Is Turkey about to send troops into Syria?

On Monday, Turkey’s National Security Council (NSC) - comprising of government ministers, top generals, and security chiefs - met in a secret session at the glittering new presidential palace. As everyone in Turkey was well aware, there was an extraordinary item on the agenda which had been announced by Mevlut Cavusoglu, Turkey’s foreign minister, the day before: whether or not to intervene directly in the conflict in Syria.  

The timing might seem strange: Turkey has had an inconclusive general election and no new government is yet in sight. But action in Syria would not require a vote in parliament. The ruling AKP government gave itself 12 months' war powers in a vote in the National Assembly in October.    

There was no doubt then that the target was pro-Assad Syrian forces. Now Turkey’s sights face elsewhere. Cavusoglu’s remarks suggested that the intervention would be aimed at IS. The press concluded that he was suggesting a possible 10-km safe zone over a 90-km IS-ruled section of the border west from Jarabulus and the Euphrates. 

But is IS the only or even the main potential target?

Turkey says it regards both IS and the main political Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) as equally dangerous. Indeed some Turkish papers regularly claim that IS, the PYD, and the USA are all in league together, despite the apparent unlikeliness of this idea. But the disposition to take action over IS is growing inside Turkey.

Until this spring, Turkey followed a fairly muted line on the threat from IS. However this is changing. President Erdogan has been outspoken for several months in his condemnations. This week a Turkish court arrested two people for membership of IS and the pro-government Yeni Safak reported the arrests of infiltrators.

This followed the discovery of a tunnel apparently intended as a secret crossing into Turkey from border town Tal Abyad and news on Monday that IS forces are digging trenches close to the Turkish border. IS however is not the only possible target.

Many signs point to a more immediate Turkish government concern with the Syrian Kurds. President Erdogan’s remarks that Turkey would never permit the formation of a new state to its south are taken to refer to the Kurds, not IS.

Since then Abdullah Selvi, a journalist close to the government, has claimed in Yeni Safak newspaper that Turkey will indeed enter Syria but to set up a buffer zone of not 90 km, but of 110 km, implying a takeover of some YPG areas, probably in Afrin to the west, as well as IS -held areas.

The rationale is that this would protect the local population from both IS and the YPG. This is where the political message abruptly shifts away from IS to portraying the Kurds as cruel violators of human rights who need to be stopped. The pro-AKP press accuses the PYD, probably unfairly, of substantial ethnic cleansing of Arabs and Turkmens in northern Syria including the massacre of doctors and nurse at Kobane.

This suggestion however did not originate in Ankara, but in a report by the London Times on 1 June and in a more cautious form by McClatchy newsagency on 13 June. McClatchy pointed out that if substantiated, charges of ethnic cleansing against the YPG would be highly embarrassing for the US Government, its de facto ally. The communiqué issued on Monday after the NSC meeting in Ankara highlights fears over ethnic cleansing.

Whether they can be substantiated or not – and some well-informed observers close to the Syrian frontier think they are basically unjust - the allegations of ethnic cleansing by the YPG add enormously to the tensions in a region already in turmoil as local populations flee from violence.

Turkey upstaged by Kurds

One reason for Ankara’s increased hostility towards the Syrian Kurds could be that Turkey feels itself upstaged internationally by the YPG fighters in the battle against IS. After the recapture of Tal Abyad there was even talk of a joint Burkan al-Fitrat and YPG assault against al-Raqqa, IS’s main stronghold. But fears that a second de facto Kurdish state is about to come into existence in the Middle East and its impact on Turkey’s Kurds is probably the main worry.

For the two years until the June elections, Ankara spun out inconclusive peace talks with the Kurds, making only token offers in return for a ceasefire. This rigidity has now been overtaken by events and the climate of dialogue existing just a few months back has vanished. Inside Turkey, the pro-Kurdish HDP won 80 seats in parliament in the June elections and 13 percent of the vote, dealing a body blow to the AKP’s hegemony at least for the time being.

Since the elections, the mood of confrontation with the Kurds has grown steadily and compromise with the Syrian Kurdish leadership has been ruled out. President Erdogan now refers to the PKK, with whom he has been engaged in a peace process dialogue for two years, as “the terrorist organisation”.

So does a conflict loom? Not necessarily. Some observers believe that Erdogan does not actually intend to intervene in Syria. All that is happening is that the Kurds are being warned not to go too far, specifically, not to try and push the area they control westwards. A strike against the YPG would invite retaliation in Turkey. Murat Karayılan, a PKK commander, has warned that an attack on Kurdish northern Syria would unleash fighting in Turkey.

Moreover Turkey’s soldiers have signalled fairly publicly that they are most uneasy about cross-border operations. “Turkish soldiers may be able to go into Syria but will they be able to come out of it?” asked retired army chief of staff Ilker Basbug.

On the other hand the US, far from showing disapproval of moves that might complicate the fight against IS, has reacted mildly to the signals from Ankara. At the daily State Department press conference on Monday, spokesperson Mark Toner, gave a studiedly vague response to questions about Turkish intervention in Syria, referring simply to “remarkable security challenges which everyone in the region is facing”.  

He suggested a little puzzlingly that claims Turkey is planning a buffer zone come only from the media. Toner’s words will be welcomed in Ankara but may cause severe disquiet among the Kurds. They may perhaps indicate that Washington thinks Ankara is only sabre-rattling. But even sabre-rattling sometimes has serious consequences.

- David Barchard has worked in Turkey as a journalist, consultant, and university teacher. He writes regularly on Turkish society, politics, and history, and is currently finishing a book on the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

Photo: Turkish soldiers look onto Kobane on the Syrian side of the border (AFP)