Dr. Elizabeth H. Prodromou is affiliate scholar and co-chair of the Southeastern Europe Study
Group at Harvard University and served (2004-2012) as vice chair of the United
States Commission on International Religious Freedom.
The Turkish Parliament's green light last week for
cross-border operations and the Turkish General Staff's deployment of armored
units f or possible engagement with Syria are ominous signs of the escalation
of the Syrian civil war into a regional war that will have catastrophic
consequences for those immediately at risk—namely, unarmed civilians in Syria.
The United States has welcomed Turkey's leading role in trying to find a
solution to the Syrian quagmire. But the moment has come for Washington to
be clear that Ankara's assistance can be optimized through diplomacy and
humanitarian relief and should absolutely exclude unilateral military action.
What has become a proxy war between the despotic
Assad regime's Syrian Armed Forces and the militarized jihadist-Salafist groups
funded by Iran and Saudi Arabia, has already produced many thousands of civilian
casualties in Syria and has highlighted the serious threat to the survival of
the country's Christian minority. Turkey is a country with a founding history
of genocide against its Christian population and continuing privations against
its various religious minorities, a scorched-earth policy against more than
3,000 Kurdish villages in southeast Turkey, and continuing military
occupation of the northern portion of European Union member-state Cyprus—all
of which stand as stark cautionary tales against any Turkish military
involvement in Syria.
Ankara's priorities are regional order and Turkish
military hegemony in the Near East, which means the elimination of Syrian
Kurdish positions. Turkey also aims to position itself as the leading
Islamic power in the Middle East, which means bolstering Ankara's bona fides
against other Sunni leaderships and versus Shiite alternatives. Neither of
these goals is consistent with rule-of-law gov ernance and the protection of
endangered minority populations in the region, much less with a sustainable
security environment for Israel and a stable, post-Assad Syria.
Turkey's recent actions should catalyze a
long-overdue international response, preferably one endorsed by the United
Nations, in the form of a collective security umbrella and humanitarian relief
plan that can stabilize the Turkish-Syrian border. Given Ankara's brutal human
rights record against its own Kurdish civilian population and its efforts to
erase the Christian population in Turkish-occupied Cyprus, any solution to
the Syrian problem must quickly move to preclude unilateral military action by
Turkey.
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