The tension along the Turkey-Syria border continues to grow. Turkish forces today again sent artillery fire into Syria, after a Syrian shell landed just inside the Turkish border. This comes two days after Turkey fired shells into Syria after a Syrian mortar landed in the Turkish border town of Akcakale, killing five people, among them three children.
The Turkish response has been swift. Along with responding with its own artillery, Ankara has beefed up its forces along the Syrian border, while the parliament approved yesterday a motion that allows the government to send troops into "foreign countries" if deemed necessary. The motion is valid for one year.
Along with the escalation in military activity along the border, there has also been an escalation in rhetoric. Although Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Thursday that Turkey is "not interested" in starting a war, a speech he gave today was more strident. Reports Reuters:
Striking a belligerent tone in a speech to a crowd in Istanbul, Erdogan said: "We are not interested in war, but we're not far from it either. This nation has come to where it is today having gone through intercontinental wars.
After months and months of simmering tensions, Turkey and Syria have now stepped closer towards open military confrontation. Soon after mortar rounds fired from inside Syria today landed in a Turkish border town, killing five and wounding several others, Turkish forces replied with artillery fire aimed at Syrian military targets. "Turkey, within rules of engagement and international laws, will never leave unanswered the provocations of the Syrian regime targeting Turkey's national security," a statement released by the Turkish Prime Minister's office said.
The cross-border shelling represents the most serious and dangerous escalation yet between Ankara and Damascus, former friends which have been growing increasingly hostile towards each other since the start of the uprising in Syria last year and after Turkey started openly supporting elements of the Syrian opposition. Up until now, though, Turkey has refrained from engaging with Syria militarily, even after a Turkish jet was shot down this past June while flying off the Syrian coast.
Turkey's already strained relations with Iraq continue to worsen, with the two countries now engaged in open disputes over several issues, with little hope for reconciliation in sight.
The main bone of contention between the two neighbors is the fate of fugitive Iraqi Vice President Tareq Al Hashemi. Recently sentenced to death by a Baghdad court on charges that he ran death squads, the Sunni politician is currently living in self-imposed exile in Turkey. After the verdict was announced, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Hashemi is safe in Turkey. "I'll say it very clearly. We will be willing to host Mr. Hashemi as long as he wants, and we will not hand him over," Erdogan said in Ankara the other day.
It didn't take long for the Shiite-led government in Baghdad to respond, announcing Thursday that it has stopped registering new Turkish companies that want to do business in Iraq for, ahem, "regulatory and statistics" purposes. The move is not a minor one, considering that Iraq has become Turkey's second largest export market, with Iraqis buying some $8 billion worth of Turkish goods in 2011, up from $2.8 billion in 2007. (In response, Ankara summoned the Iraqi ambassador to Turkey to explain his government's move.)
Back in February, I wrote an analysis piece for Eurasianet that looked how their differing position regarding the crisis in Syria and political and economic competition in Iraq were helping cool down what had been warming relations between Turkey and Iran. The tension and rivalry between these two regional powerhouses would only sharpen in the coming months, analysts told me at the time, an assessment that is being reinforced by recent events.
For the last week, the Turkish press has carried several front page stories about an alleged Iranian intelligence ring that was captured after collecting information in eastern Turkey's Igdir region. From the Hurriyet Daily News's report about the arrests:
The operation was started in Iğdır after it was revealed that photos of the Iğdır Provincial Gendarmerie Command building were taken by people using a minibus with the license plate “04-D-3759.” Police stopped the vehicle on the outskirts of the city and detained two suspects of Iranian origin. The suspects, Shahram Zargham Kohei and Mohammed Reza Esmaeilpour Ali Malek were determined to have taken photos of strategically important security zones in the region.
During questioning, the suspects revealed that they had demanded information in return for money from a number of important figures from state institutions in Van’s Çaldıran district. It has also been revealed that information was collected about Turkey’s military institutions in Iğdır, the local governor’s office, and a number of firms, daily Radikal has reported.
The Syrian government protested loudly when Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said last August that his government doesn't view what's happening across the border as a foreign problem but rather as a "domestic" one. A year later, Erdogan's words are ringing true, although perhaps not in the way the PM meant them. With the conflict in Syria dragging out and becoming more bloody, the crisis is quickly becoming a domestic issue for Turkey, although not because of what's happening in Syria as much as because of what Syrians are doing inside Turkey.
With the number of Syrian refugees in Turkey approaching 100,000, Ankara has said it is approaching the limit of how many it can accommodate, leaving thousands of Syrian fleeing the violence in their country stranded on the other side of the border. But the Turkish government is now also facing mounting questions about how its dealing with the Syrians already in camps inside the country, particularly those in one called Apaydin, which houses a large number of defected Syrian generals and other high-ranking members of the Syrian army and which has been kept off limits -- not only to journalists but also to Turkish elected officials. A recent delegation of parliamentarians from Turkey's opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) was turned back at the gates of the camp after trying to visit it on Sunday, prompting the party's leader, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, to accuse the government of using the camp to secretly train Syrian opposition forces and to claim that Apaydin is filled with "agents and spies."
The recent kidnapping of a Turkish businessman in Lebanon by a powerful Shiite clan retaliating for the abduction of one of its own by members of the opposition Free Syrian Army near Damascus is bad news for Ankara on several fronts. On the most basic level, it demonstrates that holding a Turkish passport no longer an indication that its bearer is somehow removed from or able to hover above the Middle East's current troubles. Quite the opposite -- it now appears that being Turkish makes one a major target. As Today's Zaman reports, the Turkish citizen kidnapped on Wednesday by the Lebanese Meqdad clan appears to have been abducted specifically because of Ankara's support for the FSA, which was responsible for detaining one of the clan's senior members, Hassan al-Meqdad. From TZ's report:
A spokesman for the Meqdad clan has said Turkish nationals were targeted because of Turkey's support for the FSA. The Gulf countries, which also openly support the Syrian opposition, have ordered their nationals to leave after the wave of abductions.
"If Hassan [al-Meqdad] is killed, the first hostage we will kill is the Turk," Maher al-Meqdad told Reuters on Thursday. "Regarding Saudis, Qataris and Gulf nationals, they are not targets for the Meqdad clan," he said, speaking in an area of southern Beirut controlled by Hezbollah, the Iran-backed, Shiite Lebanese party and guerrilla group.
The kidnapping has evoked memories of Lebanon's civil war, reinforcing fears that the Syria conflict could trigger more instability in a much smaller neighbor where Damascus has had a major influence over politics and security for decades.
Two years after the tragic Mavi Marmara incident, in which nine Turks were killed by Israeli commandos who stormed a ship attempting to break Israel's blockade on Gaza, Turkish-Israel relations remain frozen. Ankara maintains that only an Israeli apology, compensation to the families of the victims of the lifting of the Gaza blockade will allow it to restore relations. Israel, on the other hand, is ready to express its "regret" about the incident and pay some compensation, but is most certainly not ready to apologize or to consider changing its Gaza policy in order to appease Turkey.
Still, some recent reports would indicate that, at least on the Israeli side, there is a desire to break out of the impasse (or at least create the impression that such a desire exists). Although it's been clear for some time that Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak and some top military leaders believe apologizing to Turkey would make strategic sense, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has so far balked at doing this. But as veteran Israeli journalist David Horovitz writes in The Times of Israel, the news website he edits, this may be changing. Writes Horovitz:
As US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta arrived in Israel on Tuesday night, the Iranian nuclear drive was, as ever, high on the agenda for his talks with Israeli leaders. So too, unsurprisingly, was the bloodshed in Syria, and concerns over President Bashar Assad’s chemical weapons falling into the hands of Hezbollah, Al-Qaeda, or other terror groups.
Although Turkey late last year indicated its concern about the threat of ballistic missiles by agreeing to host part of NATO's new missile defense shield, Ankara now appears to be moving past this defensive posture towards something more robust.
As Today's Zaman recently reported, officials in Ankara have said that Turkey will soon start developing its own ballistic missiles. From TZ's article:
According to information acquired by Today’s Zaman from sources within the Defense Ministry, Ankara will produce its own ballistic missile system to avert any threat directed against Turkish national security. The decision was taken in a recent meeting of the Defense Industry Executive Committee led by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on July 17....
....Officials underlined that it is an imperative and necessity for Turkey to produce and develop such missiles to maintain its deterrent capability and to feel safe in an insecure environment. The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK) is now developing a missile called an SOM with a range of 300 kilometers. This will be a first step towards developing a ballistic missile with a range of 2,500 kilometers. Unlike other types of missiles, ballistic missiles can fly beyond the Earth’s atmosphere as they don’t burn oxygen, meeting no air resistance. A ballistic missile spends most of its flight in space. After the lunch, the missile arches up from one point and lands at another point. It is difficult to detect a ballistic missile on radar and harder to intercept a ballistic missile than a conventional one.
The continuing violence and bloodshed in Syria may be troubling, but for Ankara, the real worry right now is actually about what's happening in the place where things are quiet, across the border in Syria's Kurdish region, where the Assad regime has now ceded control to local militias as it tries to consolidate its forces in order to protect Aleppo and Damascus from rebel forces.
With a Kurdish autonomous region already well established in northern Iraq, a nascent Kurdish autonomous region now in Syria and with its own Kurds increasingly making autonomy part of their demands, Turkey is now confronting what has long been one of the country's biggest fears: the rise of, as columnist Mehmet Ali Birand recently put it, the "mega Kurdish state."
Ankara's already strained relations with Baghdad have taken yet another turn for the worse thanks to a recent deal signed between the Turkish government and the Kurdistan Regional Government in northern Iraq to export oil and gas from that region to Turkey. Reports the Associated Press:
The agreement envisions the Kurdish region exporting not only oil but natural gas through a web of pipelines through Turkish territory to the international market.
"Exporting oil from the Kurdistan region to Turkey is illegal and illegitimate," Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said in a statement. "The oil and gas are the property of all Iraqis and those exports and revenues must be managed by the federal government which represents all Iraqis," al-Dabbagh added.
He accused Ankara of "participating in the smuggling of Iraqi oil ... and this issue will affect the relations between the two countries, especially the economic ones."
