Jun 6, 2014

The timing was interesting. Turkey’s Council of Ministers decided on June 3 — the day war-torn Syria held a dubious election in regime-controlled areas — to designate Jabhat al-Nusra, an al-Qaeda affiliate fighting the Bashar al-Assad regime, a terrorist organization.

Since the May 2013 Reyhanli bombing — the worst terrorist attack in Turkey, which killed 52 and wounded more than a hundred — the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has held the Syrian regime responsible. Yet, the country’s main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) has submitted multiple requests to the Turkish parliament for a thorough investigation into the matter. The CHP has frequently demanded the formation of a parliamentary investigation commission in an attempt to come clean on Turkey’s alleged support for al-Qaeda's franchise groups in Syria. Their proposals have not produced any outcome.

However, in March 2014, Tacan Ildem, Turkey’s ambassador to the Permanent Council of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), became the first high-level Turkish official to claim that Reyhanli was actually an al-Qaeda attack. Ildem’s statement only came after Turkey shot down a Syrian fighter jet on March 23, claiming it violated Turkish airspace. This was just a day before Armenians marked the anniversary of their fallen ancestors in 1915.

Ildem could have been acting on his own personal initiative to save Turkey’s image from a fierce Armenian attack, which held Turkey responsible for atrocities committed in Syria at the hands of radical Islamists. On March 25, the Armenian Bar Association complained to US President Barack Obama in a letter that Turkey’s shooting down of the Syrian jet only helped the radicals take over the majority Armenian city of Kassab in Syria, close to the Turkish border. Although Turkey has been under the spotlight since the early stages of the uprising in Syria for its alleged support of these radical groups, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has constantly fired back, questioning whether those raising such criticisms are vying for the survival of the Assad regime.

The Council of Ministers stated that its decision to brand Jabhat al-Nusra a terrorist organization is based on UN decisions. This same Erdogan government, however, never adopted US or UN decisions regarding Yasin al-Qadi, the Saudi businessman who was listed in 2001 as a “specially designated global terrorist” for his role as al-Qaeda’s financier. At the time, Erdogan said he knew al-Qadi personally. He would later repeat this assertion — that al-Qadi is a "family friend" — after the surfacing of several audio recordings in the December graft probe, which publicized a talk between al-Qadi and Erdogan’s son Bilal.