Using Google, I discovered that Syria’s northern town of Ain Al Arab, or Kobane as the Kurds prefer to call it, is only 600 metres from the nearest Turkish village. This means that a person can walk the distance in six minutes.
But the town is now a battlefield where Kurdish militias backed by a coalition of 40 countries (the coalition now has more than 40 nations, but I preferred using the ‘coalition of 40 countries’) are fighting the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant for several weeks.
An Asian diplomat told me the following story a few years ago:
I was a fresh graduate and posted at my country’s mission in New York. I attended a voting session seated beside an American diplomat. When voting started, diplomats raised their hands. One of them was an African diplomat whose country gets US financial support. The American diplomat was not happy with the African diplomat voting and whispered in my ear that this vote will make his country lose millions of dollars that his country used to get in US aid. The Asian diplomat concluded saying it is since then that he realised politics is heartless.
Last week, all western newspaper headlines talked about Turkey’s hesitation to send ground troops into Syria to fight the ISIS and back the coalition of 40 countries. Turkey had already positioned its tanks along the border and in front of Kobane. The country even said that it would not get involved directly in the fight unless there is a direct threat. The question now is: Why is Turkey doing this?
Last week under a fierce western campaign, US Vice-President Joe Biden accused Turkey of funding extremist movements. He said: “They (he meant Turkey) paid hundreds of millions of dollars and tonnes of weapons to everybody to try to overthrow the regime of Syrian President Bashar Al Assad, and thus Al Nusra Front,
Al Qaeda and other extremists, who came from different parts of the world got financial and military support”. Few days later, however, Biden apologised for making these remarks in a phone call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Turkey has been at the receiving end of a fierce media and diplomatic campaign to force it to participate in the war against ISIS. The problem is that Turkey does not see clear objectives for this campaign or does not see a happy end for it and I think it has the right to think so.
In an interview with CNN, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmed Davutoglu sent direct messages to Western countries about his country’s stance in the fighting in Kobane. The American channel celebrated the interview, sending one of its most prominent anchors, Christiane Amanpour, to conduct it and invited the attention of her fans for it on Twitter.
The Turkish Prime Minister was clear as far as Turkey’s conditions for joining the coalition are concerned. He said his country was ready to be part of this coalition only if there is a clear strategy which should not be limited to fighting ISIS and leave the Assad regime behind. US and its allies have not said anything about the duration and finances involved in the campaign. This is also something that Turkey does not accept.
Davutoglu said his country is ready to deploy troops to fight the militants only if other countries did the same. This will be a bad example to Assad and other similar regimes. “We do not only want to please our electorate, but also want to solve the problem for good,” the Turkish premier said.
It seems the Turkish PM wants to say what’s going on is simply a Western election campaign.
Davutoglu insisted that the so-called ISIS is not the real problem, it is the Assad regime which opened the door for this militant organisation and others to surface. He was apparently referring to the Kurds and PKK, the party which Ankara still considers an “enemy” which hasn’t laid down arms.
The Turkish PM added: “We said earlier that chemical weapons are a red line, but the Assad regime had used these weapons against its own people, but nothing happened, so what?”
There are around 50,000 photos that documented the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime against the Syrian people, but everybody remained silent, he said.
Biden was forced to apologise to the Turkish President. Turkey has become a main player in the region. It knows its borders, its interests and the sensitivity of its population’s ethnic composition. This means that joining such a coalition will make it necessary for it to get guarantees. It is not like some Arab countries that joined even without demanding the downfall of the Assad regime.
Even after these years, the words of the Asian diplomat still ring in my ears: “Politics is a creature without a heart.” I can add that it does not have a mind either.
