FOR many years Turkey’s recipe for combating Kurdish nationalism was to pretend that Kurds did not exist. Even as Turkish troops battled the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), government propaganda maintained that Kurds were a subgroup of Turks and that their language, banned from official use, was a dialect of Turkish. To his credit, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s president, has never indulged in such fantasies. His Justice and Development (AK) party pursued peace negotiations with Abdullah Ocalan, the founder of the PKK, and moderate Kurds. Alas, in recent months, as the world has focused on the tragedy taking place in Iraq and Syria, Mr Erdogan has thrown those achievements away, relaunching Turkey’s war on Kurdish militants with a deadly new ferocity.

Hundreds are dead, many of them civilians. About 200,000 people have been displaced, adding to Turkey’s burden of millions of Syrian refugees (see article). Districts across the south-east are under curfew. The army is using tanks and artillery against PKK-aligned youth militias dug in behind barricades filled with explosives. Parts of Diyarbakir, the biggest Kurdish-populated town in south-eastern Turkey, resemble the rubble-strewn wastelands of Syrian cities like Aleppo.

The PKK bears much of the blame. Last summer it began killing Turkish troops and police, supposedly in retaliation for Turkish collusion with Islamic State (IS). The jihadists had sought to annihilate Kobane, a Kurdish enclave in Syria, in full sight of Turkish troops who stood by; and they carried out a suicide-bomb attack against Kurdish activists in the Turkish town of Suruc. By breaking the ceasefire, the PKK has stirred suspicions that it wants to carry the Kurds’ successful fight against IS in Syria back into Turkey.

Grid of grievances: Enemies, alliances and animosity in the Middle East Whether the PKK’s action was a rush of emotion or premeditated, Mr Erdogan exploited it to end peace talks with the Kurds and launch a full-scale military campaign. By playing on Turkish nationalism, he propelled his troubled AK party back to victory in the election in November. But the repercussions are dire for Turkey as a whole. Its democracy is under attack. Anyone criticising the war, including moderate Kurdish politicians, is persecuted. What remains of the independent media is being silenced. Turkey, a bastion of stability, is being sucked into the Middle East’s ever-expanding war zone. Mr Erdogan may never have peddled the myth that the Kurds do not exist, but he has succumbed to a different fantasy: that he can end Kurdish nationalism by force. Turkey has already wasted decades trying to do so. Returning to suppression is futile, since Kurds form a large minority and control havens in Syria and northern Iraq. Instead Mr Erdogan will be drawn into a familiar vicious cycle, as the attempt to crush insurgents alienates moderate Kurds and creates recruits. The PKK, too, is indulging in fantasies. Turkey will never allow the Kurdish chunk of the country to secede or let its fighters take over militarily as they tried to do in the 1990s. Nor will America, however much it may look to the Kurds as the most reliable force against IS in Syria and Iraq, offer them any succour in destabilising Turkey, a vital NATO ally. If anything, America and Europe need Turkey more than ever to help them stop refugee flows and bring peace to Syria.

Point the guns the other way

A return to peace talks, on the basis of greater autonomy for Kurds within Turkey, which Mr Ocalan has already accepted, offers the only solution. The West must urge both Turks and the Kurds to see that they should be fighting IS, not each other. It will be impossible to end the civil war in Syria if Mr Erdogan insists on waging a war of his own in Turkey.