Blog Post

AEIdeas

On July 20, a suicide bomber struck a gathering in the Turkish town of Suruç, just across the border from Kobani, the site of a fierce struggle between the Islamic State (ISIS, ISIL, Daesh) and Syrian Kurdish forces. Two days later, after a telephone call between Presidents Barack Obama and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey agreed to allow US planes to use Turkish bases to strike at Islamic State targets in Syria. That’s significant: flights which once took hours to get over targets in Syria now take as little as 20 minutes.

But does the change in Turkish policy signal an about-face? After all, over the past few years, Erdoğan has transformed Turkey into a superhighway for foreign fighters wishing to join Al Qaeda-linked groups or the Islamic State. Has Erdoğan finally recognized that his passive, if not active, support for ISIS has endangered all Turks with a jihadist backlash?

Alas, compartmentalization may be blinding those directing the US fight against ISIS. They might applaud Turkey’s sudden cooperation, but they don’t recognize that Turkey might be pursuing very different goals. While Turkish planes have launched some attacks on ISIS targets in Syria, they have directed far more sorties bombing the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) insurgents and fighters in northern Iraq. While Turkey had long faced a PKK insurgency, there has been an ongoing peace process for two years. Another way to look at this is that Turkey is bombing the same Kurdish Peshmerga who have been most successful at rolling back the Islamic State in Syria and around Mount Sinjar in Iraq. By such a flagrant violation of the peace process with the PKK, Erdoğan also is preparing the groundwork for dissolving the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), the Kurdish party whose members generally sympathize with the PKK and whose election success in June denied Erdoğan’s followers a majority or the first time since they came to power in 2002.

Dissolving the HDP would ensure Erdoğan a majority in new elections likely to be held as early as this November should coalition talks fail. Even if Erdoğan doesn’t dissolve the HDP, a crisis in Syria empowers the Turkish leader much as contrived states-of-emergency have empowered autocrats across the Middle East.

It must be comforting to believe that Erdoğan saw the light, but ideologies don’t change on a whim. To reward Erdoğan prematurely might simply be to play into his hands.