Islamist Turkey’s Double Game with ISIS

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. He is completing a book on the international challenges America faces in the 21st century.

Erdogan’s Islamist Turkey was until recently tied to ISIS. While the usual talking heads are claiming that Turkey is afraid, it has a huge military and has nothing to fear from ISIS.

It just likes what ISIS is doing. It doesn’t want to let it get too close, but it’s happy to see it mess up Syria and Iraq for the Jihad.

The regime of Turkey’s chief political Islamist, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and its alleged links to extremist groups in Syria and Iraq, most specifically the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) — also known as ISIS and the IS — has been put under closer scrutiny now that US President Barack Obama has unveiled a plan of action to degrade the capabilities of this terrorist organization by enlisting the help of its allies and partners in NATO and the Middle East.

The extent, if any, to which the political Islamist government in Turkey has aided and abetted the blossoming of radical groups as part of an overall strategy to shore up opposition against the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria or to weaken the now-defunct Nouri al-Maliki government in Iraq is not known. What we do know is that Turkey has clearly emerged as the front-line battle state against vicious al-Qaeda-type terror groups, including ISIL, whose cells have been spreading across Turkish provinces like a cancer, waiting to knock out healthy tissues one by one.

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