“While the United States and Russia are distracted, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan wants to take advantage of the war in Ukraine to pursue his obsession: to erase any possibility that the Kurds may have a land to consider them”. Thus begins the editorial written by Amílcar Correia in the Portuguese daily Público and translated this week in Internazionale. In recent days, Turkish military activities in northern Syria have increased and on 9 June the Syrian Democratic Forces, a Kurdish-led coalition, released a video that would show a drone and Turkish army artillery hitting the strategic cities of Qamishli. and Manbij. On the same day, some Turkish media reported that a military incursion into northern Syria is “imminent”.
Erdoğan has repeatedly made clear his government’s intention to reject Kurdish fighters he considers affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), an organization defined as terrorist by Turkey, the United States and the European Union. Furthermore, recalls Ahmed Maher in The National, the Turkish president announced a plan to relocate one million of the four million Syrian refugees who have fled the civil war since 2011 and residing on Turkish territory, in what he describes as a safe zone in Syria near the border with Turkey.
In an article in Middle East Eye, Christopher Phillips adds that Erdoğan wants to expel the Kurdish militias that currently control these areas and replace them with Syrian rebel forces allied with Turkey, “transforming the cities along the Turkish border into client regimes” of Ankara.
Internal and external issues
This would be the fourth Turkish military incursion into the region in six years. This time the pretext used by Erdoğan to target Syria again was the request for NATO membership presented by Sweden and Finland, two countries accused of supporting the Kurdish cause. But in reality, as Phillips points out, Erdoğan is more interested “in internal issues and the opportunities offered by the current geopolitical climate”. After twenty years in power, his popularity is waning and his party risks losing the presidential and legislative elections of 2023. Thus the president hopes that an operation against the Kurdish fighters of the People’s Protection Units (YPG) will alleviate at least in part this internal pressure.
“Equally important is the change in the international situation, which is facilitating Erdoğan’s moves,” explains Phillips. Turkey is a major external player in the Syrian conflict, but its role is subordinate to Russia and the United States. Past Turkish operations against the YPG were only possible with the approval of Moscow or Washington and now both are opposed, for different reasons, to new raids. “At the same time neither is expected to raise serious objections to the conquest of Tel Rifat and Manbij. What has changed? In a word: Ukraine ”, continues Phillips. Russia is engaged in the new conflict in Europe and is withdrawing some of its forces from Syria, while the United States, which is allied with the Kurds in the fight against the Islamic State group, could turn a blind eye in exchange for the end of Erdoğan’s opposition to all. entry of Sweden and Finland into NATO.
“It remains to be understood what will happen to the Syrian conflict after the Turkish military operation, which has no basis in international law and is not authorized by the United Nations,” concludes Amílcar Correia in his editorial. What is certain is that “the Turkish incursion would further destabilize the region, reviving the conflict and triggering a new wave of refugees”.