His preference for the ISIS to the Kurdish State, as espoused by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), is not unknown.
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Leyla Imret, the mayor of the town of Cizre, tells Vice News that she, too, experienced the tear gas attacks, as well as the use of water cannons and rubber bullets to subdue the mostly Kurdish protesters.
Nor have liberal-minded Turks welcomed Erdogan’s blatant actions to restrict freedom of the press, Turkey now having one of the highest number of journalists imprisoned for allegedly violating so-called security laws or crimes against the state. The US has trained barely 50 fighters inside Syria, and most of these were captured or killed last week by the fundamentalist forces of Jabhat al Nusra.
The Turkish foreign minister, Mevlüt Çavusoğlu, said on Wednesday a “comprehensive battle” would be launched against Islamic State with the arrival of US aircraft and drones.
Turkey has been a North Atlantic Treaty Organisation member since 1952, after its armed forces intervened under U.S. command against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Presently Turkey forbids any information release referring different explosions occurring in the country.
They sacrificed their lives for the free world and for the Kurdish cause, which [is] why we are concerned that their bodies are being held at the border.
The U.S. air base rights are helpful, though unlikely to prove decisive in changing the prospects for defeating Islamic State. The death of even one trained fighter is strategically significant because the US has deployed very few reliable fighters in Syria.
Islamic State has seized large parts of Syria and neighbouring Iraq in its drive to create a caliphate. The AKP fell short of the needed 276 seats to get an absolute majority. At the moment, he must cooperate with the Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP). Women played an active role among the Kurdish fighters of the PKK and its Syrian sister party.
Turkey has time and again reiterated its determination to fight terrorism in all its manifestations.
The election took place as described on June 7, but Erdogan ignored the result: He never authorized the winners (his own Justice and Development Party, known as the AKP) to form a new coalition government. It took only a month for Erdogan to move in the direction of using the repressive apparatus of the state to reverse his electoral defeat.
It’s thus not surprising that many within Turkey – including within the European Union, which Turkey has applied to join – won’t be surprised by accusations Erdogan has secretly aided radical Islamic movements and is now attempting to turn on the Kurds, to advance his political objectives.
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Washington and Ankara differ about whether the Americans are allowed to continue to support the Kurds once they start their bombing raids from Turkish soil. Violence has intensified since Turkey began an air campaign against PKK camps in northern Iraq on July 24, in what Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu called a “synchronised fight against terror”.
