The Turkish parliament has now authorized #Erdoğans government to send troops to #Iraq and #Syria apparently to strike at #ISIS/#ISIL/#Daish/#Daesh (which absurdly calls itself #IslamicState/#IS). For that #Turkey has also given the #UnitedStates its consent to use Turkish air bases for the job. hurriyetdailynews/turkish-government-gets-ok-for-military-operations-in-syria-iraq.aspx Of course, Turkeys motives are more complicated. Allegedly it is doing exactly the same thing Pakistan is accused of doing in Afghanistan; covertly back the most powerful terrorist organization in the target country (in Turkeys case, ISIS!) to enable it to take out its more serious enemies: the Kurdish terrorist militias that Turkey is hostile to, especially as they are looking to create their own illegitimate country on snatched Iraqi and Syrian territory (the same thing ISIS has done). Beyond that, the theory goes, Erdoğan is harboring expansionist neo-Ottoman ambitions seeking to undo the post-World War One international settlements that drew the current map of the Middle East. By this, he hopes to regain oil-rich former Ottoman territories in Iraq and Syria that Britain denied Turkey a hundred years ago, and that are conveniently under ISIS control right now. All of this is going to cause severe convulsions in the Middle East since all the Arab countries, Iran, Israel and the Kurdish terrorists will actively resist Turkeys ambitions that it seeks to fulfill under the cover of American and British support against ISIS, and Russia is going to do its best to counter the Anglo-American designs in that region. The Americans will also be repeating the same pattern with Turkey that they did with Pakistan; team up with it to fight a common enemy but then turn on it when the political costs of that mount up, regardless of Turkeys (or Pakistans) compulsions that drove them into this endeavor. For more details see here: blogs.rediff/mkbhadrakumar/2014/10/04/decoding-erdogans-shift-on-is/
Posted on: Wed, 15 Oct 2014 08:00:00 +0000