The problem of how Turkey will deal with a new influx of Islamic State (ISIS) fighters attempting to transit the country on their way back to their homelands from Syria and Iraq will be on the top of the regional agenda in coming months, Deutsche Welle reported on Thursday.
Ankara has been negotiating the establishment of a safe sone in northern Syria along the Turkish border with Washington and Moscow, since on Dec. 19 the U.S. President Donald Trump announced his decision to withdraw American troops in the country, saying ISIS had been defeated.
Many experts say that rather than ISIS, Turkey is much more focused on clearing the area off Kurdish militia, which form the backbone of the U.S-led coalition forces fighting against ISIS. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan dismisses such criticisms and says Turkey is fighting both the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), an extension of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) according to Ankara, and ISIS.
Since the beginning of the conflict in Syria eight years ago, Ankara has been repeatedly criticised for permitting jihadi fighters to transit the country relatively freely en route to Syria, DW said.
According to Metin Gürcan, a security researcher at the Istanbul Policy Center (IPC), after the defeat of ISIS, the jihadi group’s fighters would likely to use Turkey to leave Syria.
Getting across the country will become extremely expensive for them,” DW quoted Gürcan as saying. “Ankara needs to make sure that as few fighters as possible settle in Turkey.”
Turkish authorities have stepped up their operations in the country against ISIS in recent months. Earlier this month, the Turkish police detained 52 Syrians over suspected links to ISIS in the northwestern province of Bursa.
Between 2015 and early 2017, Turkey witnessed a series of ISIS bombings and attacks, starting with an explosion in the southeastern province of Diyarbakır during an election rally for the predominantly-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) in June 2015. In July, the same year, another blast killed 33 young people in the southeastern town of Suruç who were planning to deliver humanitarian aid to Kurdish-controlled zones in Syria.
ISIS also claimed responsibility for an attack on a nightclub during the New Year celebrations in 2017, which killed 39 people.
The future of the women married to ISIS fighters in Syria has also been discussed widely over the past week, after Britain stripped a teenager who travelled to join the jihadi group of her citizenship on security grounds. Shamima Begum , passed Turkey and joined ISIS in Syria in 2015, when she was 15. The teenager was found in a Syrian refugee camp last week.