Jun 30, 2014

A day after declaring itself an Islamic caliphate and calling on Islamic factions worldwide to pledge their allegiance, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), now calling itself the Islamic State, raised its flag June 30 in the town of Tell Abyad, Syria, just across the border from Akcakale, Turkey.

That flag, however, has been up and down there since January 2014, with ISIS trading control with the Free Syrian Army (FSA). The ISIS flag had been removed from Tell Abyad just two weeks ago.

On June 25, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan blamed opposition parties for risking the lives of 80 Turkish citizens held by ISIS — 49 consulate members in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, including the consul general, and 31 truck drivers — for criticizing his ambiguous approach to the extremist group, an approach that had the goal of bringing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime down. “No one should expect me to provoke ISIS,” Erdogan said. “Eighty of our citizens are being held by this group. They expect us to make provocative statements regarding this group. They expect us to approach the fire with a stoker in hand.”

There was no reaction June 30 from the Erdogan government to the ISIS flag visible from Turkey's Sanliurfa province. Moreover, a Turkish Foreign Ministry official who asked to remain anonymous told Al-Monitor that Turkey does not consider “either ISIS or the other radical groups as a direct threat to our [Turkey’s] national security.”

However, Armagan Kuloglu, a retired major general, argues that all these radical extremist groups surrounding Turkey’s borders, whether in Iraq or in Syria, do actually constitute a national security threat. “They can’t name it as such for ideological reasons,” he told Al-Monitor. “The only threat that the government considered was to the Tomb of Suleiman Shah. That is all.” The Tomb of Suleiman Shah is 35 kilometers (24 miles) from the Turkish border inside Syria and the only Turkish territory outside Turkey proper. The government said that the Turkish soldiers protecting the tomb came under credible threat in April 2014.