Turkey’s refusal to aid the defence of the Syrian-Turkish border town of Kobane is frustrating Washington and angering Turkey’s own 15 million-strong Kurdish minority, who have been involved in violent clashes with police over the past week. However, Turkey’s reluctance to get involved is understandable, says The Times.
Turkey regards the Syrian Kurds, who are affiliated to “Ankara’s arch enemy, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), as potentially more dangerous than Isis” and believes Kurdish militants are “in cahoots” with the regime of Bashar al-Assad.
Last week Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu told CNN that Turkish intervention was dependent on the widening of the coalition’s strategy to include the aim of bringing Assad’s regime to an end.
The Obama administration’s promise to limit US military engagement makes it difficult to accept Turkey’s terms, says Bradley Klapper in The Independent on Sunday.
Turkey’s stated desire for the US to create a no-fly zone inside Syrian territory would mean either the US co-operating with Assad, which Obama has ruled out because of alleged war crimes and other human rights violations, or taking out the government’s “formidable” air defences, “an action tantamount to war”.
The coalition’s lack of a united front isn’t helping, adds The Times. “Since so many members have ruled out fighting in Syria”, Turkey fears being “left in the lurch” if it intervenes, facing a tide of refugees, a rise in Kurdish militancy, the “guns” of Isis and a “hostile Syrian air force”.
It is unsurprising that Turkey is mistrustful of America, says The Guardian. The US refused to prop up the anti-Assad opposition with heavy weapons, and in 2013 Obama “abandoned a plan” to bomb Syrian military targets after the Assad regime used chemical weapons.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan might appear “cold-hearted” to outsiders, but, like other regional actors, he is simply trying to best serve his and his country’s interests. That means some clearer answers on the “Western endgame in Syria and Iraq”.
He may not have the luxury of time, says David Gardner in the FT. “Whatever his motives, he is dividing Turkey”, once a “beacon of moderate and modernising Islam”. The ceasefire declared by the PKK 18 months ago is “fraying”. Unless he is careful, he could “open Turkey’s gates to the whirlwind of sectarianism roaring across the Levant”.