Jan 9, 2017

On Dec. 5, the daily Sabah, the flagship of Turkey’s pro-government media, came out with an assertive headline: “It is very clear that Daesh [Islamic State], the PKK and FETO are acting all together.” Accordingly, these three very different nonstate actors — IS (radical jihadis), the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK Kurdish separatists) and the Fethullah Gulen Terror Organization, or FETO (an Islamic cult with political ambitions) — were attacking Turkey at the same time in a well-coordinated campaign. Moreover, their coordinator was the nefarious “mastermind” — a conspiratorial power that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan invented in 2015 and has been defined by his supporters as the US government.

This Sabah “news story” was not unique; it is rather a political narrative that one can read in Turkey’s pro-government media literally every single day. It is a narrative based on a partial fact: Turkey, indeed, has been targeted by repeated terror attacks by IS and the PKK. It is also common wisdom in Turkey that the Gulenists were indeed the main element behind the failed coup attempt in July. However, the assertion that these groups are coordinated by a single major manipulator is not a fact — it is a conspiracy theory.

Erdogan seems to agree with this conspiracy theory, as he not only gives his blessing to the pro-government media but even publicly refers to their “news” — including unabashedly fake news. For example, in a recent public speech, Erdogan said, “An American general declares, ‘We founded [IS].’ It is not me who is saying that; it is him.” This was a clear reference to a recent fake news story on A Haber, the Sabah TV channel. A two-minute video of retired American Gen. Wesley Clark's statements on the discussions in the wake of the Iraq War of 2003 was subtitled by A Haber, but by a crucial add-on: “We needed a hammer, so we founded [IS],” the American general was made to say on A Haber, while the original sentence only read: “If all you have is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail.”

Aren’t there any people in the pro-government media who oppose such fake news — of which there is plenty — and the conspiracy theories based on them? There are just a few. But they are on the margins and are condemned by hard-core pro-Erdoganists — on social media or aggressive websites — as “traitors” who are serving the United States by concealing its plots. Anti-Western conspiracy theories make up today’s official ideology, and those who doubt it attract a lot of wrath.

Yet for anyone who doubts the official ideology, the theory that all terror groups are united — regardless of what one thinks about America — is implausible. IS and the PKK are not in collaboration; rather, they are at war with each other. The PKK’s Syrian affiliate, the Democratic Union Party, has been actively fighting IS over the past two years, and IS is hitting back. In fact, the first three major terror attacks by IS inside Turkey — in Diyarbakir, Suruc and Ankara, all in 2015 — were directed at leftist Kurdish targets, which were considered pro-PKK. It is more correct to say that Turkey has been the stage of the IS-PKK conflict — along with their independent attacks on Turkey — rather than the target of a united IS-PKK attack.