Between March 29 and April 2, 2016, Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, paid a visit to Washington D.C. to participate in the 4th Nuclear Security Summit hosted by U.S. President Barack Obama.

In an interview with CNN broadcast March 31, Erdogan said, “We will not allow an act such as giving northern Syria to a terrorist organization… We will never forgive such a wrong. We are determined about that.”

Asked which terror organization he was referring to, Erdogan said: “The YPG [Kurdish People’s Protection Units], the PYD [Democratic Union Party] … and if Daesh [ISIS] has an intention of that sort then it would also never be allowed.”

Erdogan was thereby once again attempting to equate Islamic State (ISIS), which has tortured, raped, sold or slaughtered so many innocent people in Syria and Iraq, with the Kurdish PYD, and its YPG militia, whose members have been fighting with their lives to defeat genocidal jihadist groups such as al-Nusra and ISIS.

The question is not why Erdogan or his government have such an intense hatred for Kurds. Turkey’s genocidal policies against the Kurds are not a secret. Turkey’s most recent deadly attacks are ongoing in Kurdish districts even now. The more important question is why Erdogan thinks that Turkey is the one to decide to whom the predominantly Kurdish north of Syria will belong — or who will not rule that part of Syria.

On February 17, Turkey’s capital, Ankara, was shaken by a car bomb that killed 28 people and wounded 61 others.

Turkey’s Prime Minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, immediately announced that the perpetrator was a Syrian national with links to the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG).

“A direct link between the attack and the YPG has been established,” Davutoglu said. “The YPG attack was carried out with logistical support from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) inside Turkey. Just as al-Qaeda or Daesh do not have seats at the table, the YPG, which is a terrorist organization, cannot have one.” He then once again refused to permit Kurdish YPG participation in U.N.-brokered Syria peace talks in Geneva.

Saleh Muslim, the head of Syria’s Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), replied via Agence France-Presse: “We deny any involvement in this attack. These accusations are clearly related to Turkish attempts to intervene in Syria.”

The General Command of the YPG also denied any involvement in the attack:

“Under challenging conditions, we are protecting our people from barbaric gangs such as ISIS and Al-Nusra. Countless states and media outlets have repeatedly reported about the support Turkey has been providing to these terrorist groups. Apart from the terrorist groups attacking us, we as YPG have engaged in no military activity against the neighboring states or other forces.

“We would like to repeat our message to the people of Turkey and the world: We have no links to this incident… We have never been involved in an attack against Turkey. The Turkish state cannot possibly prove our engagement in any kind of attack on their side because we were never involved in such an action. Turkish Prime Minister Davutoglu’s remarks ‘Ankara attack was conducted by YPG’ is a lie and far away from the truth. With this statement, Davutoglu wants to pave the way for an offensive on Syria and Rojava and cover up Turkey’s relations with the ISIS which is known to the whole world by now.”

The Middle East is going through mass murders, kidnappings, rapes, the sexual slavery of women and other crimes. And Turkey’s aggressive and supremacist foreign policy, which does not respect the sovereignty of its neighbors, has played a large role in this situation.

Syria and Iraq, Turkey’s southern neighbors, are now the breeding ground of genocidal jihadist groups, foremost the Islamic State (ISIS). Many reporters, experts and eyewitnesses have revealed that Turkey has contributed to the rise of jihadist terrorists in the region — by letting ISIS members get in and out of Turkey and even by providing funds, logistics, and arms for ISIS.

Inside its own boundaries, Turkey has been engaged in an all-out war against its own Kurdish citizens since last August. Turkey has been murdering them indiscriminately and destroying their homes and neighborhoods.

Turkey’s hatred of Kurds is so intense that it also targets Kurdish defense forces in Syria.

On February 13, Davutoglu confirmed shelling the Kurdish YPG group in Syria, after the YPG advanced on the rebel-held town of Azaz in Syria. “We will retaliate against every step [by the YPG],” Davutoglu said. “The YPG will immediately withdraw from Azaz and the surrounding area and will not go close to it again.”

The rebels in Azaz and elsewhere in Syria are mostly Islamist jihadists. According to the scholar Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi, Azaz was mostly controlled in early 2015 by the group Liwa Asifat al-Shamal (“Northern Storm Brigade”), affiliated with the Islamic Front. Syria’s al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra (“Al-Nusra Front”) also had a presence there.

“Azaz is a symbol for Turkey,” said Fabrice Balanche of the Washington Institute For Near East Policy. “Prime Minister Davutoglu fears that if the Kurds capture Azaz, they could start a big offensive from Kobane to the west and from Afrin to the east,” he told BBC.

As widely reported, the crisis in the region reached a peak when a Turkish Air Force F-16 fighter jet shot down a Russian Air Force Su-24 bomber along the Turkey-Syria border on November 24, killing the pilot, Lieutenant-Colonel Oleg Peshkov. The Turkish government tried to excuse the attack by claiming that the jet was downed after it had violated Turkish airspace for 17 seconds.

The Russia Defense Ministry, however, denied the aircraft ever left Syrian airspace, and released a video they claimed shows that the Su-24 was not in Turkish airspace when it was shot down.

Meanwhile, Turkey’s neighbor to its West, Greece, has long been a victim of Turkey’s violations of its sovereign airspace. According to data recorded by the Greek military, in 2014 alone, Turkish aircraft violated Greek airspace 2,244 times. On just one day, February 15, Turkish warplanes violated Greek airspace 22 times, according to Athens News Agency.

After Syria, Greece and Russia, Turkey’s next target was its other southern neighbor, Iraq. In December, Iraq’s President, Fuad Masum, said, “The presence of the Turkish Army Forces in Mosul Province without our permission violates international rules. I want Turkish officials to get its force out of Iraq’s territory immediately.”

Iraq’s Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi also condemned Turkey’s action: “We have not asked Turkey for any force and no one had informed us about the arrival of the force.”

Two neighbors of Turkey, Cyprus and Armenia, have also been victims of Turkish aggression — for an even longer time.

Turkey, for more than 40 years, has been illegally occupying the northern part of the Republic of Cyprus, which it invaded with a bloody military campaign in 1974. According to historian Victor Davis Hanson:

“Thousands of settlers from Anatolia were shipped in by the Turkish government to occupy former Greek villages and to change Cypriot demography — in the same manner the occupying Ottoman Empire once did in the 16th century. … The island remains conquered not because the Greeks have given up, but because their resistance is futile against a NATO power of some 70 million people. Greeks know that Turkey worries little about what world thinks of its occupation.”

Turkey has also been blockading yet another neighbor since 1993: “Turkey and Azerbaijan have effectively been exercising an illegal unilateral economic blockade against Armenia, which has hurt the latter economically,” wrote Armen V. Sahakyan, the executive director of the Eurasian Research and Analysis Institute. “Turkey and Azerbaijan are in clear violation of the Principle of Good Neighborliness, as well as all of the General Assembly resolutions condemning unilateral coercive measures.”

Turkey has been assaulting its neighbors in what appears as outbursts of Turkish Islamic supremacy. What Turkey would call a crime if committed by a non-Turkish or a non-Sunni state, Turkey sees as legitimate if Turkey itself commits it.

When Turkey invaded Cyprus, historically a Greek and Christian nation, it is not called an invasion. Turkey still refers to the 1974 military campaign as a “peace operation.” Senior politicians and military officials from Turkey also participate in the official ceremonies called “the Peace and Freedom Festival,” organized in occupied northern Cyprus on July 20 every year, to celebrate what they “achieved” more than 40 years ago — namely, an ethnic cleansing and colonization campaign that they conducted through many crimes, including mass murders, wholesale and repeated rapes, torture and inhuman treatment, plundering Cypriot cultural heritage and destroying churches, among others.

The crumbling buildings of the Varosha district of Famagusta, Cyprus, photographed in 2009. The area lies within Turkish-controlled northern Cyprus. The inhabitants fled during the 1974 Turkish invasion and the district has been abandoned since then. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

If anyone blockaded another state, especially a Sunni state, Turkey would most certainly condemn it. But when Turkey itself blockades a Christian nation, it is always “justified” — most often as a response to some “unacceptable wrongdoing” by the other side.

If a non-Turkish, or non-Sunni state, treated a Turkish or Sunni minority brutally, Turkey would passionately condemn it. But Turkey sees no harm in slaughtering its own Kurdish citizens, and devastating their towns. Turkey claims this is a just way of “fighting against terrorism.”

Turkey can shoot down a Russian plane in the blink of an eye, because supposedly no one can violate Turkish airspace even for a few seconds — or even if no such violation takes place. But Turkey can violate the Greek sovereign airspace countless times as a national sport or hobby whenever it feels like it?

If Western authorities criticize Turkey for its policies, Turkey accuses them of “intervening in Turkey’s internal affairs.”

For instance, when a group of journalists close to the movement of the Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen were detained in a mass arrest operation on December 14, 2014 in Turkey, the European Commission, in a joint statement, criticized the police raids and arrests of the media representatives.

EU foreign affairs chief Federica Mogherini and the commissioner heading EU enlargement talks also said the arrests went “against European values.”

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan responded in a public speech:

“When we take a step, someone in the European Union immediately comes up and makes a statement. According to what do you make this statement? What do you know?

“Those who have made this country wait at the gate of the European Union for 50 years, do you ever know what this [our] step is? The elements that threaten our national security — be they members of the press, or this or that — will get the required response. It is impossible for us to make them sovereign in this country.

“And when we take such a step, we do not think about ‘what will the European Union say?’ or ‘will the EU accept us [as a member]?’ We do not have such concerns. We will pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps. Please keep your intellect to yourselves.”

Erdogan also said that the detentions were not an “issue” of press freedom and claimed that the Fethullah Gulen movement was backed by Israel, which Erdogan referred to as “the country in the south that he [Gulen] loves.”

So, the European Union, of which Turkey is allegedly “striving” to be a member, cannot even issue a critical statement concerning Turkey’s policies because that would “intervene in Turkish steps for national security,” but Turkey can send jihadist fighters, arms or funds into Syria or Iraq and destroy lives and civilizations there?

Turkey seems to believe it always has to be strong and a leading force in the region. But if Kurds — an indigenous, stateless and persecuted people — are to gain a single right anywhere in the world, does Turkey find that unacceptable?

The entire history of Turkey as well as its current policies demonstrate that Turkey believes Kurds are inferior to Turks. Turkey does not even recognize the Kurds’ right to be educated in Kurdish, evidently in an attempt to separate them from their identity.

“The policy of Republican Turkey since its establishment in 1923,” wrote the author Amir Hassanpour, “is a typical case of what has been called ‘linguicide’ or ‘linguistic genocide.’ Forcing the Kurds to abandon their language and become native speakers of Turkish is the primary goal of the language policy.”Freedom and sovereignty are for Turks only. Kurds are just to be murdered or to be Turkey’s servants. This has been the state policy of Turkey ever since it was founded in 1923.

“The master in this country is the Turk,” said Mahmut Esat Bozkurt, Turkey’s first Minister of Justice, in 1930. “Those who are not genuine Turks can have only one right in the Turkish fatherland, and that is to be a servant, to be a slave. We are in the most free country of the world. They call this Turkey.”

Uzay Bulut, a Turkish journalist, is currently based in Washington DC.

The selection of an ethnic Turk to lead the Islamic Religious Community in Austria (Islamischen Glaubensgemeinschaft in Österreich, IGGiÖ), the primary representative of Muslims in the country, is being challenged by Muslim groups opposed to Turkey’s growing influence over the practice of Islam in Austria.

Ibrahim Olgun, a 28-year-old Austrian-born Islamic theologian with ties to the Turkish state, was quietly named on June 19 to replace 62-yer-old Fuat Sanac, who stepped down after serving as IGGiÖ president for five years.

Sanac, also a Turk, was reviled by Turkish authorities for helping the Austrian government draft a new Islam Law (Islamgesetz) that aims to promote an “Islam with an Austrian character.” The law, which was promulgated in February 2015, seeks to reduce outside meddling by prohibiting foreign funding for mosques, imams and Muslim organizations in Austria. It also stresses that Austrian law must take precedence over Islamic Sharia law for Muslims living in the country.

Observers worry that Olgun — a member of the Turkey-financed Turkish-Islamic Union for Cultural and Social Cooperation in Austria (ATIB), an influential group that has vowed to challenge the Islam Law at Austria’s Constitutional Court — will use his new position both to undermine the Islam Law and to increase further Turkey’s influence over Muslims in Austria.

At least eight Austrian Muslim groups (representing Albanian, Arab, Bosnian and Sufi Muslims) are challenging Olgun, who was selected by the IGGiÖ’s Shura Council (Schurarat), a rules committee (Shura is an Arabic word for consultation) whose five members all happen to be ethnic Turks.

IGGiÖ statutes require a person to be at least 35 years old to head the group, but the Shura Council secretly annulled that stipulation last December, according to Hassan Mousa, head of the Arab Religious Community in Austria (Arabischen Kultusgemeinde in Österreich). He said that Olgun’s selection was “undemocratic” and “illegal” and added that his ties to ATIB would shift IGGiÖ’s balance of power further in Turkey’s direction.

ATIB, an umbrella group that operates more than 60 mosques in Austria, is directly managed by the religious affairs attaché at the Turkish embassy in Vienna, and the imams of these mosques are Turkish civil servants. ATIB and its German counterpart, the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (DITIB), are financed by the Turkish government’s Directorate for Religious Affairs, known in Turkish as Diyanet.

According to the Berlin-based expert on Turkey, Ralph Ghadban, the primary mission of ATIB and DITIB is to “install the Turkish government’s official version of Islam” in Austria and Germany. He says the two groups are the “extended arms” of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who uses them to promote Turkish nationalism as an antidote to integration among the Turkish diaspora.

Ghadban warns that the Islam being preached in Turkish-controlled mosques in Europe is a “Sharia Islam with strong Turkish-nationalist overtones” that calls for a “strict separation from Western individualistic values.” He also says that DITIB has been strengthening its ties to Milli Görüs (Turkish for “National Vision”), an influential Islamist movement strongly opposed to Muslim integration into European society.

Olgun, who studied Islamic theology at the University of Ankara, has vowed to represent all Muslims in Turkey:

“I myself have experienced what it is like to grow up in Austria and to question my own identity. What is religion and what is tradition? It is worthwhile to reflect on it and then do theological research. Today I feel at home as a Muslim in Austria, but I also do not forget my roots. Therefore I will build bridges.”

Olgun insists that he will not be Erdogan’s puppet and will not allow himself to be influenced by ATIB. Until recently, however, Olgun was ATIB’s point man for “interreligious dialogue,” a key method of spreading Islam in the West by portraying it as a religion of peace and tolerance.

In Austria, ATIB directly competes with the Vienna-based, Saudi-funded King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz International Centre for Interreligious and Intercultural Dialogue, which, according to critics, is a permanent “propaganda center” in central Europe from which to spread the conservative Wahhabi sect of Islam.

Olgun also was an “inspector for Islamic religious instruction” (Fachinspektor für islamischen Religionsunterricht) for the IGGiÖ in Vienna, where he worked to ensure that Muslim children are being taught a version of Islam that presumably complies with standards established by the Turkish government.

The selection of 28-year-old Ibrahim Olgun (left) as the new leader of the Islamic Religious Community in Austria has been criticized by other local Muslim leaders as “undemocratic” and “illegal.” They believe Olgun will work to increase Turkey’s influence over Muslims in Austria. At right, the Saudi-funded King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz International Centre for Interreligious and Intercultural Dialogue in Vienna, which critics say spreads fundamentalist Wahhabi Islam.

The IGGiÖ, which represents more than 250 Muslim associations across Austria, supplies state-funded Islamic religious education at Austrian public and private schools.

In 2014, the IGGiÖ introduced new taxpayer-funded textbooks for the formal teaching of Islam in all public elementary schools across the country. According to the IGGiÖ, the new textbooks — called “Islam Hour” (Islamstunde) — are based on “secure and recognized sources of Islam” aimed at “embedding Islam into the lives of students.”

Unlike previous versions of the books, which were criticized for being “overly martial in tone” and for not being “sufficiently oriented toward European values,” the new books have been developed based a “completely new didactic model for competency-based education.”

In February 2016, however, the University of Vienna published study which found that Islamic kindergartens in the capital are dominated by “intellectual Salafists and political Islamists” who are contributing to the “theologically-motivated isolation” of Muslim pupils. The report calls into question claims by the IGGiÖ that anti-Western textbooks have been removed from Austrian schools: “In many of their publications the Muslim Brotherhood and Milli Görüs reject the Western way of life as an inferior worldview.”

Olgun rejects the criticism levelled against him: “They say that I am too young, that I am the extended arm of the Turkish state. That is not true. I was born in Austria. I grew up here and am an Austrian citizen. I am not a Turkish civil servant.”

Olgun’s supporters say it is time for a “generational change” at the IGGiÖ because Austria’s Muslim community is young and growing fast. The Muslim population in Austria now exceeds 500,000 (or roughly 6% of the total population), up from an estimated 150,000 (or 2%) in 1990. The Muslim population is expected to reach 800,000 (or 9.5%) by 2030, according to recent estimates.

Muslim students now outnumber Roman Catholic students at middle and secondary schools in Vienna, according to official statistics, which show that Muslim students are also on the verge of overtaking Catholics in Viennese elementary schools. The data confirms a massive demographic and religious shift in Austria, traditionally a Roman Catholic country.

Soeren Kern is a Senior Fellow at the New York-based Gatestone Institute. He is also Senior Fellow for European Politics at the Madrid-based Grupo de Estudios Estratégicos / Strategic Studies Group. Follow him on Facebook and on Twitter. His first book, Global Fire, will be out in 2016.

In theory, Turkey is part of the international coalition that fights the Islamic State (IS). Since it joined the fight last year, it has arrested scores of IS militants, made some efforts to seal its porous border with Syria and tagged IS as a terrorist organization. Turkish police have raided homes of suspected IS operatives. More recently, Turkey’s Interior Ministry updated its list of “wanted terrorists” to include 23 IS militants, and offered rewards of more than 42 million Turkish liras (more than $14 million) for any information leading to the suspects’ capture. But this is only part of the story.

On March 24, a Turkish court released seven members of IS, including the commander of the jihadists’ operations on Turkish soil. A total of 96 suspects are on trial, including the seven men who were detained but released. All are free now, although the indictment against them claims that they

“engaged in the activities of the terrorist organization called DAESH [Arabic acronym of IS]. The suspects had sent persons to the conflict zones; they applied pressure, force, violence and threats by using the name of the terrorist organization, and they had provided members and logistic support for the group.”

The release of terror suspects came in sharp contrast with another court decision that ruled for a trial, but while under detention, for four academics who had signed a petition calling for peace in Turkey’s Kurdish dispute. Unlike the IS militants, the academics remain behind bars.

The Turkish government, which controls the judiciary almost in its entirety, relies on Islamist grassroots supporters of various flavors — from Islamists and ‘lite jihadists’ to radicals.

Last year the Turkish pollster MetroPOLL found that one in every five Turks thought that the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris was the natural response to people who insulted Prophet Mohammed [only 16.4% of Turks thought of the incident as an attack on freedom of expression]. Among the ruling Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) voters, the rate of approval of the attack was 26.4%; and only 6.2% viewed it as an attack on free speech. Only 17.8% of AKP voters thought the attack was the work of radical Islamists. Three-quarters of AKP voters thought Muslims were aggrieved by the attack; while as few as 15.4% thought the victims were the cartoonists who were murdered. Two-thirds of AKP voters thought attacks on Islam by Christian Crusaders were continuing.

The fact that key IS suspects are now free because the government may fear looking mean to its Islamist supporters only partly explains the appalling judicial rulings on jihadists and academics. “The suspects may be holding the Turkish government hostage … What if they threatened the authorities that they would reveal the government support for their organization in the past? You normally don’t walk free over such serious legal allegations,” observes one western diplomat in Ankara.

Russia has been claiming that Turkey keeps supporting the Islamic State through trading the jihadists’ oil, their main source of income. A new report claims that total supplies to terrorists in Syria last year was 2,500 tons of ammonium nitrate; 456 tons of potassium nitrate; 75 tons of aluminum powder; sodium nitrate; glycerine; and nitric acid. The report stated:

“In order to pass through the border controls unimpeded, effectively with the complicity of the Turkish authorities, products are processed for companies that are purportedly registered in Jordan and Iraq … Registration and processing of the cargo are organized at customs posts in the [Turkish] cities of Antalya, Gaziantep and Mersin. Once the necessary procedures have been carried out, the goods pass unhindered through the border crossings at Cilvegozu and Oncupinar.”

Turkey keeps playing a fake war on jihadist terrorists. At a March meeting with top U.S. officials, King Abdullah of Jordan accused Turkey of exporting terrorists to Europe. He said: “The fact that terrorists are going to Europe is part of Turkish policy and Turkey keeps on getting a slap on the hand, but they are let off the hook.”

In fact, the Turkish government’s secret love affair with various Islamist groups is not always so secret. In March, thousands of supporters of Hizb ut-Tahrir, a global Islamist group, gathered at a public sports hall in Ankara — courtesy of the Turkish government — to discuss the re-establishment of the Islamic caliphate. In his speech, Mahmut Kar, the media bureau chief of Hizb-ut Tahrir Turkey said:

“Infidels who were enemies of Islam thought they buried Islam in the depths of history when they abolished the caliphate on March 3, 1924 … We are hopeful, enthusiastic and happy. Some 92 years after … we are shouting out that we will re-establish the caliphate, here, right next to the parliament.”

(Hizb ut-Tahrir, viewed by Russia and Kazakhstan as a terrorist group, defines itself as a political organization aiming to “lead the ummah” to the re-establishment of the caliphate and rule with sharia law.)

Guess what else Turkey is doing while pretending to be fighting jihadists? Apparently, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s declared political ambition to “raise devout generations” seems to have geared up. Turkey’s Religious Affairs General Directorate (Diyanet), the ultimate official religious authority in the country, recently issued comic books to the nation’s children telling them how marvelous it is to become an Islamic martyr.

Turkey’s Religious Affairs General Directorate (Diyanet), the ultimate official religious authority in the country, recently issued comic books to the nation’s children telling them how marvelous it is to become an Islamic martyr.

One comic strip is a dialogue between a father and his son. “How marvelous it is to become a martyr,” the father says. Unconvinced, the son asks: “Would anyone want to become a martyr?” And the father replies: “Yes, one would. Who doesn’t want to win heaven?”

And this is the country its Western allies believe will help them fight jihadists? Lots of luck!

Burak Bekdil, based in Ankara, is a Turkish columnist for the Hürriyet Daily and a Fellow at the Middle East Forum.

Turkey has been a republic since 1923, a multi-party democracy since 1946, and a member of NATO since 1952. In 1987, it added another powerful anchor into the Western bay where it wanted it to remain docked: It applied for full membership in the European Union (EU). This imperfect journey toward the West was dramatically replaced by a directionless cruise, with sharp zigzags between the East and West, after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Islamist AKP party came to power in 2002. Zigzagging remains the main Turkish policy feature even at this day.

Until the summer of 2015 Turkey was widely known as the “jihad highway,” because of its systematic tolerance for jihadists crossing through Turkey into neighboring Syria to fight Erdogan’s regional nemesis, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Turkey supported various jihadist groups in the hope that they would help Ankara unseat Assad. Then, under pressure from its NATO allies, it decided to join the U.S.-led, international campaign to fight the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in Syria. Feeling betrayed, ISIS started to blow up Turkish cities.

At the end of 2015, Turkey risked tensions with Russia in order to advance its pro-Sunni Islamist agenda in Syria. Russia, together with Iran, provided the lifeline Assad needed to stay in power while Turkey stepped up its anti-Assad campaign. In November, Turkey once again zigzagged toward the West when it shot down a Russian military aircraft, citing the violation of its airspace along its border with Syria. Turkey also threatened to shoot down any Russian aircraft that might violate its airspace again. It was the first time in modern history that a NATO ally had shot down a Soviet or Russian military airplane.

An angry Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, imposed punishing economic sanctions, which cost the Turkish economy billions of dollars. Turkey started zigzagging again. In July 2016, Erdogan apologized for downing the Russian plane, and in August he went to Russia to shake hands for normalization. Once again, Russia is trendy for the Turks, and the West looks passé.

In July 2016, Erdogan apologized for downing the Russian plane, and in August he went to Russia to shake hands for normalization. Once again, Russia is trendy for the Turks, and the West looks passé. Pictured: Russian President Vladimir Putin with Turkey’s then Prime Minister Erdogan, meeting in Istanbul on December 3, 2012. (Image source: kremlin.ru)

Erdogan and his men are now accusing NATO and, in particular, the United States, of roles in the failed July 15 coup, which they claim is linked to a reclusive, U.S.-based Islamic scholar, Fethullah Gulen. According to Turkish Defense Minister Fikri Isik, NATO should sit down and think where it went wrong in response to the coup attempt in Turkey. According to Turkey’s justice minister, Bekir Bozdag, the United States would be sacrificing its alliance with Turkey to “a terrorist” (Gulen) if it refuses to extradite him.

Turkey’s newfound love affair with Russia will inevitably have repercussions in Syria, and that pleases Iran. “Not only will Turkey have to ‘digest’ that [Russian-Iranian-Syrian] line, it will have to join it, entering into a pact with Putin and the ayatollahs. Clearly, this is where Erdogan has decided is the best place to pledge his allegiance,” wrote Meira Svirsky at The Clarion Project. There are already signs.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said that Turkey and Russia have similar views on the need for a ceasefire in Syria, the provision of humanitarian aid, and a political solution to end the crisis. That must have caused shy smiles in Moscow: the Turkish John Wayne on his knees begging to work on Syria only months after he threatened to shoot down any Russian aircraft and kick the Russians out of Syria. Now Turkey is calling on Russia to team up and carry out joint military operations in a bid to crush ISIS in Syria.

After the last Turkish zigzag, Turkey and Russia found where they converge: Putin accuses the West of violating agreements by expanding NATO to Russia’s borders and fomenting unrest in nearby Georgia and Ukraine, while in Turkey, the pro-Erdogan media accuses the U.S. of orchestrating the coup. There are more alarming signals from Ankara. Cavusoglu, the foreign minister, said that Turkey may look outside NATO for defense cooperation.

Fuad Kavur, a prominent London-based film director and producer, described the Turkish zigzag in a private letter (quoted with permission):

“Erdogan’s recent manoeuvrings remind me of how Hitler hoodwinked the West. Until four days before he invaded Poland, the West, ever sleepwalking, were utterly convinced Hitler was going to attack USSR, because he had come to power on an anti-Communist ticket. The West had a rude awakening only when, on 23 August 1939, Von Ribbentrop signed the Non-Aggression Pact with Molotov; and on Sept. 1, Hitler took half of Poland. Few days later, Stalin took the other half.

“What is the moral of the story? Until a few weeks ago, the West was comfortably day-dreaming that, despite his foibles, Erdogan was a staunch U.S. ally and an eager EU candidate. After all, had he not, only recently, downed a Russian jet? Then, suddenly, what do we see? Putin and Erdogan kissing and making up … It is a matter of ‘my enemy’s enemy…'”

From the beginning, Russia was too big for Turkey to bite. A few billion dollars of trade losses and friendly reminders from Western allies that Turkey should keep up to better democratic standards were sufficient to get Ankara kneel down — and perform another act of zigzagging. This, in all probability, will not be the last such act.

Burak Bekdil, based in Ankara, is a Turkish columnist for the Hürriyet Daily and a Fellow at the Middle East Forum.