August 5, 2015 | Quote
Turkey ‘Decided to Light a Match’ and ‘Won’t Be Able to Control the Intensity’ of What Happens Next
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In facilitating the jihadists, Turkey inadvertently allowed them to build a network within its borders — a network that will likely remain intact due to gaps in Turkey's legal system that make it difficult for police to detain foreign fighters.
“It's a dangerous game they [Turkey] have always been playing,” Jonathan Schanzer, vice president for research at Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told Business Insider recently.
That game stopped being politically useful for Erdogan after the Suruc bombing, and he was quick to capitalize on the resulting surge in nationalist sentiment.
Now, Turkey's president and his ruling AKP party are betting his political future on annihilating the PKK — the biggest perceived threat to Turkish sovereignty — in northern Iraq.
“The AKP needed the Kurdish angle to sell the war to ultranationalists inside Turkey,” whose main priority is to curb Kurdish territorial gains along its southern border, Schanzer said.
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