TURKEY'S President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is making another dangerous policy change as he seeks to renew ties with the bloody Syrian regime of Bashar Assad. This comes on top of his restoration of links with Israel and his supine capitulation to Russia's president Vladimir Putin. His first and arguably most catastrophic volte-face was over the Kurds. Erdogan was rightly hailed for having the political vision, not to say the guts, to strike a March 2013 deal with imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan. The PKK insurrection ended with a truce, Kurdish cultural and political rights were recognized and Kurdish politicians took their place in parliament. No other Turkish politician had dared pull of this remarkable initiative, for which Erdogan was rightly praised around the world. Then a series of events occurred in 2015. Despite his declared opposition to Daesh (the self-proclaimed IS) as well as the Assad government, heavily-armed Turkish military units stood by and watched as the terrorists sought to seize the Kurdish city of Kobane, just over in the border in Syria. A Kurdish youth rally in support of the fighters in Kobane was targeted by a suicide bomber and 32 activists were blown to pieces. It was immediately assumed that Daesh (so-called IS) was to blame. But as more was discovered the suicide bomber was Turkish, doubts began to arise. Nothing was ever proved. Erdogan meanwhile promised to strike back at the terrorists in Syria. But then within days came an attack in the Kurdish east of the country on a patrol of gendarmes. Ankara blamed the assault on the PKK. Within hours Turkish warplanes had taken to the skies. Wave after wave of airstrikes went in on PKK camps in the Iraqi hills over the border from Turkey. Since then attacks on the Turkish mainland, which may well have been by Daesh, have been blamed on the PKK. And Erdogan's soldiers are busily fighting yet another campaign against the Kurds, which history suggests simply cannot succeed in anything but costing the lives of civilians as well as combatants. Erdogan's somersault over relations with Assad may have been launched by a push from Putin's Kremlin. Many Turks were upset by the response of their president to Moscow's threats and sanctions. If a Russian jet had continued to violate Turkish airspace after repeated warnings, then it was not wrong to shoot it down. But Erdogan's decision to extend an olive branch to Assad may also be about Syria's Kurds whose territory is no longer under Damascus' control. Could he be seeking a green light from Assad to do to Syria's militant Kurds what he has tried on the PKK in Iraq? And might airstrikes be followed by a ground incursion into Syria, with Assad's approval? Might Erdogan be looking to establish a buffer zone within Syria to which he can move some of the 2.7 million Syrians who have fled the violence of their own government? This could be the least deplorable reason for Erdogan's betrayal of his former principled stand against the Assad dictatorship.
