Turkey has never made any secret of its hatred of Brett McGurk, the prominent former State Department official who resigned in protest last month over President Donald Trump’s decision to pull out US troops from northeastern Syria.

Turkey’s Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu had publicly called on Washington to sack the man. A Turkish prosecutor weighed a criminal complaint calling for his arrest on terror charges. In private conversations lubricated with expensive Scotch, Turkish officials wished him an even darker fate. In Ankara’s eyes, McGurk was the main architect of the US-led coalition’s alliance with Turkey’s enemy, the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), in the battle against the Islamic State.

It's a measure of just how deep the anger against McGurk burns that even after he stepped down, TRT International, the Turkish state broadcaster’s English-language propaganda channel, ripped into the Columbia-trained lawyer today. Was McGurk “the new Lawrence of Arabia?,” TRT asked in reference to the controversial British officer-cum-archaeologist and then spy who encouraged the Arabs to rise up against the Ottomans around the First World War. Recalling McGurk’s long years dealing primarily with Iraq starting with the US occupation in 2003, TRT contended that the Iraqi Constitution was "one of his creations” and that "many experts think” it had “divided the country along ethnic and sectarian lines” and “dragged the country back into the path of violence.” Not only that: The Kurds of Iraq had — gasp — “secured a legal status.”

It's an interesting accusation. Turkey is arguably among the biggest enablers of the Iraqi Kurds’ near independent status because it allows the Kurds to sell their oil through a purpose-built pipeline running from oil fields in Iraqi Kurdistan to loading terminals on the Turkish Mediterranean coast. Baghdad insists it is a breach of its sovereignty. Turkish leaders, most notably late President Turgut Ozal, have expressed interest in reclaiming parts of Mosul on the grounds that it was unlawfully wrested by the British from the Ottomans.