An old Turkish proverb says, “You can’t carry two watermelons under one arm,” meaning that two big tasks should not be tackled at the same time. These days, the Ankara regime seems to be attempting exactly that. At home, it is waging a war on the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), and regionally, it is sliding into a cold war with Russia that carries the risk of heated confrontation. As a natural outcome, these two wars could draw Russia and the PKK together, creating a tough challenge for Turkey.
The first frost in the cold war with Russia came Nov. 24 when Turkey downed a Russian warplane on grounds it violated Turkish airspace at the border with Syria, where Russia is intervening militarily to prop up the Damascus regime and Turkey is backing opposition forces. A brief recollection of the past would explain why the PKK should not be overlooked in this cold war.
In the 1980s, Syria — the Soviet Union’s ally in the Middle East — offered safe haven and military and logistic support to the PKK in a bid to destabilize NATO’s flank country, Turkey, among other objectives. In the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse, the Russian Federation — irked by the pan-Turkist winds blowing in Turkey and the support Chechen separatists enjoyed there — allowed the PKK to operate legally on its soil. The group was even allocated a "culture and education camp" near Yaroslavl, northeast of Moscow. No wonder Russia became the first country where PKK founder Abdullah Ocalan — now jailed on a prison island in the Sea of Marmara — sought refuge in 1998 after leaving his longtime safe haven in Syria, under Turkish pressure.
The PKK is again part of the Syrian equation today, though in a different form. The PKK’s Syrian offshoot, the Democratic Union Party (PYD), has emerged as the undisputed, dominant power in Rojava (the term Kurds use to refer to western Kurdistan in Syria), and a well-proven force in the fight against the Islamic State (IS). Ankara, however, sees the PYD as a threat, wary that the Kurdish autonomy in Rojava threatens Turkey’s territorial integrity.
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