Sunday, September 14, 2014

And you want Turkey to help?


NATO member Turkey surprised and upset people this week when it refused to sign on to efforts to stop ISIL. The problem is that Turkey has real issues that a great lumbering US led military effort would only aggravate.
Turkey has sent mixed signals about its willingness to take a more public position alongside the Americans. While Ankara did label the Nusra Front a terrorist organization in June, Turkish opposition figures claim that the government still isn’t doing enough to stop jihadists from using Turkey as their way station to Syria.

Turkey raised more eyebrows this week at a regional summit in Saudi Arabia, where Turkish officials declined to sign onto a communique expressing support for the campaign against the Islamic State.

But there are other complicating factors that prevent Turkey from taking too prominent a role, not least the fact that the Islamic State is holding dozens of Turkish hostages. In June, the jihadists stormed the Turkish consulate in Mosul, Iraq, and seized 49 personnel, including the consul general. Ankara appears to be taking pains to mute its public criticism of the Islamic State for now, presumably so as not to shut the door on the hostage recovery effort.

“Turkey is a European and regional power but does not yet seem fully committed to dealing with the Islamic State,” Anthony Cordesman, a former defense official who’s now with the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote in a commentary this week.

“It fears any form of Kurdish separatism, has hostage issues, has major problems in securing its southern border, and does not want more of a Syrian or Iraqi crisis on its southern borders,” Cordesman wrote. “At least some elements in Turkey also seem to benefit from trade with the Islamic State and others are happy to support the Iraqi Kurds in their separatist efforts.”
Turkey has been an established nation for many years now, but it still has deep rooted problems that have moved nearer the surface as the power of the military has receded. It is more fragile than it would care to admit and is walking carefully at the edge of the mess in Syria and Iraq.

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