Over the weekend Turkey sent around 20 special forces into Syria in a secret mission to get intelligence on ISIS targets so they could retaliate against them for continually firing over the border into Turkey:
YENI SAFAK – Turkey has stepped up retaliation efforts after the Daesh terrorist organization intensified attacks targeting Turkey, as a group of 15-20 Turkish Special Forces entered Syria for reconnaissance and preparation for Turkey’s retaliation.
The operation started at 1:30 a.m. on Saturday and lasted four hours.
The Turkish military aims to end Daesh attacks and declare a safe zone in the south of Turkey’s Kilis province, according to anonymous sources who spoke to Yeni Şafak daily.
The Turkish military killed 55 Daesh terrorists by mortar shelling in the north of the Syrian city of Aleppo on Saturday evening, according to military sources. The shelling also took out three vehicles and three rocket installations, the military sources added.
Today Erdogan said that he is preparing to take UNILATERAL action and go into Syria to fight ISIS:
HURRIYET – President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has sent a strong signal regarding his country’s readiness to take unilateral action against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) following a series of attacks by the group on the border province of Kilis.
“While our citizens are being martyred every day by rockets fired from the other side, what will we wait for from the allies,” Erdoğan said at an event called “Domestic and National Will in Turkish Political History.” “If so, we will pull ourselves up by our bootstraps.”
“We are doing all the necessary preparations to clean the other side of the border because of the troubles being experienced in Kilis, but we haven’t yet been able to receive the support that we desire from allies,” Erdoğan said.
Erdoğan again accused the international coalition battling ISIL in Syria of abandoning his country to fight the jihadists on its own soil in the face of regular attacks on Kilis by ISIL.
“The Kilis issue will serve as a litmus paper which will manifest the anti-DAESH [ISIL] coalition’s sincerity,” he added.
“We do not believe the sincerity of any country that has not seen rockets falling on our town as if they fell on Moscow, London, Brussels, Washington, Paris or Berlin,” he said.
Just the other day Erdogan was also lamenting how the West has abandoned Turkey in its fight against terrorism and that they were now all alone.
Now I know Erdogan may have said some of this before, but I think the context of today’s comments is very different than in the past. First of all you have the now de facto Sultan of Turkey telling the Muslim world over and over they need to unify. And part of that message is to get rid of the problem of terrorism that plagues the Muslim world. An invasion into Syria to take out ISIS would certainly go along with that same message.
What Erdogan really wants is for the Muslim world to see him as their savior, as their Caliph. And he’s playing them all to accomplish this.
We know that Erdogan helped create ISIS in the beginning and now that they have turned on him, he’s using this as an excuse to look like a victim so he can invade Syria to fight them.
The same is true for the PKK (Kurdish terrorist group). While the fight with the Kurds is decades old, it was renewed last year after Erdogan and the AKP lost the majority in the June elections. Erdogan starting bombing the Kurds in Syria and Iraq as a way to get the country to rally around his AKP, and now there are monthly terrorist attacks from the PKK in Turkey. Between ISIS and the PKK there have probably been close to a dozen attacks since this began in summer of 2015.
Erdogan has made Turkey a hotspot for terrorist attacks and will now use that as an excuse to invade Syria. While I do believe he will fight ISIS in some regard and maybe even destroy them, I think getting rid of Assad is still his primary goal and that will what he really seeks to accomplish first.
Now when, or even if, the new Sultan of Turkey will invade Syria is unknown. I really think he will, and it will be sooner than later given the new context and atmosphere in Turkey and the Middle East that he is creating.
Perhaps I’m wrong, but this is how I’m reading it right now.