Tag Archives: Muslim Brotherhood

Britain, Iraq, Islamic State, NATO, Syria, Turkey, United States

Turkey: why isn’t it doing anything to curb the advances of Islamic State?

THE LACK OF TURKISH ACTION

Almost 200,000 people have been forced to flee and abandon their homes, joining 1.5 million Syrian refugees already in Turkey.

Poorly equipped Kurdish fighters – men, women and children – have tried in vain with AK-47 assault rifles to hold back the maniacal hordes of Islamic State fighters. The terrorists are armed with modern, heavy-grade American weapons.

IS now has a clear grip on at least a third of the Syrian Kurdish stronghold of Kobani on the border with Turkey.

U.S. and Arab warplanes and drones have been targeting IS positions, but to little avail. U.S. General Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, accepts the town could fall, leaving its remaining citizens facing rape, murder and torture at the hands of the barbarians besieging it.

All the while, just a few hundred yards over the border, Turkish troops look on. As IS fighters stalk the deserted streets of the town, Turkish tanks in clear sight of the calamity stand idle.

Turkey’s inaction as Kobani falls has provoked worldwide fury. Kurdish expats have taken to the streets throughout the country, and at least 19 people are known to have died in violent clashes against the government’s troops and police.

Washington has ‘voiced concern’ about Turkey’s reluctance to engage IS, even though it has its own parliament’s approval to do so.

Less diplomatically, a U.S. State Department official reportedly told the New York Times: ‘This isn’t how a NATO ally acts while hell is unfolding a stone’s throw from its border.’

It does, indeed, seem outrageous that Turkey, the second-largest land power in NATO with 290,000 troops, and a candidate for EU membership, is doing nothing to prevent a massacre on its doorstep. Why does it view the prospect of IS’s dreaded black banner fluttering over a town near its border with such apparent equanimity?

The main reason – and it is a very simple one – is that Turkey abhors the 1.3million Syrian Kurds more than it hates IS.

Turkey is home to some 15million Kurds – about 20 per cent of its population – many of who are locked in a violent secessionist battle with the Turkish government.

What Turkey really fears is that the Syrian Kurds will establish their own state on the Turkey/Syria border, which could prove deeply destabilising in a country with such a large Kurdish population. Anything – even IS – that weakens the Syrian Kurds reduces that threat.

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Turkey has, for 30-years, fought a brutal war against the far-Left militant Kurdish Workers Party (PKK), until a fragile ceasefire was declared in 2013. In those blood-soaked decades, 40,000 people were killed in vicious fighting that involved suicide bombers on the terrorist PKK side, the flattening of Kurdish villages on the other – and widespread allegations of torture on both.

What makes Turkey particularly reluctant to defend the Syrian Kurds in Kobani is that they are allied to the PKK, and committed to Kurdish homeland. This explains why Turkish border guards have been stopping PKK militia and other Kurdish fighters from joining their Syrian kinsmen in Kobani to fight IS.

And why, in contrast, they turned a blind eye to foreign jihadis flying into Turkey to take the long bus journey over the border to Syria – not to mention the 3,000 Turks who have joined IS after being recruited in rundown provincial towns.

Turkey’s response to IS was certainly complicated by the terrorists’ seizure of 49 Turkish hostages in Syria. But rather than refuse to negotiate, the Turks exchanged them for 180 imprisoned IS sympathisers.

Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has made it plain he sees no moral difference between the Kurds in Kobani and IS.

In a briefing, Mr Erdogan said: ‘It is wrong to view them differently; we need to deal with them jointly.’

One diplomat who is involved in attempting to build the anti-IS alliance says Erdogan hates the Syrian Kurds. What is more, the diplomat said, is that ‘he thinks they’re worse than IS.’

Elsewhere, the EU’s counter-terrorism co-ordinator, Gilles de Kerchove, said: ‘The Syrian Kurds are a big concern for Erdogan because he is not done with the PKK.’

Both the EU and the U.S. has designated the PKK as a terrorist organisation. The irony is that the West is now implicitly relying on PKK fighters to relieve Kobani. And the fact is that, until IS came along, the Syrian Kurds were getting ever closer to their dreams of an autonomous state.

In the chaos of the Syrian civil war, they had declared their own statelet, calling it ‘Rojava’, which straddled Syria’s northern border with Turkey like a series of cantons.

An embattled President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, locked in a lethal war with IS, tolerated this arrangement, which put Kobani right in the centre of the statelet. Little wonder IS considers the town to be of such strategic significance.

The Syrian Kurds have taken their lead from Kurds in northern Iraq, who have established their own thriving and virtually autonomous regime in an oil-rich region now known as Iraqi Kurdistan.

The difference, however, is that Turkey does not see the Iraqi Kurds – who will have nothing to do with the PKK – as a threat. Ankara invested heavily in the region and has become increasingly dependent on Kurdistan’s oil and gas to fuel its own growth.

In contrast, Turkey fears that any concession to the Syrian Kurds will fuel demands from its own restive Kurdish population for autonomy.

On top of all of this, you have the autocratic and self-determined nature of Erdogan who, in a move reminiscent of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, appointed himself president this summer after serving 12-years as prime minister.

No Turkish leader since the death in 1938 of Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, has invested himself with such power as Erdogan. But whereas Ataturk wanted to distance Turkey from its religious heritage, turning it into a power player in modern Europe, Erdogan has very different ideas.

As part of his general conservative push, Erdogan has been trying to re-orientate the country away from the decadent West and towards the Arab world, which the Ottoman Turks ruled for centuries.

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With his ambition to revive Turkey’s once-great power status, Erdogan has allied the country not only with the conservative Sunni Muslims of Saudi Arabia, but with the Muslim Brotherhood regime of former President Morsi in Egypt, and with the Sunni militant Palestinian group Hamas.

In doing so, he destroyed Turkey’s good relations with Israel, a staunch ally of the Kurds.

Relations with the newly-elected military regime in Egypt are grim, too. Erdogan’s emotional pull towards Sunni Arabs means he is implacably opposed to Syria’s President Assad, who is an ally of Shia Iran, and explains why he is so keen to back Assad’s enemies, even if it means backing IS.

That is why he is telling the U.S. that only if America extends its intervention in Syria to toppling Assad will he then move to help the Kurds in Kobani.

Erdogan will drive a very hard bargain before he contemplates any military action, not least because the Turks realise that while Western intervention comes and goes in the Middle East, Turkish intervention in Syria could involve the country in an intractable war that lasts decades.

Yet, this is a NATO country which the West hopes will put men on the ground to repulse IS. Some hope that is. For as well as supporting the terrorists, Turkey has been allowing British jihadis to cross its borders, while simultaneously claiming its desire to join the anti-IS coalition.

At this terrifying moment and juncture when IS appears to be unstoppable, it’s tragic for the West that Turkey is the country that holds most of the cards.

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Egypt, Foreign Affairs, Government, Middle East, Politics, Society, United States

Abdulfattah el-Sisi: Egypt’s new political leader…

EGYPT

Once again, Egypt has a senior military officer in charge of the country’s affairs. Field Marshal Abdulfattah el-Sisi, recently promoted from the rank of General, has been elected with the support of 97 per cent of the voters (of a low turnout) and has been inaugurated into office. He officially stood down from his military appointment in contesting the presidency. For the past 60-years, ever since the Free Officers Movement overthrew King Farouk in 1952, the Egyptian government has had a senior military strongman at the helm. Successive leaders – Naguib, Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak – all came from the military, so on that basis el-Sisi’s political victory in now leading his country should come as no great surprise.

For many, though, given the political earthquake and subsequent tremors that have occurred over the past three years, and the way in which power has been handed over, will leave many feeling uncomfortable if not untoward. The high hopes of the Arab Spring and the resulting revolution that toppled Hosni Mubarak were undone by the election of the Muslim Brotherhood. Mohammed Morsi’s mandate suggested that the Arab world’s most populous country would become increasingly Islamised, and became a significant factor in his eventual deposition that came in the form of a military coup. But now the Brotherhood is proscribed once more and most of its leaders are in prison.

Whether President el-Sisi is to be remembered as another Arab tyrant will depend on how he utilises his unparalleled position of public dominance. Time will tell – and history will record – whether he is able to reform his country’s anachronistic and decrepit institutions and his ability to convert an inward-looking society into one that is more representative of the modern age. In the short-term, his priorities must be to overhaul the police and judiciary and to end the daily charades of how justice is dispensed in the courts.

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Egypt, Foreign Affairs, Government, Middle East, Politics, United States

Why has the U.S. taken this long to cut aid to Egypt?

U.S. AID TO EGYPT

Washington’s decision to suspend some of its military aid to Egypt is long overdue. By all accounts it should have happened months ago following the military style coup in Egypt that led to the fall of President Mohamed Morsi. America’s decision, however, is still only a symbolic gesture, one that the Obama administration acknowledges will have scant impact on either the regime’s crackdown on the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood or the pace of returning Cairo to democracy. Some commentators may view it as a carefully calibrated balancing act between the need to preserve US interests in the region and the desire to uphold the democratic principles it purports to value.

Had Washington’s decision come three months ago, immediately after the ousting of Mr Morsi, it might have carried some weight. Instead, the American administration refused to use the word coup, and has continued to do so even as it unveiled belated sanctions against the country. At the same time, Egypt’s military-backed regime has moved at its own pace, unhindered and unrestricted in its approach. Yet, whilst measures are being drawn up for a return of normal government – which are likely to be approved in a forthcoming referendum – most of the Brotherhood leadership are behind bars and Islamic media outlets are shut down. Such measures are likely to amount to very little.

Following Washington’s belated reprimand, Cairo announced almost at once Mr Morsi’s trial and declared that Egypt ‘will not surrender to American pressure’.

The US move may even actually boost the regime’s popularity, reducing what many see as a humiliating foreign dependency. Neither will it greatly affect the security balance in the region. Israel is agonised because such a cut in U.S. aid might jeopardise the 1979 treaty upon which its subsequent ‘cold peace’ with Egypt has rested.

The referendum may give the United States a pretext in resuming full military assistance to Cairo, a proviso Washington appears to be calling for. However, this temporary interruption in aid will not only end up pleasing no one, but will demonstrate once and for all how little influence the US wields in the most populous Arab country. To have had any real impact, America should have made its decision months ago.

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