Not long after ISIL militants began their devastating offensive on Kobani last September, a few dozen Kurdish men stood near a Turkish border crossing with Syria, within eyeshot of their hometown, pleading with Turkish troops to be allowed through to fight.
The border gate did not open. No one would be allowed through till the morning, one of the soldiers said. “I know what you’re up to, I know you’re going to fight for your land,” he said, “which is fine, as long you don’t harm ours.”
There was sympathy in his words, and there was suspicion.
Until Monday’s announcement that it would help Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga reinforce their embattled brethren in Kobani, Turkey’s policy towards the town has resembled a patchwork of red lines. Ankara has refused to open its airbases, including Incirlik, a key installation less than 160 kilometres from the Syrian border, to US planes fighting ISIL. It prevented Kurdish forces from other areas of Syria from transiting its territory en route to Kobani. It turned a deaf ear to Kurdish pleas to allow weapon deliveries to the besieged city. And, finally, it stressed that it would not attack ISIL unless the US committed itself to setting up refugee safe havens in northern Syria and toppling Bashar Al Assad’s regime in Damascus.
To the surprise of many observers, top officials have also failed to distinguish, in moral terms, between the two sides fighting in Kobani.
“For Turkey, they are the same,” Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan said last week, referring to ISIL and to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), whose Syrian offshoot, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), has defended the city.
This weekend, however, the US coalition made it clear that its patience for accommodating Turkey’s concerns had run out. On Sunday, US central command confirmed that it had airdropped weapons to YPG forces inside Kobani.
On Monday, US secretary of state John Kerry said it would have been “irresponsible” and “morally very difficult” not to have helped Syria’s Kurds.
Sobered by days of violent protests by their own Kurds, which killed at least 30 people and brought a nascent peace process with the PKK to the brink of collapse, Turkish officials themselves tested a new narrative last week.
Deputy prime minister Yalcin Akdogan claimed in an interview that the US would not have stepped up its airstrikes around Kobani without Turkish prodding. “Turkey made every effort to enlarge the scope of the bombing,” he said.
The airdrops, however, plus a Saturday phone call from US president Barack Obama to Mr Erdogan, appear to have prodded Turkey into making a policy shift on Kobani faster and more awkwardly than it anticipated.
On Monday morning, Turkish foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, who not long ago ago insisted that the PKK, which the US, the EU and Turkey consider a terrorist group, should not receive Western arms, appeared to have reconciled himself to the weapons airdrop. “We want the region to be cleared of all threats,” he said.
He also announced that Ankara would help Kurdish peshmerga forces deploy from northern Iraq to Kobani. While he did not specify the nature of the aid, the implication was that the peshmerga would arrive in Kobani via Turkey. Mr. Cavusoglu neither endorsed nor denounced the US arms airdrop.
The move was a message to Turkey’s own Kurds, said Henri Barkey, a former US state department official now at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. “The real paradox,” he said, is that by preventing or delaying Kobani’s fall, “the US bombing has bought Turks time on the peace process.”
He characterised Turkey’s decision to aid the peshmerga as “damage control”.
Turkey feels its Kurdish policy makes it an outlier, as the rest of the world moves to help, said Mr Barkey.
foreign.desk@thenational.ae
