Erdogan's planes have aimed their missiles almost exclusively at the one army which poses a real threat to ISIS - the Kurdish PKK forces inside Syria

Despotic presidents tend to have many admirers who will hail them as saviours of their nations. But they also have a tendency to lock horns with other despots.

The clash between Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, after Turkish F-16s shot down a Russian fighter, is one which has set the entire world on edge as diplomats desperately work overtime to reduce the tension.

Putin is not blameless in this affair. His air force has been probing Western air spaces provocatively in a number of different locations in recent months. But was the Russian president right, after the downing of the jet, to accuse ‘back-stabbing’ Turkey of being the accomplices of ISIS terrorists?

And was there any truth in Putin’s accusation yesterday — made just as Moscow was expelling 39 Turkish businessmen attending a conference in Russia — that Turkey is propping up ISIS by buying oil from them?

This latest claim inevitably prompted a furious response from Erdogan, who accused Putin of slander. But the fact is that Erdogan’s regime has on many occasions turned a blind eye to ISIS activity in Turkey, as well as to Turkish businessmen and smugglers doing trade deals with the jihadist butchers.

To be fair, on the surface, Turkey’s president is fully involved in the fight against ISIS. In October he allowed U.S. jets to use Turkey’s Incirlik air base for operations against ISIS, pledging that his forces, too, would join the fight.

But the truth is that Turkey’s planes have aimed their missiles almost exclusively at the one army which poses a real threat to ISIS, and has won countless battlefield victories against them — the Kurdish PKK forces inside Syria.

The trouble is that Erdogan, who has spent years ruthlessly concentrating power into his own hands, considers the Kurds an even greater threat to his nation than ISIS.

A fifth of Turkey’s 75 million people are Kurds who, along with fellow Kurds in Syria, Iran and Iraq, want to form their own country, with a population of some 40 million. Erdogan sees this plan for a Kurdish nation as a mortal threat to Turkey and will take any opportunity to attack those behind it. Furthermore, he loathes Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad. And if ISIS is weakened, Assad’s forces — backed by Russia — will be strengthened commensurately.

The fact is that ISIS could rapidly be destroyed if Kurdish forces in Syria and Iraq — along with Kurdish guerillas in Turkey — were fully unleashed. They have proved extraordinarily militarily effective and oppose every aspect of Isis’s devilish ideology.

Yet this does not happen because PKK forces in Syria and Kurds in northern Iraq are under continual bombardment by the Turkish air force. No, the fact is that while Turkey may be a member of Nato — and of the alliance taking on the jihadists — Erdogan seems to be doing almost everything he can to cripple the forces actually fighting ISIS.

But then Erdogan has always been utterly ruthless when it comes to protecting his own interests. He became prime minister of Turkey back in 2003, has been re-elected three times, and last year became the country’s first directly elected president.

On the brink: The Russian jet pictured as its plummets towards the ground after being shot by Turkish forces

Until this happened, the presidency had been a largely ceremonial role. But Erdogan is transforming it to grant himself immense executive powers, like a latter-day Sultan. And he’s had no hesitation in using these powers before he’s even had the constitution changed.

When his party did relatively poorly in an election earlier this year, largely due to a popular new Kurdish party, he declared the election should be re-run.

In the meantime, he broke off peace talks with Kurdish militants in Turkey — aimed at winning him Kurdish votes and bringing to an end a conflict that has claimed 40,000 lives in the country in 30 years — and drummed up populist support by denouncing all Kurds as terrorists.

His Muslim AKP party incited mobs of their supporters to burn down the offices of the rival Kurdish HDP party, while the army put Kurdish cities under virtual occupation. In other words Erdogan actively risked an ethnic civil war to win re-election.

Even though the economy crashed when a vast bubble of easy credit and over-expansion popped, Erdogan decided to build himself a 1,000-room presidential palace costing £230 million in what was a charming national park and zoo.

But perhaps the most worrying aspect of Erdogan’s consolidation of power is that it has gone hand in hand with his transformation of Turkey — a country with a 500,000-strong army — from a secular into an Islamist state.

Modern Turkey was founded in 1923 as a secular republic by the ‘father of the nation’, Kemal Ataturk, after the collapse of the mighty Ottoman Empire, of which Islam was the main religion and where Sunni clerics were hugely influential.

In Ataturk’s new republic, the clerics were marginalised in terms of government influence. Government officials (who were often generals) at gatherings where imams were present always made a point of offering delegates the local spirit ‘raki’ — even though Muslims are forbidden to touch alcohol.

Flight: This map shows the route of the Russian jet (shown in red), based on data released by the Turkish army, including where it violated Turkish airspace, and the area in the Turkomen Mountains where it crashed

Whenever the Islamists appeared to be getting too powerful, the army would move in to remove them. In the decades before Erdogan came to power, the army had intervened four times to curb Islamist influence.

Erdogan himself was jailed in 1997 when he was mayor of Istanbul and active in Islamist circles.

It was an experience he never forgot and in 2012, when he was prime Minister, he got his revenge by putting 324 serving officers on trial. Some were jailed for 20 years, reportedly as a result of fabricated evidence. Funding for the armed forces, meanwhile, was cut by 30 per cent.

To help crush the independence of the armed forces, Erdogan relied on a shadowy network called the Gulenists, a sect-like elite which had infiltrated the judiciary, prosecution service and police. Once they had served their purpose, Erdogan jettisoned them — and the sect’s leader is now exiled in Pennsylvania.

Thousands of prosecutors and police have been purged, political protests have been crushed, investigations into corruption dismissed and the country’s relatively free media repressed.

In June 2014, politically connected developers tried to concrete over the only park in central Istanbul with a new barracks, a mosque and a shopping mall, infuriating young secular Turks who were already angry at Erdogan’s introduction of curbs on alcohol sales after 10pm. The police waded in to attack what Erdogan called ‘bums’.

Worrying numbers of young Turks, including members of the youth wing of Erdogan’s AKP party, now support ISIS

This came on top of the regime’s annulment of a clause in the penal code that made it punishable for couples (and imams) to conduct a religious marriage without a prior civil ceremony.

Many secular Turkish women felt this Islamisation of marriage opened the way for polygamy, child brides, and one-sided divorce settlements in which husbands could enjoy a legal separation simply by telling their wives ‘I divorce you’ three times.

Private citizens are harassed, as well as protesting crowds. In January, Merve Buyuksarac, the 26-year old brunette former Miss Turkey, was arrested for tweeting a poem that allegedly mocked Erdogan.

Meanwhile, Turkish journalists have been beaten up by AKP supporters, and foreigners have been deported for trying to report the war brewing in south-eastern Turkey with the Kurds.

And, all the time, the violent Islamists are gaining in strength.

In his obsession with removing Syria’s President Assad, Erdogan has ignored the way ISIS has quietly infiltrated dingy and depressed Turkish towns through which they funnel foreign jihadists to Syria. Turkish smugglers buy ISIS oil by the tanker load.

Worrying numbers of young Turks, including members of the youth wing of Erdogan’s AKP party, now support ISIS. In the aftermath of the ISIS attack on Paris, Turkish football fans booed during the minute’s silence for victims at a match in Istanbul between Turkey and Greece. There were even cries of ‘Allahu Akbar’ — the Islamic phrase meaning ‘God is greater’.

Before this year’s elections, ISIS launched two bomb attacks in Turkey on Kurdish rallies in Suruc in July and Ankara in October, killing 134 people in total.

Yet despite this, 7 per cent of Turks do not regard ISIS as terrorists, and more than 15 per cent say they are not a threat to Turkey.

Erdogan’s deep fear is not ISIS, but rather 40 million Kurds in Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran who might coalesce into a single new state.

That’s why he has been bombing the Kurds (and illegally sending his planes into northern Iraq to hit PKK bases) rather than focusing on ISIS.