The Erdogan Connection

Turkey’s close call with a military coup this past week not only sent shockwaves through that country but also through the Western world. Because of its strategic position between East and West and its ever-tense alliance with the Western powers, instability in Turkey sets off alarms in Europe and the United States, particularly so at a time like this, when Western allies have Islamic State (ISIL) on the run in battlefield combat but when the ultra-Islamist terrorist network is changing tactics and encouraging small terrorist cells or lone-wolf killers to infiltrate Western capitals and wreak havoc.

It is believed that the reasons behind the attempted coup were not only President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s authoritarian advances against democratic rule in Turkey but also because of attacks carried out by ISIL in the heart of Turkish society. The perception among many is that Turkey is paying with innocent blood for the sins of Erdogan and his cronies, who have been indulging in a dangerous game, walking a tightrope between playing the NATO ally while making the country a no-man’s-land where a blind eye is turned to Islamic State fighters slipping back and forth across Turkish borders and where ISIL’s ill-gotten crude has been trafficked unabated.

The clear winner, for now at least, in the July 15 military coup attempt, has been its intended victim, President Erdogan, who, although elected by popular vote to that office in 2014, after serving as the country’s prime minister for the previous 11 years, has become increasingly autocratic. After quelling the ill-planned and ill-fated military uprising, making use of popular resistance movements in the streets of major cities and of apparently powerful loyalist sectors within the military and police, Erdogan declared the attempted overthrow “a gift from God” because it would allow him to “cleanse the Army” of seditious elements. And indeed, that “cleansing” has, in the past week, turned into a massive witch-hunt in which over 50,000 people have been arrested, fired or suspended, including a third of the Armed Forces’ upper chain of command—99 generals and admirals—nearly 3,000 judges and thousands of soldiers and other military personnel.

Both Erdogan and those who led the coup against him claim to be defenders of democracy. In military coups worldwide and throughout history, this is nothing new: Armed groups claiming to take over a nation in defense of its constitution and its people are common enough, but quite often, coups are perpetrated against working democracies that are headed in directions that are inconvenient for the estates of economic power that gain the military’s ear. In this case, however, the coup was directed against a leader who has been consolidating personal power for some time now and who is seeking more all the time, while playing political chicken with ISIL, putting enough pressure on the international terrorists to barely satisfy his NATO allies, but giving them a pass where he can to let them do his dirty work for him against his regional rival, Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and against his internal foes, the Kurds, along the Turkish border.In the meantime, Erdogan’s government has sought to put a face to the rebellion by blaming Fethullah Gülen, a 77-year-old moderate Muslim cleric who has lived in self-imposed exile in the United States since 1999. The Turkish government has petitioned the US for Gülen’s extradition. But while President Barack Obama has made it clear to Erdogan that the US backs Turkish democracy and condemns the coup, with regard to the extradition request, Obama’s administration has told the Turkish government that the decision to comply or not will be “no overnight process.” For his part, Gülen came out immediately to say that he had nothing to do with the coup attempt and that, indeed, he “condemned and rejected” the military rebellion “in the strongest terms”.

Like Russia, Erdogan seeks—somewhat less than effectively—to convince the West, to which he owes his country’s strategic strength, that his enemy is ISIL, when the main thrust of his actions is directed against the West’s Kurdish allies in the fight against Islamic State. Long at odds with Turkish Kurds who are seeking autonomy, Erdogan has taken advantage of US pressure for him to join the fight against ISIL to not only attack certain Islamic State positions but also those of Kurdish fighters along Syria-Turkey border. Russia, for its part, has pretended to be an independent player in the efforts of an international coalition fighting ISIL, while its campaign in Syria has actually focused strongly on pounding that country’s nationalist rebels who oppose both ISIL and Moscow’s ally, Assad. In effect, the West’s natural allies, the Syrian nationalist rebels and Kurdish Peshmerga fighters—the main ground forces holding back ISIL’s advance and maintaining territories won back from the terrorist organization—have often found themselves under attack not only by Russia, which is playing its own strategic game in the Middle East, but also by supposed Western ally Turkey, while simultaneously struggling to combat the East and West’s common enemy, the Islamic State Caliphate.

As witnessed by recent devastating terrorist operations within Turkey’s borders, however, ISIL appears to have lost its willingness to tolerate even the most minimal of actions that Turkey has taken against it to appease the West and is now targeting Turkish cities as it would any other Western capital.
The Turkish military has long considered itself to be the keeper of Kemalist democracy—the secular nature of which has made it appealing to the West—and has stepped in to overthrow four administrations in Turkey since the 1960s. Each time, the Turkish Armed Forces have eventually delivered the country back to democracy, but in every case with new modifications and limitations. As occurred in some South American nations during the decades from the fifties to the seventies, Turkish democracy has developed, then, with the permission and under the shadow of its military. And Erdogan has apparently known how to exploit that Turkish idiosyncrasy to amass increasing power.Seen as a charismatic strongman in his own country, Erdogan was able to exploit popular sentiment in putting down this past week’s coup attempt, largely because of Turkey’s checkered democratic history: Indeed, it was a former military officer, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who formed the Turkish Republic in the 1920s. Called Kemalism, the political system that he established was one of democratic nationalism, structured along strictly secular lines.

Clearly, despite fairly widespread popular support, Erdogan poses a challenge to both democracy and the secular nature of Turkish democracy. He is the leader of a moderate Islamist party and has sought to reform Turkish education along Islamist lines. He has sponsored reforms to consolidate presidential power and has used his increasing clout to muzzle the press and intimidate opponents. Now he is seeking to bring back the death penalty in Turkey “in the name of the people” so that he can legally kill off his opponents in the military and crush dissent in other erstwhile power bases.
For the West, Turkey under Erdogan poses a conundrum. Indeed, Turkey boasts full membership as a NATO strategic ally and, as the world’s largest host for refugees from war-torn Syria, it has also managed to negotiate billions of euros in compensation from the European Union as well as consideration of its petition to form part of the EU itself—although, since the coup, Europe has warned Erdogan that if he brings back capital punishment, EU membership will be off the negotiating table. But Turkish is also a country which, under Erdogan’s rule, is drifting further and further away from healthy, secular democracy and whose actions are often capricious and hard to predict.Despite this autocratic political profile, however, it seems, in light of the fate of this most recent coup attempt, that a broad sector of the civilian population and a significant proportion of the military prefer the continuing leadership of a civilian strongman to a return to historical pendulum swings between military takeovers and weak civilian governments. It is probable that the leaders of the coup felt recent attacks by ISIL in the heart of Turkey, including last month’s terrorist strike on an airport in Istanbul that killed 44 and injured 240, would be sufficient to undermine Erdogan’s popularity and people’s confidence in his ability to keep the country safe, and thus permit a successful takeover. Obviously, they were wrong, and have played into the president’s hands, unless his harsh punishment of coup-plotter opponents sparks fresh unrest in the Armed Forces.

Furthermore, while Turkey continues to be treated as an unquestionable Western ally, it is no secret that ISIL has long marketed unrefined crude from oilfields it took over in Iraq by smuggling it into Turkey, from where it is shipped to buyers in other parts of the world—even, reportedly, to major US allies, such as oil-dependent Japan. These sales alone have provided ISIL with a steady daily income in the millions of dollars, with which to feed, clothe and arm its fighters. Less talked about still is the allegedly direct relationship between ISIL’s oil-smuggling operations and the Erdogan family. There have been persistent reports that President Erdogan’s Harvard-educated third son, Bilal, who heads a major Turkish shipping group, has been the main shipper of ISIL’s ill-gotten crude and, as such, constitutes a necessary link in ISIL’s financing operations.However, the factor that makes Erdogan’s Turkey less trustworthy than any other is its ambivalence with regard to ISIL and this is the one factor that, oddly enough, is least talked about in the West. In October of 2014, US Vice President Joe Biden told a Harvard University audience that Erdogan’s regime was backing ISIS with “hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of tons of weapons…” But the vice president would later apologized to Erdogan’s government for the comment, making it seem that he had spoken out of turn, when the truth appears to be that the US needed the Turkish president’s permission to use one of the country’s airbases to launch  airstrikes against ISIL positions and Biden’s apology was part of the deal.

All of this would appear to explain, to a large degree, why even when ISIL’s backing from Saudi Arabia—also a seemingly sacred US ally—and other Middle East sources has all but dried up, the terrorist organization continues to be well-funded, despite serious setbacks in Iraq and Syria, thanks largely to airstrikes and other backing from the US-led anti-ISIL coalition. In the end, if it is true, as Western countries maintain, that defeating a highly organized, highly motivated and highly professional terrorist organization like ISIL will be a long and difficult process, it is also just as true that progress in the war on that terrorist group has been seriously hindered by the hypocritical and duplicitous nature of Erdogan’s increasingly autocratic regime and by the West’s disingenuous protection of Turkey’s strongman despite the harm his actions have done to the fight to dismantle ISIL once and for all.