Turkey’s Syria Problem in 5 Maps
▻http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-10-10/turkey-s-syria-problem-in-5-maps?alcmpid=view
I have a lot of sympathy for Erdogan’s predicament. The advance of Islamic State forces him to choose between two unpalatable options. The first is to join the U.S. campaign, which would carry huge downside risks. Part of his political base is sympathetic to Islamic State, which it considers a Sunni response to Shiite oppression. Worse, the organization now has enough adherents in Turkey to make the country highly vulnerable to terrorist attacks, should the Turkish military get involved.
Turkish nationalists would simultaneously attack him for collaborating with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party. Indeed, he would be making a big bet on the PKK, which fought a war in which at least 30,000 Turkish citizens were killed before a cease-fire last year. The Kurdish group is getting a new lease of life from the turmoil in Syria, and Turks still fear the PKK wants to carve out a Kurdish state, though it claims to want only autonomy.
To understand the conflict, and have a sense of where it might go next, it helps to know the following:
–- Rojava, which means western in Kurdish (the PKK divides Kurdistan into North, South, West and East), is a de facto autonomous region carved out during Syria’s civil war where a majority of Syria’s roughly 2 million Kurds live:
The headlines to the effect of “Turkey won’t send troops to aid Kobani” answer a question that isn’t being asked. The Kurds don’t want the Turkish military to intervene on the ground, and nor does the U.S. Only Turkey wants to send in troops — to create a “buffer zone” that it, and not Kurdish militants, would control. The Kurds just want Turkey to allow Kurdish fighters to be allowed to move from one part of Rojava to the other with arms and reinforcements.
–- Kurds are convinced Turkey is arming and aiding Islamic State to destroy or occupy Rojava. The first accusation probably isn’t true, but the second is accurate in the sense that sealing the border is all the help the Islamic State needs to achieve its goal.
–- The fall of Kobani won’t end the crisis. There are two much larger parts of Rojava remaining. The first, Cizre, contains some of Syria’s most productive oil fields. These are much smaller than those in Iraq, but would be important to Islamic State. The vast majority of Iraq’s oil is on territory populated by Kurds and Shiites, and the Sunni areas held by Islamic State are mostly devoid of energy resources. A Caliphate without oil revenue probably wouldn’t be glorious for long:
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