Today Turkey is playing a pivotal role in the escalation of violence in the Middle East along with a number of other regions, namely Europe. To understand the origins of this evil one has to take a closer look at the policies Ankara has been employing.
What could possibly go wrong in a secular and democratic nation that was built by Ataturk to replace an Islamist sultanate? How could it have slipped so fast back to the state of a fanatical and obsessive Islamized state that is practically living in accordance with the Sharia law? But the trend is not stopping here, since the sitting Turkish authorities have been pretty active in supporting ISIL by buying stolen oil from this inhuman terrorist group, along with providing it with weapons and reinforcements. And now Turkey has gone as far as providing close fire support to those militants that are fighting Syrian Kurds.
It’s all started back in 2002 when Recep Tayyip Erdogan came to power after the victory the Justice and Development Party (AKP) enjoyed at the parliamentary elections in Turkey. He has virtually become the first Islamist prime minister of Turkey. We must not forget that this party was founded on the Islamist movement “New Look” and the banned Islamist Virtue Party, while Erdogan has always been calling for Turkey’s deviation from the principles of a secular state and his pan-Islamist beliefs brought him to prison.
In this regard it should be reminded that back in 1999 Erdogan cited the words of a Turkish poet: “Mosques are our barracks, minarets our bayonets, domes our helmets, the believers our soldiers.” That’s how Erdogan envisioned the conquest of Europe and the creation of the so-called Neo-Osman Empire.
To achieve this goal Erdogan has decided to go all in with an idea of Pan-Turkism with a distant Islamist flavour. While being unable to provide an answer to countless social problems of the country he has been searching for internal and external enemies to push the blame on, while investing considerable resources in various propaganda campaigns.
This statement can be illustrated by a stream of publications that has been appearing in the Turkish media in recent years that criticized the European Union “for the continuous prolonging of negotiations on the accession of Turkey to the EU ever since 2005.” And the longer negotiations were stalled, the more bitter Ankara’s criticism was getting. But then Ankara came up with an argument Europe, it seems, cannot resists – the flow of refugees to Europe. Now the EU is forces to pay large sums and provide preferences to Turkey in vain hopes to at least get this flow reduced. According to the German Die Welt, Turkish authorities’ came as far as demanding the European Union to double the amount of financial assistance allocated to fight illegal migration, increasing it to the staggering 5 billion euros.
According to Erdogan’s ideas, those poor souls that have reached Europe will out of the “gratitude for the assistance” that Turkey provided form a Neo-Osman lobby that will help him extend the boundaries of his “empire.”
A similar position is being exploited by Ankara while dealing with Crimean Tatars. Thus, Ukraine’s and Turkish Foreign Ministers have reached an agreement at a meeting in Istanbul that the Crimean Tatars that are dwelling in Turkey are to be provided with Ukrainian passports, which, according to Anakra, will allow it to form “a large Tatar ethnic group living in exile.” It is believed that this group is going to be governed by the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar People. Both Kiev and Ankara are trying to use Crimean Tatars to meddle with the situation in Crimea. Ankara hopes that once it has established full control over the MCTP it will start lobbying Turkey’s interests in Russia.
According to preliminary estimates of the Turkish Ministry of the Interior, a total of 500 thousand local Tatars will agreed to obtain Ukrainian citizenship, while their legal status shall be governed by a special bilateral agreement between Ankara and Kiev that is to be signed in the nearest future.
A large-scale propaganda campaign aimed at discrediting Russia’s policies has been used in Turkey to create an image of a vicious enemy that is to be opposed at no matter what cost. This envy is supposed to allow Erdogan to rally various social groups under the banner of the fight against a common enemy, or at least that’s what Turkey’s President believes in.
By creating such a distorted image of both Russia and the EU the sitting government in Ankara is trying to secure the positions of the Justice and Development Party, opening the way to the presidential reform that Tayyip Erdogan is craving for. It’s possible that new parliamentary elections will be held in September-October to facilitate this goal. There’s little doubt that opposition forces are going to be used as a pretext, since they have allegedly blocked the work of the constitutional commission entrusted with a mission to draft a new Basic Law of the country. Ankara has already declared that it cannot rule out the possibility that it will reduce the duration of curfew introduced in the south-eastern regions of Turkey to ensure that some elections are conducted, along with withdrawing military troops that have been so far waging a veritable war on the Kurdish population of the country. However, certain “problematic” areas, such as Cizre, are going to “enjoy” the state of war for months to come.
In the meantime, Erdogan and his regime will continue his “secret” collaboration with ISIS, along with blackmailing the EU and escalating the tension on the border with Syria in an effort to put together a coalition that would embark on the military adventure in this war-torn country. However, neither NATO nor the United States is supporting Turkey’s, and Saudi Arabia doesn’t seem to be willing to risk it all as well.
In this situation an “unexpected” near the Syrian-Turkish carried out by ISIS could have become an ideal solution for Turkey, providing it with a “legal” pretext for the invasion of Syrian territory. But ISIS has no resources to carry out such an attack since it’s got stuck fighting in Syria and has practically been surrounded near As Sin. Under these conditions, only hosted Turkish secret services could proivde Ankara with a pretext that it needs so desperately. Erdogan’s to create such pretexts and manipulate the public opinion in accordance with his plans is well known and documented. So, it would be a safe assumption that the violent terrorist attack in Ankara that was carried out on February 17 has been organized by Turkey’s intelligence agencies.
Meanwhile, a list of crimes that Turkish are committing daily keeps growing. All this brings the moment when Turkish people along with the international community recognize the sinister face of the sitting authorities in Ankara closer, making an international tribunal that will judge them for their crimes virtually inevitable.