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Turkey and the War Against ISIS

If Turkish participation is contingent on expanding the war to include attacks on the Syrian regime, it would be better to do without such "help."

The Turkish parliament has authorized its military to operate in Iraq and Syria. This has been widely interpreted to mean that Turkey is now on board with the anti-ISIS coalition and will now be actively cooperating in the war. That is not necessarily true, or at least it is not that straightforward. The motion permits Turkish forces to operate in Iraq and Syria and allows foreign forces to be based in Turkey, but it doesn’t appear to commit Turkey to any particular course of action. There may be another snag: Turkey’s government wants to target the Assad regime as well. Hurriyet reports:

But just hours before the parliamentary session, Yılmaz stressed that the adoption of the motion did not mean that Turkey would take immediate steps in line with the scope of the motion. The three priorities Turkey has already outlined are to establish safe havens inside Syria to provide humanitarian assistance to Syrians in their own country, establish no-fly zones for the protection of these zones and train and provide logistics to the Free Syrian Army (FSA) in Turkey. Turkey is yet to decide what measures it will take in this framework but it has made it clear that all such potential measures to be carried out with the participation of coalition forces should also target the Syrian government [bold mine-DL].

The CHP, the main Turkish opposition party, pointed this out during the debate and cited it as one of the reasons for their rejection of the motion:

Akif Hamzaçebi, deputy parliamentary group leader of the CHP, described the motion as a “battle cry” and stressed that it was not aimed at fighting against ISIL but the Bashar al-Assad regime, which could drag Turkey into war with Syria. “Where is ISIL in this motion? Mr. President was caught red-handed yesterday with his address to Parliament as he outlined that their main objective was to topple the regime,” Hamzaçebi said [bold mine-DL]. “We simply do not want to draw Turkey into this fire.”

If Turkish participation is contingent on expanding the war to include attacks on the Syrian regime, it would be better to do without such “help.”

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