Turkey's Dilemma

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/30/world/middleeast/turkey-a-conduit-for-fighters-joining-isis-begins-to-feel-its-wrath.html?_r=0

June 29, 2016: Analysts said Turkey was paying the price for intensifying its action against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, ISIL or Daesh. Under mounting international pressure, the country began sealing its border last year, as well as arresting and deporting suspected militants. And last summer, Turkey allowed the United States to use Incirlik Air Base to fly sorties over the group’s territory in Syria and Iraq.

“Turkey has been cracking down on some of the transit of foreign fighters who are flowing into as well as out of Turkey, and they are part of the coalition providing support, allowing their territory to be used by coalition aircraft,” the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John O. Brennan, said in an interview this week with Yahoo News. “So there are a lot of reasons why Daesh would want to strike back.”

Soon after the government’s decision to allow airstrikes to be carried out from the base in southern Turkey, the Islamic State began naming Turkey as a target, according to Michael S. Smith II, an analyst who closely tracks the group’s messaging. Last fall, the cover of the group’s Dabiq magazine ominously featured a photo of Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, standing alongside President Obama.

The attacks attributed to the Islamic State began around then, too, including devastating bombings in the southern city of Suruc in July 2015 and in Ankara, the capital, in October. This year, two suicide bombings targeted tourists in Istanbul.

The Islamic State was blamed for all of those attacks, yet none of them were claimed by the group, despite its habit of reveling in its violence elsewhere in the world. While officials blamed it for the attack on the Istanbul airport, the group’s daily news bulletins for Tuesday and Wednesday made no mention of the bombing. Its main English-language channel on the Telegram encrypted messaging app instead posted a photo essay of fighters in fatigues posing with automatic weapons on a hill in Deir al-Zour, Syria.

Some analysts saw this as the Islamic State trying to have it both ways: punishing Turkey for starting to act against it, but leaving enough of a gray area that it avoids a full-on clash with a country that has been valuable to its operations.

Still, there has clearly been a shift.

“Since mid-2015, a significant rise in pejorative references to the Erdogan government in Islamic State propaganda has indicated Turkey is now in its cross hairs,” Mr. Smith said, adding that this kind of rhetoric also preceded attacks in Western Europe and beyond. “An increase in terrorist attacks in Europe, in North Africa, in Bangladesh and in the Caucasus region were all preceded by increased focus on these areas in Islamic State propaganda materials.”

The group’s long honeymoon with Turkey started with the country’s aid to rebel groups that were fighting the government of Bashar al-Assad of Syria, often with the blessing of Western intelligence agencies, according to analysts. At the start, the Islamic State fit into that category, though it then began focusing more on eliminating competitors than fighting Mr. Assad.

Among the competitors the group was killing were Turkey’s avowed enemies: Kurdish separatists sheltering in Syria and Iraq. Turkey’s Western allies began accusing it of clinging to ambivalence toward the Islamic State. Even when it began strikes against the group last summer, its actions against the Kurds were more numerous and intense.

The centrality of Turkey for foreign volunteers flocking to the Islamic State is evident in court documents and intelligence records. Dozens of young men and women were arrested by the F.B.I. in the United States and by officials in Western Europe after they booked flights to Istanbul. Because so many of the group’s foreign fighters passed through Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport, the destination itself became synonymous with intent to join ISIS.

By 2015, the group was advising recruits to book round-trip tickets to beach resorts in southern Turkey instead, and to be sure to spend a few days pretending to be a tourist as a ruse.

That was the technique used by Reda Hame, a 29-year-old Parisian recruit. He explained to interrogators last summer, after he was arrested upon returning to France to carry out an attack, that he had made sure to buy a package stay at a beach resort in southern Turkey specifically because he wanted to throw off investigators, who knew to look for suspects heading to Istanbul. “I bought an all-inclusive holiday so that I could pass myself off as a tourist,” he said, according to a transcript of his interrogation by France’s domestic intelligence agency in August.

Thousands of pages of investigative documents from the agency, recently obtained by The New York Times, show that nearly all of the recruits arrested by officials in Europe had passed through Turkey on their way to join the Islamic State, as well as on their way back.

Seamus Hughes, the deputy director of George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, said that Turkey also figured heavily in the travel patterns of American adherents trying to join the group.

“The vast majority of American ISIS recruits used, or considered using, Turkey as their route,” said Mr. Hughes, who provided a breakdown showing that, of the 91 people charged with ISIS-related offenses in the United States, 18 purchased tickets through Istanbul, and 15 others either traveled through Turkey or considered doing so.

When Islamic State fighters communicated with worried family members, it was often with Turkish SIM cards. And investigation records reviewed by The Times show that two fighters who were arrested in Austria late last year, and who the police believed were supposed to take part in the Paris attacks on Nov. 13, had been sent money from their ISIS handler through a Western Union office in Turkey.

In his fortified office in northern Syria, Redur Khalil — the spokesman for the Y.P.G., the main Syrian Kurdish group fighting the Islamic State — keeps a stack of passports found on the bodies of the fighters his group has killed. He brings them out for reporters and turns the pages to show the Turkish entry stamps they all bear: proof, he said in an interview last summer, that the terrorist group’s foot soldiers are passing through Turkey.

Islamic State prisoners being held by the Kurds, whom The Times interviewed in the presence of a Y.P.G. minder, all said that they had moved freely across the Turkish border into Syria.

Bulent Aliriza, director of the Turkey Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said Turkey and its Western allies had not been quick enough to recognize the threat the Islamic State would pose.

He said that when the rebel groups in Syria began to gain strength, Turkey had nods of approval from the C.I.A. and MI6, the British intelligence agency, to allow arms and volunteers across its border and into rebel camps.

“Where Turkey can be accused of negligence is failing to understand, just as Pakistan did with the Taliban, that these radicals who crossed Turkey to get into Syria would morph into an organization that not only threatened the West, but ultimately itself,” Mr. Aliriza said. “The threat assessment simply did not happen fast enough.”

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/29/violence-turkey-conflict-ankara-isis
June 29, 2016: Turkey has also become increasingly disconnected from its friends and allies in the international community, which has undermined coordination with Europe on matters of intelligence and security. Ankara has rejected western alignments. It did not support western sanctions on Russia, voted against US-backed security council sanctions on Iran and before the Arab uprisings forged strong ties with Iran and Syria, whose governments at the time were facilitating and sponsoring terrorist attacks in Iraq against US personnel and Iraqi civilians.
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Turkey has been here before. After initial reluctance, it chose to work with Iraq’s Kurds and their autonomous region in the 1990s. It has also negotiated with the PKK on previous occasions and knows that the PKK, unlike Isis and other Islamic fundamentalist groups, has negotiable objectives.


https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/07/01/turkey-did-nothing-about-the-jihadists-in-its-midst-until-it-was-too-late/
1 July, 2016: Gaziantep, a large border city 60 miles north of Syria’s Aleppo, emerged as an important route for foreign fighters traveling via Syria to Iraq to fight the United States. Louai Sakka, a Syrian Kurd from Aleppo, was a key player in this network and had extensive links to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of the Islamic State’s previous incarnation, al Qaeda in Iraq. Sakka also fought against the United States in Fallujah in 2004 and has been linked to the 2003 al Qaeda bombings of Jewish and Western targets in Istanbul. He was arrested in the Turkish city of Antalya in 2006 as he was planning an attack against targets related to Israel.
Sakka was just one figure in a much broader network operating on Turkish soil on behalf of Syrian jihadist groups. His Turkish lawyer, Osman Karahan, was killed in Syria fighting with the Nusra Front in 2013. Osman’s brother, Sinan, is also a lawyer and represents HISADER, an Islamist NGO previously based in Istanbul’s Gungoren neighborhood that is accused of recruiting for the Islamic State. Turkish authorities closed HISADER in 2015, but at least one man connected to the NGO, Huseyin Peri, fought with the Islamic State against the Syrian Kurdish YPG near Tel Abyad in 2015. Peri, in turn, is linked to at least 35 other Islamic State members previously based in the southeastern Turkish city of Adiyaman.
Turkey was aware of these networks from the early days of the Syrian conflict. In 2012, Turkish police began to electronically monitor suspected Turkish al Qaeda members but did little to disrupt their networks. Turkish intelligence officials privately suggested that they were more interested in mapping the network and seeing where the information led them rather than endlessly arresting low-level recruits.
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For Turkey, the fight against the Islamic State will continue long after Raqqa is liberated and the group is pushed from its border. The average birth year of Turkish Islamic State fighters is 1990, according to data this author collected. This means that the average Islamic State fighter was just 20 when the war in Syria started. Many of those not killed during the conflict will return to Turkey, with potentially devastating effects for the country’s domestic peace.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/07/06/why-the-islamic-state-targets-muslim-countries-like-turkey/
When the Islamic State captured Mosul, Iraq, in June 2014, it kidnapped 46 Turkish diplomats and their families.
Ankara refused to join Washington in attacking the Islamic State as retaliation. Instead, they focused on securing a release of the hostages. For months, the Islamic State kept the Turkish hostages in order to maintain this tenuous balance, and Ankara and the Islamic State entered into a “cold war.” That meant that in September 2014, the Islamic State did not overrun the tomb of Suleyman Shah (Turkish territory inside Syria guarded by a few dozen troops). In exchange, Turkey let the Islamic State use its country as a passageway to smuggle antiquities, foreign fighters and weapons.
Turkey secured the release of the hostages in September 2014. Six months later, it evacuated troops guarding the tomb, and physically moved the Ottoman patriarch to an exclave next to the Turkish border, eliminating another key vulnerability.
This changed the dynamic between the two governments. Soon after, Turkey joined the United States’ coalition against the Islamic State. Turkish planes started bombing the group’s strongholds in July 2015. Ankara also started cracking down on Islamic State smuggling routes across the Turkish-Syrian border. The government has backed Syrian rebels working to wrest control of the A’zaz-Jarablus corridor in northwestern Syria, the Islamic State’s main conduit for smuggling fighters into Turkey and beyond.


http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2016/07/iran-reactions-turkey-coup-attempt-zarif-erdogan.html#ixzz4EvtjZhqF
With an Islamic-oriented government in power in Ankara, bilateral relations have improved in the past decade, paving the way for common ground despite differences over regional developments. The latter has been possible thanks to Iranian-Turkish proximity in terms of grander objectives and also similarities in their ways of thinking. Indeed, at the height of the nuclear-related sanctions on Iran, Turkey played a vital role in easing the pressure on its eastern neighbor. Erdogan certainly paid the price for the holes he was accused of creating in the web of sanctions imposed on Iran through what came to be known as the "gold-for-oil scheme" — even while economic ties between the two countries greatly expanded in the sanctions era. With the implementation of the nuclear deal, the two countries now plan to triple their trade volume to $30 billion.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/yusuf-muftuoglu/salafi-extremism-turkey_b_10814254.html 
July 7, 2016: Turkey’s strategy of supporting the Salafi factions in Syria, and its huge public relations machinery that praised the fighters, normalized Salafism in the eyes of many ordinary, pious Sunni Turks. Essentially, the support given to the Syrian opposition from Turkey became support for an Islamist agenda, and in the face of the main enemy, Iran, it was, in time, transformed into a sectarian, Sunni discourse.

Some of Turkey’s Islamist NGOs and media have assumed prominent roles in this process, not just proselyting an extremely sectarian discourse, but also silencing anyone who warned against the Islamic State. A great deal of Iran, and hence Shia, bashing has gone on, labeling the Shia with insulting adjectives throughout, justified by the argument that Salafi extremism was a result of Shia extremism and hence understandable. The fact that those NGOs played a key role in delivering humanitarian aid to a large umbrella of opposition groups in Syria made the process more natural.
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While non-violent sympathy with Kurdish violence was disproportionately punished, as in the case of academics prosecuted for signing a collective paper, numerous culprits who actively wrote and published in media in support for Salafi violence remained untouched, or have been just briefly detained and then let go.

This climate of soft Salafization of a segment of Turkey’s pious Sunnis has provided ISIS with an organic ground to prosper among Turks. Adıyaman and some other cities in Turkey’s southeast have turned into fertile ground of mostly Turkish ISIS cells. Even in Istanbul and Ankara, certain central districts have turned into ISIS recruitment grounds.