Syria :
Could Turkey be Gambling on an Invasion?
Kurdish
forces, close to sealing the border, must beware -
President Erdogan is unpredictable
By Patrick Cockburn
January 31,
2016 "Information
Clearing House"
-
"The
Independent" -
A month before Turkey shot down a Russian bomber
which it accused of entering its airspace, Russian
military intelligence had warned President Vladimir
Putin that this was the Turkish plan. Diplomats
familiar with the events say that Putin dismissed
the warning, probably because he did not believe
that Turkey would risk provoking Russia into deeper
military engagement in the Syrian war.
In the
event, on 24 November last year a Turkish F-16 shot
down a Russian bomber, killing one of the pilots, in
an attack that had every sign of being a
well-prepared ambush. Turkey claimed that it was
responding to the Russian plane entering its
airspace for 17 seconds, but the Turkish fighters
made every effort to conceal themselves by flying at
low altitude, and they appear to have been on a
special mission to destroy the Russian aircraft.
The
shooting-down – the first of a Russian plane by a
Nato power since the Korean War – is important
because it shows how far Turkey will go to maintain
its position in the war raging on the southern side
of its 550-mile border with Syria. It is a highly
relevant event today because, two months further on,
Turkey now faces military developments in northern
Syria that pose a much more serious threat to its
interests than that brief incursion into its
airspace, even though Ankara made fresh claims
yesterday over a new Russian violation on Friday.
The Syrian
war is at a crucial stage. Over the past year the
Syrian Kurds and their highly effective army, the
People’s Protection Units (YPG), have taken over
half of Syria’s frontier with Turkey. The main
supply line for Islamic State (Isis), through the
border crossing of Tal Abyad north of Raqqa, was
captured by the YPG last June. Supported by intense
bombardment from the US Air Force, the Kurds have
been advancing in all directions, sealing off
northern Syria from Turkey in the swath of territory
between the Tigris and Euphrates.
The YPG
only has another 60 miles to go, west of Jarabulus
on the Euphrates, to close off Isis’s supply lines
and those of the non-IS armed opposition, through
Azzaz to Aleppo. Turkey had said that its “red line”
is that there should be no YPG crossing west of the
Euphrates river, though it did not react when the
YPG’s Arab proxy, the Syrian Democratic Forces
(SDF), seized the dam at Tishrin on the Euphrates
and threatened the IS stronghold of Manbij. Syrian
Kurds are now weighing whether they dare take the
strategic territory north of Aleppo and link up with
a Kurdish enclave at Afrin.
Developments in the next few months may determine
who are the long-term winners and losers in the
region for decades. President Bashar al-Assad’s
forces are advancing on several fronts under a
Russian air umbrella. The five-year campaign by
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s to
overthrow Assad in Damascus, by backing the armed
opposition, looks to be close to defeat.
Turkey
could respond to this by accepting a fait accompli,
conceding that it would be difficult for it to send
its army into northern Syria in the face of strong
objections from the US and Russia. But, if the
alternative is failure and humiliation, then it may
do just that. Gerard Chaliand, the French expert on
irregular warfare and the politics of the Middle
East, speaking in Erbil last week, said that
“without Erdogan as leader, I would say the Turks
would not intervene militarily [in northern Syria],
but, since he is, I think they will do so”.
Erdogan has
a reputation for raising the stakes as he did last
year when he failed to win a parliamentary majority
in the first of two elections. He took advantage of
a fresh confrontation with the Turkish Kurds and the
fragmentation of his opponents to win a second
election in November. Direct military intervention
in Syria would be risky, but Mr Challiand believes
that Turkey “is capable of doing this militarily and
will not be deterred by Russia”. Of course, it would
not be easy. Moscow has planes in the air and
anti-aircraft missiles on the ground, but Putin
probably has a clear idea of the limitations on
Russia’s military engagement in Syria.
Omar
Sheikhmous, a veteran Syrian Kurdish leader living
in Europe, says that the Syrian Kurds “should
realise that the Russians and the Syrian government
are not going to go to war with the Turkish army for
them”. He warns that the ruling Kurdish political
party, the PYD, should not exaggerate its own
strength, because President Erdogan’s reaction is
unpredictable.
British jets prepare for air strikes
in Syria
Other
Kurdish leaders believe that Turkish intervention is
unlikely and that, if it was going to come, it would
have happened before the Russian jet was shot down.
That led to Russia reinforcing its air power in
Syria and taking a much more hostile attitude
towards Turkey, giving full support for Syrian Army
advances in northern Latakia and around Aleppo.
For the
moment, the Syrian Kurds are still deciding what
they should do. They know that their quasi-state,
known as Rojava, has been able to expand at
explosive speed because the US needed a ground force
to act in collaboration with its air campaign
against Isis. Russian and American bombers have, at
different times, supported the advance of the SDF
towards Manbij. On the chaotic chess board of the
Syrian crisis, the Kurds at this time have the same
enemies as the Syrian Army, but they know that their
strong position will last only as long as the war.
If there is
no Turkish intervention on a significant scale then
Assad and his allies are winning, because the
enhanced Russian, Iranian and Lebanese Hezbollah
intervention has tipped the balance in their favour.
The troika of regional Sunni states – Saudi Arabia,
Qatar and Turkey – have failed, so far, to overthrow
Assad through backing the Syrian armed opposition.
Their
enthusiasm for doing so is under strain. Saudi
Arabia has a mercurial leadership, is enmeshed in a
war in Yemen, and the price of oil may stay at $30 a
barrel. Qatar’s actions in Syria are even more
incalculable. “We can never figure out Qatar’s
policies,” said one Gulf observer in frustration. A
more caustic commentator, in Washington, adds that
“Qatari foreign policy is a vanity project”,
comparing it to Qatar’s desire to buy landmark
buildings abroad or host the football World Cup at
home.
In Syrian
and Iraqi politics almost everybody ends up by
overplaying their hand, mistaking transitory
advantage for irreversible success. This was true of
a great power like the US in Iraq in 2003, a
monstrous power like Isis in 2014, and a small power
like the Syrian Kurds in 2016. One of the reasons
that Iran has, thus far, come out ahead in the
struggle for this part of the Middle East is that
the Iranians have moved cautiously and step by
step.
Turkey is
the last regional power that could reverse the trend
of events in Syria by open military intervention, a
development that cannot be discounted as the
Syrian-Turkish border is progressively sealed off.
But, barring this, the conflict has become so
internationalised that only the US and Russia are
capable of bringing it to an end. |