In the small hours of 29th October, a small convoy of military vehicles crossed via the Habur checkpoint from the Kurdish region of northern Iraq into Turkey. The convoy contained 150 Peshmerga, Iraqi Kurdish fighters, on their way to reinforce the defenders of Kobane, a small town on the Syrian-Turkish border under siege from the jihadis of Islamic State (IS). For the second time in six weeks, Turkey was bowing to international pressures.
The previously little-known town of Kobane (officially Ayn al-Arab), with just under 45,000 inhabitants in 2004, leapt into the headlines in mid-September when IS fighters began closing in on it, the latest stage in a 15-month long operation to grab Syrian territory along Turkey’s southern border. A few weeks earlier, the neighbouring crossing point of Tel Abyad, 68km east of Kobane, had fallen to IS. Ankara watched this development without discernible alarm. It is possible that Turkish leaders preferred IS as neighbours than the Syrian Kurdish PYD (Democratic Union Party). In any case, for more than a year pleas for help from Kurds under attack from IS received no response.
Ankara’s initial silence over the threat from IS in Syria has left Kurds with the lasting impression that it is on the jihadis’ side against them. Its slowness to act against IS has also raised questions in Washington and European capitals about how much solidarity can be expected from Turkey and on what terms. A member of Nato for over six decades and apparently set on obtaining membership of the European Union, Turkey has long been a pillar of western security policy. However, its behaviour in response to the threat from IS and its increasingly autocratic style of government are prompting fears in other capitals that the answer to the question “Whose side is Turkey on?” may not be the one the west wants to hear. The question is, of course, tied up with that of where the Islamist government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoan, elected as head of state last August after ruling the country as Prime Minister for nearly 12 years, plans to take the country. These anxieties are exacerbated by the suspicion that the Turkish President’s real priority is not defeating IS but overthrowing Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Damascus.
As the armies of IS closed in on Kobane, these nagging questions turned into urgent policy dilemmas. With well-armed jihadi fighters nearing the town, panic erupted among civilians on the Syrian side of the border, triggering a mass exodus from villages and settlements around it and Tel Abyad. Turkey had already accepted about 1.5m mostly Arab refugees from Syria’s civil war. The initial reaction of local Turkish officials was to try and staunch this latest flood, but on 19th September, the Prime Minister, Ahmet Davutolu, ordered that they be allowed in. In just over a week, 160,000 refugees from Kobane poured into Turkey. By that time the town itself was left with only its defenders from the armed wing of the PYD, and a few thousand civilians. A few days later, on the night of the 26th and 27th September, IS’s fighters began to enter the outskirts.
Kobane looks difficult to seize. Like other cities in northern Syria and Iraq, it is a labyrinthine mass of shoddy concrete apartment blocks, each several storeys high and providing perfect boltholes for snipers. This is a nightmare for any occupying force, as the Americans discovered in Iraq in 2003. But Kobane is even less easy to defend, lying below hills to its east and south from which it can easily be bombarded once the heights are occupied. Concrete buildings apart, the town has few obvious defences for a long siege. It is hemmed in to its immediate north by the Turkish frontier, the Müritpnar checkpoint into Turkey being its only access point.
Three high, wall-like barrier gates seal off the crossing. During the last few weeks these have usually been shut, except when civilian refugees are allowed to move northwards into Turkey. The obvious dream of the defenders, and the millions of fellow Kurds supporting them in Turkey, was to allow supplies and reinforcements to be allowed to travel south. Otherwise it looked as if the fall of the town to IS was a foregone conclusion, even if the street fighting would be messy.
As the IS bombardment began, Turkish troops watched impassively on their side of the border from low hills a few hundred metres away—and the world’s press watched them. Turkey’s inaction has led to invidious comparisons being drawn with the Red Army’s refusal to cross the Vistula and help Poles in the Warsaw uprising against the Nazis in the autumn of 1944. From Turkey’s point of view, it was barred from incursions into Syria by international law. It was in any case, its spokesmen pointed out, already sheltering most of the non-combatant population of Kobane.
In Turkish eyes, the town’s defenders were doubly compromised, first by their links with the PKK, the Kurdish terrorist organisation which has been fighting the Turkish government since 1984, fomenting a conflict which has claimed at least 40,000 lives. Second, Turkey claims the PYD had links with the government of President Assad in Syria. Some refugees coming out of Kobane foolishly exacerbated this hostile perception, flaunting PKK colours and emblems to the disgust of Turkish onlookers and television viewers. Some of the defenders of Kobane are indeed PKK militants who moved into northern Syria as part of a ceasefire agreement signed between the PKK and the government in the spring of 2013. Others are recent volunteers from Turkey who came to help defend the town—in their own eyes, they are freedom fighters for Kurdistan, but to Turkish officials they are guilty of disloyalty.
The strong sympathy among Turkey’s Kurds for the Kobane defenders is countered by memories among non-Kurds of the thousands of conscript soldiers who died in three decades of bitter warfare with the PKK guerillas fighting for autonomy in southeastern Turkey. “Islamic State are the ones on our side, aren’t they?” a driver in Anatolia, a pious Turkish Sunni though anything but an extremist, asked me in genuine puzzlement as the siege began. Images of IS’s beheadings and atrocities had somehow not got through to him, but he knew all about the PKK from his own days as a conscript soldier.
Ankara’s rigidity over Kobane has deeper roots, however, reflecting a failure to recognise three key facts early on. The first was the impact of huge international media interest in the siege. Attempts to discourage or even harass foreign journalists, with incidents such as the tear-gassing of a BBC film crew on 5th October across the border from Kobane, simply increased international sympathy for the defenders and indignation at apparent Turkish willingness to stand by and watch as they perished.
A second reality, which Turkish officials should have known about from their own contacts, was that Turkey stood to be badly embarrassed if the United States-led alliance came to the aid of the defenders. Kobane is not a major strategic position, but the allies turned out to be prepared to make hundreds of air strikes to save it. The strikes, and perhaps some assistance from Free Syrian Army units, helped stave off defeat.
The first air strikes took place on 27th September, while IS mujahideen were entering the town. They perhaps had little direct impact on street fighting in the town itself, but inflicted significant damge on IS positions on higher ground, while an air-drop on 19th October got supplies of heavy weapons and fresh ammunition to the defenders just when their stocks were running low. By then it was clear that even if Turkey was not in communication with the PYD leaders in Kobane because it regarded them as terrorists, the US was.
The third, and perhaps most fundamental, flaw is that instead of discussing the threat from IS, Turkish foreign policy focuses on finishing off the Assad regime, pressing for direct western military assistance. This gives the impression that Turkey either does not understand or, worse still, does not care about the danger posed by IS.
Immediately after the first airdrop, Erdoan, described by the media as “furious” with the Americans, declared that: “For us, the PYD is equal to the PKK; it is a terrorist organisation.” Given the balance of international opinion on the Kobane siege, this was not a sustainable position. Just three days later, it was announced that Turkey would be allowing Peshmerga and perhaps Free Syrian Army troops to cross over into Kobane. The idea for this had come from Erdoan in a conversation with US President Barack Obama, Turkish new reports said, apparently trying to play down the possibility of a U-turn.
Permitting foreign fighters to pass through Turkey breaches a very strong Turkish taboo. With the exception of personnel from Turkey’s Nato allies, who always keep a low profile, it is more or less unheard of for foreign troops to be allowed on Turkish soil, least of all Iraqi Kurdish irregulars on their way to assist a Syrian Kurdish force containing PKK fighters.
Turkey is now faced with a problem which will not go away and threatens to drive a wedge between it and the rest of the world, while also exposing misjudgements by its own policymakers. “We don’t want IS or the PKK or Assad on our border,” Davutolu, the former Foreign Minister who became Prime Minister in August, told a BBC reporter on 28th October. But, largely as a result of Turkey’s recent policies, that scenario is precisely what his countrymen now have to contend with.
Its top priority—regime change in Syria—is, at first sight, much the least important. But it is the cornerstone of Turkey’s foreign policy and has been immensely costly in terms of both finance and regional stability. Abandoning it would be the end of a cherished dream for Turkey’s rulers, implying humiliation at home and abroad.
The root cause, then, of the tangle Turkey faces in Iraq and Syria is the transformation of its foreign policy over the last 12 years as it began to pursue an Islamic regional leadership role in the Middle East. Until 2002, when the AKP (Justice and Development Party) came to power, Turkey viewed its relations with the Arab world mainly in terms of trade and energy supplies. It is often said that before the AKP, Turkey took no interest in the Arab world. This is not true. But until 2002, EU accession was the centrepiece of Turkish foreign policy, a dream which today seems to have all but evaporated.
The Middle East used to take second place. Before the AKP gained power, Turkey did not try to be a major player there and stayed out of regional disputes. The theory behind this was that increased prosperity through economic cooperation was the most likely route to peace and stability in a troubled region.
After 2002, and particularly since around 2007, Turkey set about turning itself into an Islamic regional power. To some extent, this shift was encouraged by a cluster of American Middle East specialists in Washington, would-be midwives to change who wrote enthusiastically of a new, democratic Islam that brought with it the possibility of an Islamic Turkey as a bridge linking America and the Arab world. Their views read a little embarrassingly today.
Nevertheless, a decade or so ago Turkey certainly looked well placed to achieve regional leadership. It is the Middle East’s only industrial country with a large and relatively wealthy population of 76m, a multi-party political system and closer links with the international mainstream than most Middle Eastern countries. Through satellite television and the media, it had a certain gravitational pull on mass culture in the area. The main snag, which became more obvious with time, is that the Middle East contains many varieties of Islam, while the AKP is wedded to a particular form of Sunni Islam and thus to a single set of players in the politics of the region.
The AKP’s slogan, “Zero Problems with Neighbours,” is actually a fair description of the state of Turkey’s relations with the Arab world before its new Middle East foreign policy began to operate. Despite an undercurrent of rivalry with Egypt for regional leadership, Turkey had no significant disputes with any country in the Arab world. Once in power, the AKP quickly forged stronger economic ties with the Gulf states, encouraging Arab investors to take major stakes in its privatised infrastructure. Even dealings with Syria, which had long been tense because of Syrian sheltering of Turkish left-wing and Kurdish terrorists, were now good. In 1999, Assad had given into pressure from Turkey and expelled Abdullah Öcalan, the PKK’s leader—a move which led to his capture and imprisonment in the Turkish island prison in the Sea of Marmara, featured in the film Midnight Express.
Turkey’s relations with Syria blossomed for a decade, and Assad and his wife were feted by press and politicians. In the spring of 2009, the Turks and the Syrians even held joint military exercises and, in May of that year, Erdoan made a high-profile visit to Syria. It looked as if Turkey was pursuing its longstanding policy of acting as an honest broker in Middle East disputes. But its policies were about to take a radical turn. A newly appointed Foreign Minister accompanied Erdoan to Damascus: Davutolu, who has since become Prime Minister.
Davutolu first made a name for himself in 2001 when, as a university teacher, he published a book entitled Strategic Depth. This was a blueprint for Turkey to become a global power by leading an Islamic revival in the Middle East. It portrayed the existing regimes in the region as dependent on western support and lacking popular legitimacy, and envisaged their replacement by Islamist governments backed by a democratic but Islamist Turkey. The only way to create permanent bonds between peoples and nations, Davutolu argued, was Sunni Islam—a shared religious world view based on the absolute certainties of divine revelation.
Davutolu next attracted attention in 2006, when he attempted, unsuccessfully, to have Hamas involved in the Arab-Israeli dialogue after it won elections in Gaza. His influence on Erdoan, to whom he was an advisor, grew steadily, culminating in his 2009 appointment as Foreign Minister, even though he did not have a seat in the National Assembly. He proved a capable and energetic minister, travelling ceaselessly; and his policies, though bearing an unmistakable Islamic tinge, were conventional enough.
In December 2010, the Middle East changed dramatically with the beginning of the Arab Spring. As Arab dictators fell and popular movements rose, in which the Muslim Brotherhood strove to play a prominent role, the hour for Davutolu’s ideas had come at last. Despite this, Turkish foreign policymakers were initially caught off balance and for the first half of 2011 seemed not to know how to react. In the second half of the year, however, with Syrian internal resistance to Assad growing into open warfare, Erdoan and Davutolu severed their links with him. During 2012, Turkey began working for regime change in Syria. Along with the US, France and UK, it gravely underestimated Assad’s strengths—especially the military backing he enjoyed from Russia and Iran, which gave him control of the skies, and his support among Syrian Shias and Christians, as well as some Sunnis.
The biggest flaw in the plan to oust Assad was that the original opposition in Syria, the Free Syrian Army (FSA), was hopelessly inadequate despite the help it received from outside Syria, including covert assistance from the US and UK. By early 2013, the FSA had still not captured a single Syrian province, much to the irritation of their international sponsors. Capturing a province was a necessary legal preliminary to the creation of a recognised alternative Syrian government, which would then open the way to the imposition of a no-fly zone over the country. Instead, the civil war proved a fertile breeding ground for a succession of ever-more extreme Sunni movements that looked to al-Qaeda for inspiration. They were natural partners for similar Sunni movements across the border in Iraq, who were also resisting an oppressive Shia government—that of Nouri al-Maliki. Ankara, too, was sympathetic to Maliki’s Sunni opponents.
One of these Iraqi groups, which would become IS, an affiliate of al-Qaeda led by Abu Bakr al Baghdadi (now better known as the self-proclaimed Caliph Ibrahim), spread into eastern Syria. By the summer of 2013 it was in control of the provincial capital, Raqqa, and absorbed part, though not all, of the Syrian jihadi movement, causing a rupture with al-Qaeda. Unlike the moderate rebels, IS had captured a provincial capital and claimed to be a state, albeit one in the mould of the 7th century caliphate.
Turkey’s initial reaction to the rise of IS seems to have been that any enemy of its enemy, Assad, was its friend. Eager for victory amid a surge of pan-Sunni sentiment, at first Ankara ignored the degree to which the radicals of IS are different from most Turkish Muslims. Sunni Islam in Turkey draws its roots not from the uncompromising and austere Salafi or Wahabbi traditions of the Arabian peninsula, from which IS springs, but from Naqshbandism, a conservative Sufi brotherhood which originated in medieval central Asia. It stresses absolute compliance with sharia law, but also relies heavily on spiritual guides or eyhs, and on dhikr, Koranic incantations that are said to bring mystical understanding. Naqshbandism is a secretive movement, but its importance in the politics of early 21st-century Turkey is enormous. Erdoan, like his predecessor as President, Necmettin Erbakan, is a member. It is widely believed that many of his ministers are too.
With no Salafi background, Turkey’s Islamist rulers did not condone al-Qaeda any more than their secularist predecessors would have done. But they did not expect it to turn on them and so ignored fringe Islamic militant groups, apparently assuming that (unlike the political left) all Muslim movements were benign. Even today, Turkish police do not break up street demonstrations in support of IS, while left-wing protests are swiftly quelled with tear gas.
In November 2003, the authorities paid for this complacency when militant groups which turned out to be offshoots of al-Qaeda carried out a series of terrorist attacks in Istanbul, in which the British Consul-General and 62 others died. Erdoan fiercely denounced the attacks and, in the years since, there have been many arrests of al-Qaeda suspects across Turkey.
Radical jihadis inside Syria, though, were a different matter. As Turkey became a conduit for men and arms going to the rebels, it became impossible to distinguish exactly who was who or how radical. Wounded IS members were treated in Turkish hospitals. Substantial material assistance was channelled to the Syrian rebels and in some cases probably went ultimately to IS. On 8th November last year, for instance, trucks carrying 1,200 rocket heads, bazookas and guns were seized near the Syrian border. On 19th January this year, more trucks, controlled by the Turkish intelligence service, were intercepted by border guards who tried to search them and were later punished for being overzealous. The trucks’ final destination has never been made clear.
This spring Turkey did begin active cooperation with its western allies in efforts to intercept jihadis from Europe on their way to fight in Syria. But the impression of complacency about IS persists. Davutolu has said several times that those who claim that Turkey backs IS are “traitors,” and in early February he announced that Turkey had struck at an IS convoy. However, as recently as August, he described IS as a “reaction” to the sufferings of Sunni Muslims. There are few signs yet of alarm about the unexpected appearance of pro-IS sentiment inside Turkey or about the number of young Turks who are going to fight for it.
It may be that Turkey is doing more than it says and that, for security reasons, moves against IS go unreported. Turkey seems to have secured the release of 49 hostages seized from its consulate-general in Mosul by swapping them with IS prisoners. Their very existence was previously completely unknown.
However, the diplomatic confusion and U-turns over Kobane are symptoms of a policy that has gone awry. For a decade, Turkey’s rulers have pursued a double dream: re-Islamisation of secular society at home and emergence as a Muslim power in the Middle East and beyond. Turkey’s dilemma in doing this is that it is not large or strong enough to achieve its goals in Syria without greater western, specifically American, assistance. But it is loath to serve US—that is, non-Muslim—ends in return. It knows its strategic position makes it precious to its western allies. The result is that it is now caught in a Middle Eastern vortex largely of its making and which is likely to cost it ever more dearly.
