At first it was to clear Turkey’s border of the Islamic State (IS). Then it was to roll back the Syrian Kurdish militants of the People’s Protection Units (YPG). Today brought a brand-new explanation for why Turkish troops entered northern Syria in August to team up with opposition Free Syrian Army (FSA) rebels: “Why did we enter? We do not covet Syrian soil,” President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in Istanbul at the Inter-Parliamentary Jerusalem Platform Symposium. “We entered there to end the rule of tyrant [Bashar] al-Assad. [We didn’t enter] for any other reason.”
Coming as Syrian regime forces appeared poised to regain control of rebel-held neighborhoods in eastern Aleppo, Erdogan’s comments suggest that Turkey will not be pulling the plug on its Syrian rebel proxies anytime soon. In fact, if his words are to be taken at face value, they signal an even deeper Turkish military engagement in Syria, pitting Turkish forces simultaneously against IS, the YPG and the regime.
This would leave Turkey at odds with the US-led coalition — which considers the YPG its top ally against IS — and with Russia, which wants Turkey to end its support for the FSA rebels. It would also inevitably raise the specter of more body bags coming home to Turkey. Added to all this, Erdogan’s statement belies recent speculation that Turkey was abandoning its long-running campaign to unseat Assad and was sending out feelers to Damascus, if only to join forces against the Kurds.
Since entering Jarablus in August, Turkish troops have succeeded in clearing the border of IS and have pushed further south, capturing the IS stronghold of Dabiq. Over the past month, however, they have — together with their rebel allies — been unsuccessfully struggling to dislodge the YPG from areas around the hotly contested IS-held town of al-Bab. Apparently, Ankara believed it had won Russian backing for that plan. The Nov. 24 deaths of at least four Turkish soldiers near al-Bab, in what the Turkish General Staff initially described as an airstrike by Syrian jets, threw cold water on such notions amid speculation that Russia might have been behind the attack.
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