Vulnerable to intervention by external powers

Russia has targeted Turkey with punitive sanctions in retaliation for the shooting down, on November 24, of a Russian warplane that spent 17 seconds in Turkish airspace while on a mission in the campaign against taqfiris in Syria.

The sanctions, set to be imposed over the next month, will affect the tourism, trade and energy sectors, as well as investments, and could inflict considerable losses on Turkey’s already faltering economy.

Turkey is dependent on natural gas supplies from Russia, counts on Russia for the construction of a nuclear power station, and relies on revenues from 3.5-4 million Russian tourists.

Russia also responded by deploying defensive S-400 missile launchers around its base near Latakia, dispatched a missile cruiser off the Syrian coast, and cancelled joint naval manoeuvres with Turkish ships in the Black Sea.

A naval officer in charge of coordination between the Russian Black Sea fleet and the Turkish navy has been recalled.

Finally, Russian aircraft may have bombed a Turkish aid convoy making its way to militants affiliated with Al Qaeda in Idlib: it was claimed that the convoy was not carrying humanitarian supplies, but weapons.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said he was “sad” that the shooting down of the Russian plane “happened”, as if this event had been an accident.

It was no accident but a carefully prepared “ambush” that Erdogan himself claimed he ordered.

Turkish inceptor aircraft were scrambled, ready for action. The Russian plane’s route was tracked and, conveniently, found to be heading for its brief, non-threatening incursion into Turkish airspace.

The Russian plane would probably have been shot down even if this incursion had not taken place. Turkmen fighters were ready and waiting on the Syrian side of the border to fire at the Russian plane’s crew as they ejected and floated down beneath parachutes.

The Russian pilot was killed by Alparslan Celek, the deputy commander of a Syrian Turkmen militia operating on the ground along the border.

Celek is not, according to Russia Today, a Syrian but a Turk, the son of a Turkish mayor and a member of Turkey’s Grey Wolves, an ultranationalist group which has carried out dozens of political assassinations since the 1970s.

Apparently, a Turkish television team just “happened” to be in the area where the pilot and navigator, who survived, came down.

A crew member of a Russian helicopter sent to rescue the plane’s crew was also killed when fired upon by militiamen.

Turkey, mysteriously, managed to retrieve the pilot’s body and hand it back to Russia five days after the shooting down of the plane.

The destruction of the Russian plane by a NATO member is the first incident of this kind for half a century, and the first since the Cold War ravaged relations between the Soviet bloc and the Western alliance.

Although US President Barack Obama reacted to the incident by expressing support for Turkey and NATO headquarters warned against retaliation, the event should serve as a warning that Ergodan is a dangerous loose cannon on the international scene.

He has been encouraged to adopt such behaviour by decades of Western toleration of Turkey’s actions and policies.

This toleration long predated the 2002 election of Erdogan’s Justice and Development party (AkP).

Erdogan has two objectives for involving his country in the Syrian conflict: to bring down Syrian President Bashar Assad, whatever the consequences, and to prevent the emergence of a Syrian Kurdish entity in northern Syria along the border with Turkey.

He has, so far, failed to topple Assad and fears that the Western powers are prepared to allow him to stay in power indefinitely if his presence sustains the army and institutions of the state.

The West, particularly, the US, does not want a repeat of the Iraq disaster caused by the dissolution of Iraq’s military and administration carried out by the US occupation regime after the conquest of Iraq in 2003.

This left a politico-military vacuum at the heart of the eastern Arab world that was used by Al Qaeda to build bases and ultimately move into Syria to exploit the unrest there, which began in 2011.

Ergdogan has also failed to counter the establishment of Rojava by the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) or to curb the campaign of the movement’s military wing, the People’s Protection Units, to drive Daesh and other taqfiris from Syria’s northeastern border area and fight them in the region of Raqqa, the headquarters of Daesh in Syria.

The PYD has close connections with the rebel Turkish Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK), which has been fighting the Turkish military for more than 30 years to win Kurdish autonomy or, even, independence.

There was a ceasefire and negotiations between Ankara and the PKK for four years, but the truce and dialogue broke down when the government resumed bombing PKK troop concentrations in northern Iraq and PKK positions in southeastern Turkey.

Erdogan’s aim in embarking on this confrontation with the Kurds was to stir ethnic Turkish nationalism and win the November 1 parliamentary election.

This amounted to a 180-degree shift in the policy he had adopted when coming to power in 2003, when he vowed to end the conflict between Turks and Kurds by stressing their common adherence to Islam rather than their different ethnicities.

This approach might have worked if Erdogan had pursued it seriously. The PKK seems to have been ready for compromise on reasonable terms.

However, Erdogan’s urgent need for votes overrode Turkey’s need to reach an accommodation with its Kurdish citizens, who constitute about 20 per cent of the population.

If Turkey and its surrogates in Syria — Daesh, Al Qaeda’s Jabhat Al Nusra, the Turkmen (ethnic Turk) militia and allied forces — press Russia, Moscow could very well retaliate by providing arms and funds to the PKK.

Erdogan seems to have forgotten that Turkey, a state suffering internal splits and conflicts, is as vulnerable as Syria to intervention by external powers.