Erdogan’s Anti-Kurdish Campaign Threatens to Engulf Turkey in Civil War
SputnikNews.com
02.01.2016
Turkish President Recept Tayyip Erdogan’s unquenchable thirst to concentrate political power in his hands, together with his ever-broadening campaign against the Kurds, both at home and in neighboring Syria, threatens to take the country “to the brink of a fully-fledged civil war,” warns Pakistani political analyst Salman Rafi Sheikh.
In his latest analysis for the internet-based foreign policy journal New Eastern Outlook, Sheikh, a freelance journalist and political analyst who covers international relations and Pakistani affairs, explained that the present Turkish leadership’s intolerance toward the idea of sharing power with the Kurdish minority threatens to become a recipe for disaster.
“If we were to believe Erdogan’s up-beat ‘anti-terror’ rhetoric,” the analyst writes, “we might also be also be tempted to believe that Turkey, led by him, has been one of the most important states fighting terrorists since the beginning of the current phase of the conflict in the Middle East – a phase that originally started with the Western-engineered so-called ‘Arab Spring’.”
Unfortunately, “while the ‘spring’ has since long become a disastrous ‘winter’, the spate of violence continues to send political jolts across the entire Mid-Eastern political landscape, pitting states against states as well as non-state actors against states.”
“Nowhere is this tussle more evident and crucial,” Sheikh argues, “than in the case of the Kurds, who have been one of the most important groups successfully contesting Islamic State’s [Daesh’s] militant onslaught. The struggle has been greatly successful and the more successful it becomes, the more uneasy the Turkish leadership [becomes].” This, the analyst suggests, “is evident from Erdogan’s war against Kurds both inside and outside Turkey.”
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