Turkey’s Double Game in Syria
Christopher de Bellaigue
▻http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/oct/14/turkey-double-game-syria
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One might wonder why the Turkish government would risk endangering a peace process with the PKK that has greatly contributed to Turkish stability, improved human rights and the rule of law, and facilitated economic development. The Turks may be calculating that the PKK cannot easily abandon a process that has brought its members new political power in some Kurdish areas and allowed Kurdish nationalist MP back into the national parliament. They also seem to believe that the Kurds are due a sharp reality check as to the impossibility of replicating Syria-style autonomy in Turkey. The ISIS advance on Kobani could serve that purpose, while the contraction of the Kurdish fief pushes the nationalists onto the tender mercies of the Turkish state—as Kobani has demonstrated. Weakened by the defeats suffered by its affiliate in Syria, the PKK may be less able to resist political demands made by the Turkish government if serious negotiations are renewed toward a final settlement.
For the United States, these calculations suggest that getting meaningful Turkish cooperation on ISIS may require a renewed US commitment toward toppling Assad. Responding to pressure from Washington, the Turkish government has agreed to join the US in training “moderate” Syrian fighters on Turkish soil. But the Turks have not approved America’s request to use their base at Incirlik in southern Turkey for US attacks on ISIS. That will only happen, the Turkish prime minister, Ahmet Davutoğlu, has insisted, if the US removes its longstanding opposition to Turkish demands for a no-fly zone over northern Syria and for the establishment of secure humanitarian corridors for displaced Syrians close to the border.
As Turkey and the United States negotiate the minutiae of a war they are fighting for different reasons, the wider fate of the Kurds is finely poised. The vile situation in Kobani has become a case study in the ways that civil wars suck in neighbors and break down alliances as the innocent are put to the sword. It is also a powerful refutation of the trite adage that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. In this conflict there are no friends.