Tal Abyad sits right along the Turkish-Syrian border in Syria’s Raqqa Province, which has been ISIS’s base of operations in Syria for two years now (the provincial capital, the city of Raqqa, is ISIS’s “capital city,” inasmuch as an unrecognized “state” can be said to have a capital). ISIS has controlled the city and its border crossing into Turkey since June 2014, but not anymore. Earlier this week a mostly Kurdish/YPG force, with some help from whatever the Free Syrian Army is these days, drove ISIS out of Tal Abyad and has claimed control of the city, albeit a “control” that’s tempered by the need to track down and disarm all the booby traps the fleeing ISIS fighters left behind. Not only is this a significant territorial defeat for ISIS right in its own backyard, but it also carries a major strategic cost, in that Tal Abyad’s border crossing was one of the main routes by which ISIS has been getting foreign recruits and supplies, plus the Kurdish takeover unites their enclaves into one contiguous region running across the northern part of Syria (an area known as Rojava).
This last reason explains why, despite the fact that it claims to oppose ISIS, Ankara is pretty miffed at this turn of events. Turkey opposes ISIS in an abstract sense, but in reality they’re pretty happy to have ISIS in Syria, fighting their two bigger worries, Assad and the Kurds. They don’t want Kurdish successes in Syria giving Turkey’s Kurds any bright ideas about autonomy. You’ve even got Turkish analysts arguing that the West has been hyping ISIS as a ruse to eventually carve out an independent Kurdish state (because the West has always been so favorable to the Kurds, obviously), and major Turkish newspapers writing that the West wants to “destroy Turkey” and that the “U.S. has chosen the Kurds instead of Turkey.” There’s even reportedly been talk of sending the Turkish army into Syria, which, if it goes in there and starts fighting the Kurds, could open up an entirely new can of worms and leave NATO allies Turkey and the US actually fighting one another (the Turkish military is supposedly resisting this idea). And here you thought we were all on the same side.
It’s hard for Turkish officials to come right out and say they prefer ISIS to the Kurds, but in this case they’ve been able to seize on the 20,000+ refugees who have crossed into Turkey to flee the fighting in Tal Abyad (which to be fair is a substantial and sudden burden that’s now been laid in Ankara’s lap) as evidence that the Kurds are ethnically cleansing the region. People running away from open warfare is not exactly a sign that they’re running away from anything other than the open warfare, though, so Turkey doesn’t have a strong case yet despite the fact that the Kurds in Kobani allegedly are engaging in some ethnic cleansing-like behaviors by preventing that city’s former residents from returning to their homes.
The Foreign Exchanges Companion 