When Turkey intervened in northern Syria five months ago, it claimed it had no designs on its former Ottoman dominion and that its only goals were to cleanse its borders of the Islamic State and to eliminate what it called the terrorist threat posed by the People’s Protection Units (YPG), the US-allied Kurdish militia that is paradoxically the most effective force against the jihadis.
But Syrians who saw a video of a new police force trained and equipped by Turkey might very well think otherwise.