CENTRAL NEWS
More than a week after the former leader of ISIS killed himself during a joint operation by SDF and US special forces, Erdogan announced that they had “captured Baghdadi’s wife and didn’t make a fuss like [US and SDF].”
“Similarly, we also captured his sister and brother-in-law in Syria,” he said in a speech at Ankara University.
Evidently these “captures” are window-dressing efforts to conceal what little remains ambiguous as to the relationship between Erdogan and ISIS. It is common knowledge that within the organisation of ISIS, women have close to no intelligence value -even if she is one of Baghdadi’s wives. Considering that the same rule applies also to Baghdadis sister, many questions have surfaced. The supposed captures, unconfirmed by anyone other than Erdogan himself, come just days after Baghdadi was caught in a house located within the range of Turkey’s surveillance. Baghdadi had lived 5km away from the Turkish occupation border, in this house for 5 months.
So, if Erdogan’s proxies are able to locate the women closest to Baghdadi within just a few days, we can righteously assume that Erdogan was aware that the world’s most wanted fugitive, the Islamic State chief who oversaw a UK-sized empire involved in slavery, torture, lurid videotaped executions and terrorist violence in an estimated 40 countries, was sat on his front porch. The leading question, “why” has many dimensions, some straightforward, and some not so much.
The Turkish Republic of ISIS
Erdogan’s ideology of hostility towards non-muslims is not as barefaced as it is towards the peoples of Kurdistan. According to statistics of a Turkey-based survey company, over 9% of the public of Turkey agree with the ISIS ideology, while 4% approve of the massacres and beheadings practised by ISIS. 7 of the 8 parties represented in the Grand National Assembly of Turkey, all apart from HDP, are either nationalist or radical Islamist.
ISIS detainment strategies
According to the data of the Turkish Ministry of Justice in 2015, the number of ISIS gangs in Turkish prisons was 41. The number of gangs detained in the same year was 2,800. In 2016, 4,605 people were detained as ISIS suspects, only 513 of them were arrested. Only 7 of these people were sentenced.
In 2017, 2,300 ISIS members had been detained, with 470 arrested. Only 28 of these people were convicted.
Following increased pressure by the international public opinion, in 2018 and the Turkish state seemed to increase the number slightly. Of 3,015 detained ISIS members, 1,161 were arrested.
Using ISIS detentions as a free-card for invasion, The Turkish state claimed it arrested 4,517 ISIS members. In preparations of the occupation operation in Northern Syria, the number of ISIS detained by the Turkish state was claimed to be 13,696 in only the past 10 months.
From 2015 to 2019, the number of ISIS members detained by the Turkish state was 26,466. Considering that 13,696 of these members were detained only in the past 10 months, this would mean that it took the Turkish state 4 years to detain 12,770 ISIS members. The number of sentenced, while unofficial, is assumed to be drastically low.
A total of 21,949 ISIS members were officially untried by the Turkish judiciary.
Anti-Western sentiments
As is known, Erdogan was never a pro-Western or democratic leader. Once he infamously said on July 14, 1996, “Democracy is like a train: when you reach your destination, you get off.” He was never shy about his views of Western values and democracy. In 1997 as the mayor of Istanbul while he was addressing his followers in the U.S., Erdogan openly said that democracy was never his objective, but rather a tool for him to advance Islamist Civilizations.
Erdogan’s rhetoric at the beginning of his career and during his terms as the leader of the AKP and the Prime Minister of Turkey was consistent with his anti-Western sentiments stemming from his former and current political Islamist party’s ideologies.
While Erdogan was not outspoken about his anti-Western stance up until 2014, his animosity towards the West, particularly the United States, has been a major part of his thinking. It is based on the teachings of Necmettin Erbakan who was the founder of the Welfare Party where Erdogan started his political career. It is also imperative to understand that the background of this hostility and mistrust dates back to some Turkish intellectuals’ reaction to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, portraying the West as the demolisher of the Islamic Caliphate.
Additionally, throughout the early seventies, first Necmettin Erbakan and then Erdogan and his inner circle had close interactions and collaborations with a variety of political Islamist groups including the Muslim Brotherhood who deeply affected their belief systems.
According to Dr Lorenzo Vidino, the Director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University and an expert on political Islamist movements, “Erdoğan’s ties to the Brotherhood go back to the 1970s, when he was one of the more trusted political pupils of Necmettin Erbakan, the father of Islamism in Turkey. According to Vidino, Muslim Brotherhood branches in the Gulf helped support Erbakan and Turkey’s Islamists in this era when they faced repression from the secular establishment.”
With all cards in the open and all faces exposed, Erdogan’s occupation attempts in Northern Syria is an embodiment of this hostility. Aware that this last move will be the end of him, the dictator continues to strut his way through his last battle against the world. With a raft of new American sanctions, an embargo on European arms sales, the indictment of a state-owned Turkish bank, threats to isolate Turkey within NATO, and a rise in global sympathy for the Kurdish cause: it has become apparent that this war is not over the threat caused by the insignificant number of PKK fighters in Northern Syria.
Pipelineistan
But this war does not derive from pure hostility. As we had analysed before, the official ‘pipelineistan‘ theories are defunct. Yet, this theory is only formally defunct. All official pipeline projects to the interest of Turkey; the Turkstream, the Four Seas, and the Nabucco are worth less than the drawing boards they have not progressed from. With existing pipes doomed by the politics of the Middle East and North Africa, a small calculation confirmed that if the proven oil reserves of neighbouring Iran and Iraq are some of the largest in the world, the Syrian oil reserves would offer much more as they remain largely untouched and undiscovered due to war. And then came ISIS, claiming a religious caliphate which coincidentally happened to be on the world’s oil reservoir.
With a wealthy neighbour and a suffering wallet, Erdogan would begin to plot.
Slumpflation
Turkey experienced one of the worst economic downturns in its history following the record devaluation of the lira, which lost 28 percent of its value in 2018, the Turkish economy reached bankruptcy for the first time in a decade. GDP per capita slipped to $9,632, cancelling all gains made since 2007. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate hit a nine-year high in December at 13.5 percent. Coupled with consumer price inflation that exceeded 20 percent the previous year, the country entered “slumpflation” in 2019.
With ongoing deals between Ankara and Moscow, it has been disclosed that Turkey is currently close to reaching a deal for 48 units of Su-35 warplanes costing between $50-70 million each. The end damage of the purchase is expected to cost between $2,400,000,000 (13,782,480,000 TL) and $3,360,000,000 (19,295,472,000 TL).
Analysed by Washington-based FDD (The Foundation for Defense of Democracies) research institute; Turkey’s transition to an executive presidential system in June 2018, is a determining factor of the political and economic risk in Turkey.
“Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has consolidated power, amassing executive, legislative, and judicial authorities, and undermined the autonomy of the Central Bank of Turkey, the statistical bureau TurkStat, and other regulatory agencies. This has led to economic decisions increasingly shaped by a small, insular clique driven by self-interest and conspiracy theories.
To make matters worse, Erdogan has continued to pivot Turkey away from the transatlantic alliance and its values, acting in an increasingly adversarial manner toward the U.S. and the European Union. The Turkish president has pursued greater coordination with authoritarian countries, including Russia, Iran, and Venezuela. He has also provided support to a range of violent non-state actors.
Ankara’s pursuit of “hostage diplomacy” by imprisoning Western nationals to extract concessions from their governments, coupled with a worsening record on human rights and religious freedom, increasingly have drawn the ire of American lawmakers.
Thus, the likelihood of U.S. sanctions on Turkey is now higher than ever. Sanctions could exacerbate Turkey’s already troubled economy and could take the country beyond recession to a full-blown crisis.”
Given the dire economic crisis, Erdogan’s urgency for the revival of ISIS becomes easier to fathom.
Organised crime by Turkish president
In 2014, Gordon Duff had shared: “Now there are a series of pipelines across Turkey, more than anyone knows, some closer to the Iraqi-Syrian border than the typical drawings you’ll see, that offload into the Mediterranean and take oil to places like the United States for sale.”
In 2015, Russian Deputy Defense Minister Anatoly Antonov supported this point by disclosing that Turkey is the main consumer of illegal oil from Syria and Iraq, drawing attention to Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his family’s direct involvement in the oil business of ISIS.
“The Erdogan family and their friends run organized crime in Austria, in Germany, in the Netherlands… which includes human trafficking on a massive scale, narcotics trafficking [and] credit card fraud” said Antonov.
In respect to the illicit oil trade, he explained, ISIS collaborates with a trucking and marine transportation company owned by Erdogan’s son, Bilal, that smuggles oil from Syria and Iraq into Turkey for export abroad.
Russian President Vladimir Putin had at the time received additional evidence that oil from fields controlled by ISIS was being transported to Turkey on an industrial scale. Elizabeth Gould and Paul Fitzgerald had shared that “Moscow’s evidence against Turkish officials and Erdogan is both substantial and convincing.”
