Turkey seeks to use ISIL card to crush Kurds: Pundit

Press TV has conducted an interview with Kevork Elmassian, an academic and political commentator in Beirut, to share his thoughts on Turkish airstrikes against ISIL hideouts in Syria.

The following is a rough transcription of the interview.

Press TV: Are there any surprises here, we have been speaking about Turkish connections with ISIL for quite a while now?

Elmassian: I think there is no need to read the British media or the western mainstream media in order to prove that Turkey was involved in the Syrian crisis since the beginning of 2011 crisis.

Turkey since the beginning bet on the horse of the radical Islamists in Syria regardless of their background or ideology. First of all they supported the Muslim Brotherhood brigades but then they were proved that these armed groups are not able to fight the Syrian army. Therefore Turkey relied on a different strategy.

The strategy was to attract multi-national terrorists coming from Central Asia, from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Chechnya and also from the [Persian] Gulf states and to all import them and send them into Syria. These groups were the back bone, created the back bone of al-Nusra Front because most of the so-called emirs of the al-Nusra Front were foreign terrorists and then they formed ISIS, the so-called Islamic state in Syria.

At the current moment Turkey’s priority is the Kurds, are not ISIS. We can see that Turkey is bombing Syria, the Syrian territories and they claim that they are chasing the ISIS terrorists but the truth is that Turkey’s priority is to avoid any kind of Kurdish presence on the borders with Turkey because the terrorists were there in last couple of years and Turkey did not bomb them. In contradiction, on the contrary they send them more weapons, more men power in order to advance against the Kurds and against the Syrian army.

At the current moment I believe Erdogan will use this card. He will claim that he is fighting terrorism and at the same time he will crush the Kurds and he wants to come out from this battle as a hero. We all know that in the previous parliamentary elections, Erdogan lost a majority in the parliament so he can use this in order to boost his image again, his popularity amongst his people because at the current moment all the Turkish reports indicate that they will be in early parliamentary elections and Davutoglu will fail to form a unity government between the opposition and the AKP (Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party).

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