With the Turkish military continuing to escalate its violent crackdown on the ethnic Kurdish southeast, a Kurdish NGO coalition called the Democratic People’s Congress (DTK) has ended an emergency meeting calling for “local self-governance and local democracy” in the southeast.
The call isn’t sitting well with the Erdogan government, which has vowed to “cleanse” the region of secessionist PKK fighters, and President Erdogan reiterated this weekend that Turkey would “never allow” an independent state to form out of its territory.
And while the opposition Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) had nothing to do with the DTK, its political base is overwhelmingly in the southeast, and that was enough for Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu to cancel planned talks with them, saying the opposition was “rooted in violence.”
The ruling AKP has long been hostile toward the HDP, which is more favorable to ethnic minorities than the government generally is, and the recent visit of an HDP leader to Moscow despite the ruling party’s growing hostility toward Russia has only added to that.
This fight is why Turkey is now moving closer to Israel. Turkey expects reconciliation there would help a lot against the Kurds, turning away the US from the Kurds, gaining Israeli help against them again..
This could well be true. According to an article by a Putin supporter on another site, the oil that ISIS has been selling via Turkey is going to Israel. Up to now, Israel's principal supplier has been Russia but with Putin's fondness for blackmail, Israel, like Ukraine and the EU, may well be looking to protect itself by diversifying. So you end up with Putin and Assad versus everybody else.
This is why the Turks are in Iraq. I don't know what they're doing there but willing to bet it has everything to do with the Kurds – and not ISIS.
Logically. ISIS is no threat to Turkey.
It probably has a lot to do with why they are in Syria too.
Turkey came to the very edge of war with Syria about 15 years ago, then backed off when Syria made a deal to the disadvantage of the Kurds. Turkish concern "about Assad" had everything to do with the Kurds then, and likely still does.
There's no way of "defeating" an insurgency. Erdogan won't stop the Kurds, Putin won't stop the Chechens (or the Yakut, the Altai, the Buryat etc.), Israel won't stop the Palestinians, Afghanistan won't stop the Taliban and nobody will stop ISIS. Such is the lesson of history.
The "old-time" methods of stopping them are available, but we're in the 21st Century, and they'd call it genocidal annihilation.
The only reason Erdogan began the war on the Kurds,is because their vote theatened his one-party rule in the second last national elections.