July, a suicide bomber, with alleged ties to the Islamic State, massacred more than 30 people and injured over 100 others in the Turkish town of Suruc, which borders the Syrian town of Kobane and was recently retaken from IS forces by Kurdish fighters.
This has to be a wake-up call for Turkey.
Policy-makers in Turkey have to realize once and for all that the Islamic State or any other extremist group cannot be treated as a counterpart for promoting the interests of any properly established state.
Kicking Assad out cannot be translated into accepting the existence of another tyrant that is the Islamic State. Preventing the foundation of a Kurdish state cannot be translated into accepting the massacre of thousands of people based solely on their ethnicity.
Every second that Turkey continues to meddle in the domestic politics of Syria and supports the rise of extremist groups based solely on the fact that they share the same branch of Islam; every time someone is allowed to cross the Turkish-Syrian border without any proper control or intelligence crosschecking with Western allies; every second that Turkey turns a blind eye to the massacre of Shias and Kurds, hoping that this way the Shia-allied leader, Assad, is kicked out and a Kurdish independent state cannot be formed – it is not a matter of any one nationality or religion being threatened by the Islamic State or any other extremist group: It is all of us.
The editorial team of Katoikos
