CivilnetAnkara’s decision to allow Kurdish peshmerga from northern Iraq to cross its territory to defend the Kurdish population in the Syrian border-town of Kobani, doesn’t represent a huge shift in Turkish policy regarding the Kurdish issue according to BBC’s expert on Turkey and Kurdish issues Guney Yildiz. “The best terms to explain Turkish policy on Kobani is either contradiction, discrepancy or U-turns,” says Yildiz on CivilNet.
Despite the ongoing peace process between Turkey’s Kurds, PKK, and the Turkish government, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan reiterated several times that they don’t see any difference between Kurds fighting in Syria and ISIS. Later Erdogan also said that Syrian Kurds are equal to Kurdish PKK. There is mistrust on both sides and this intensified among Kurds in the last few weeks, as Turkey didn’t allow Kurdish fighters to cross into Kobani, says Yildiz.
According to Yildiz, the Turkish government assumed that it is the only stable and powerful force in the Middle East that the West can engage with in alliance against IS and they were so sure about this position, that is why they were so uneasy to see the United States engaging in direct dialogue with PYD and Syrian Kurds. They didn’t calculate that there could be other actors in the region that the United States and the West could work with and ally against ISIS.
