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Where Turkey Is Already at War: Are Kurdish Militants Doing Syria's Bidding?
tert.am
22:26 - 15.10.12
As Turkey and Syria trade fire, the one war Turkey is already fighting
- its conflict with the Kurdistan Workers' Party - has become the most
violent in more than a decade, the Time reports.
Anniversaries are a big deal in Sirnak to most of Turkey's
Kurdish-majority southeast - and to the Kurdistan Workers' Party
(PKK), the group held responsible for the August attack. The day
before I arrived, shop owners across the city brought down their
shutters to mark the passing of 14 years since Turkey browbeat Syrian
authorities into expelling Abdullah Ocalan, the PKK's founder and
leader, from his base in Damascus. (Ocalan, captured and tried shortly
thereafter, is now serving out a life sentence in a Turkish island
prison on the Sea of Marmara.) Most of the shopkeepers close their
doors voluntarily and out of sympathy for the Kurdish cause, the
phone-store employee says. Those who demur risk seeing their shops
firebombed by PKK sympathizers patrolling the streets.
According to Hugh Pope, head of the Turkey office of the International
Crisis Group, which recently published a report on the Kurdish issue,
the number of casualties since June 2011 has reached 775, including
262 members of the security forces, 426 PKK militants and 87
civilians. A total of more than 40,000 people have died since the
beginning of the conflict, which began with a PKK insurgency in 1984.
To the Turkish government it is no coincidence that the surge in
violence should come as the country emerges as a leading advocate of
regime change in Syria - and as tensions between the onetime allies
escalate into open hostilities. Damascus has begun using the PKK as a
proxy, the thinking in Ankara goes. `Assad has given them weapons
support,' Turkey's Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu announced in
August. `We have taken necessary measures against this threat.' A
ministry official contacted by TIME confirmed that the government was
in possession of evidence of Syrian support to the PKK, but declined
to go into detail. If Syria's previous President Hafez Assad harbored
the rebels in the 1990s, many Turks reason, his son Bashar has every
reason to assist it today - namely, to punish Ankara for its decision
to harbor the insurgent Free Syrian Army and cool Turkish enthusiasm
for intervention in Syria.
Similar accusations have also been leveled against Iran, which deeply
resents Turkey's backing of antiregime forces in Syria, as well as its
earlier decision to host elements of a NATO missile-defense shield.
If Syria's and Iran's strategy is to play the PKK card to make the
Turks to think twice about intervention, it may be working, at least
partially.
Despite their government's increasingly tough rhetoric - punctuated by
artillery volleys against Syrian targets after a shell killed five
people in a Turkish border town earlier this month - most Turks oppose
military action in Syria.
Rather than trying to pin the blame for the new wave of PKK violence
on Syria, many Kurds say, the Turkish leadership should take a long,
hard look in the mirror.
But despite secret negotiations with the PKK, which unraveled only
last year, Ankara has not met the Kurds' main demands, which include
greater autonomy, political representation, full language rights and
Ocalan's transfer to house arrest.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
tert.am
22:26 - 15.10.12
As Turkey and Syria trade fire, the one war Turkey is already fighting
- its conflict with the Kurdistan Workers' Party - has become the most
violent in more than a decade, the Time reports.
Anniversaries are a big deal in Sirnak to most of Turkey's
Kurdish-majority southeast - and to the Kurdistan Workers' Party
(PKK), the group held responsible for the August attack. The day
before I arrived, shop owners across the city brought down their
shutters to mark the passing of 14 years since Turkey browbeat Syrian
authorities into expelling Abdullah Ocalan, the PKK's founder and
leader, from his base in Damascus. (Ocalan, captured and tried shortly
thereafter, is now serving out a life sentence in a Turkish island
prison on the Sea of Marmara.) Most of the shopkeepers close their
doors voluntarily and out of sympathy for the Kurdish cause, the
phone-store employee says. Those who demur risk seeing their shops
firebombed by PKK sympathizers patrolling the streets.
According to Hugh Pope, head of the Turkey office of the International
Crisis Group, which recently published a report on the Kurdish issue,
the number of casualties since June 2011 has reached 775, including
262 members of the security forces, 426 PKK militants and 87
civilians. A total of more than 40,000 people have died since the
beginning of the conflict, which began with a PKK insurgency in 1984.
To the Turkish government it is no coincidence that the surge in
violence should come as the country emerges as a leading advocate of
regime change in Syria - and as tensions between the onetime allies
escalate into open hostilities. Damascus has begun using the PKK as a
proxy, the thinking in Ankara goes. `Assad has given them weapons
support,' Turkey's Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu announced in
August. `We have taken necessary measures against this threat.' A
ministry official contacted by TIME confirmed that the government was
in possession of evidence of Syrian support to the PKK, but declined
to go into detail. If Syria's previous President Hafez Assad harbored
the rebels in the 1990s, many Turks reason, his son Bashar has every
reason to assist it today - namely, to punish Ankara for its decision
to harbor the insurgent Free Syrian Army and cool Turkish enthusiasm
for intervention in Syria.
Similar accusations have also been leveled against Iran, which deeply
resents Turkey's backing of antiregime forces in Syria, as well as its
earlier decision to host elements of a NATO missile-defense shield.
If Syria's and Iran's strategy is to play the PKK card to make the
Turks to think twice about intervention, it may be working, at least
partially.
Despite their government's increasingly tough rhetoric - punctuated by
artillery volleys against Syrian targets after a shell killed five
people in a Turkish border town earlier this month - most Turks oppose
military action in Syria.
Rather than trying to pin the blame for the new wave of PKK violence
on Syria, many Kurds say, the Turkish leadership should take a long,
hard look in the mirror.
But despite secret negotiations with the PKK, which unraveled only
last year, Ankara has not met the Kurds' main demands, which include
greater autonomy, political representation, full language rights and
Ocalan's transfer to house arrest.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress