Suddenly and without advance notice, Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has performed a 180 degree shift in its relationship with Baghdad. As though bowing to the inevitable, and to avoid drawing out its embarrassment, Ankara has now switched its tone towards its Iraqi neighbour from one of fiery animosity to one of resigned calm. As a result, observers have been asking why the AKP had been increasing its rhetoric towards Baghdad over the last two years to fever pitch, going to the point of threatening to sever diplomatic relations. Baghdad had responded with equal vehemence, most recently by refusing to grant Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu and the chairman of the rightwing Nationalist Movement Party Devlet Bahçeli permission to visit Kirkuk and the Turkmen regions in Iraq. This was how bilateral relations looked only 10 days ago: on the one side stood Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Davutoglu, the architect of the AKP's “zero-problem” foreign policy, which has only courted regional problems, and on the other stood the Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki. However, just as the Syrian crisis had been the prime cause of the deterioration in the relations between Ankara and Baghdad after March 2011, recent developments in that crisis have compelled Turkey's prime minister to modify his attitude toward his Iraqi counterpart, whom Erdogan had earlier dubbed a “sectarian dictator”. The sudden shift in policy has come as part of a series of foreign policy failures for the Turkish government, whose dreams had been pinned on the rapid demise of President Bashar Al-Assad in Syria. However, this was not to be, and not only is the Syrian president still ensconced in Damascus, he has been steadily gaining ground, rebuilding his strength and enhancing his prospects of clinging to power. To Erdogan and the AKP government, which had dragged Turkey into the Syrian quagmire, this has come as bad news. More galling still, they have been compelled to watch Al-Assad gloat as extremist Islamist groups, most notably the Al-Qaeda affiliate the Nusra Front, have turned on towns on the Turkish side of the 800km border that Syria shares with Turkey. The Syrian Kurds, for whom Erdogan had little affection until two years ago but whom he subsequently supported with military equipment and Qatari money to help them in their campaign against Al-Assad, have now also set their sights on ambitions that could jeopardise Turkish territorial unity. The English-language version of the Turkish daily Hÿrriyet recently underscored the alarm felt in Ankara at the spectre of the establishment of an interim Kurdish administration in northern Syria preparatory to the creation of a Kurdish-controlled entity on a portion of that war-torn country just across from areas in south-eastern Turkey that have large populations of ethnically Kurdish Turks. The US, a Turkish ally, is also uneasy about prospects that could fuel separatist tendencies in Anatolia. “We are disturbed by reports concerning the declaration by Kurds in Syria of an area of autonomous rule,” said US State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki, who added that her government would remain committed to its pledge to support Syria and its territorial integrity. However, such statements have done little to reassure Turkey's leaders, especially in the light of recent developments on the Syria front. What would the White House do if Syria were partitioned, or if a part of Syria were to secede, they have been asking. Probably nothing — apart from issuing statements of condemnation and threatening sanctions, after which all would bow to realities on the ground. It appears that the Syrian Kurds are confident that this would be the case. Saleh Muslim, co-chairman of the Democratic Federation Party (DFP) which has emerged from the ruins of the ruling Syrian Baath Party in areas that for all practical purposes are now beyond Al-Assad's control, said that “the creation of an interim [autonomous] administration serves the interests and needs of the Syrian Kurds. Preparations are being made at present, and they are serious in their intent, to create the structures for this administration. Once this is accomplished, it will be possible to hold elections within three months.” Turkey's leaders have been incensed as a result, and they have described the moves as “madness”, accusing the DFP, the Syrian wing of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), of breaking its promises. Earlier this month, Hÿrriyet quoted Muslim as saying that “we want friendly relations with Turkey. We do not want independence or a federal system.” Observers have been asking what has happened since then to change the situation. Ankara had halted its support for jihadist extremists in Syria, and it has not been clear why the DFP now seems to support the secessionist trend. It is no coincidence that this development has occurred as the peace process that Erdogan had initiated with the Kurdish leaders in Turkey has run aground. Signs of imminent failure were already evident three weeks ago, when Cemil Bebek, a prominent PKK leader currently stationed in the Qandil region in northern Iraq, warned that “the process that began with the [Kurdish] celebration of Nairuz at the end of March” would collapse if the government did not fulfil its pledges. He said that the package of reforms that the government had recently announced had fallen short of the minimum demands of the Kurdish people and had called into question the possibility of a peaceful resolution to the four-decade long Kurdish crisis. Bebek also said that officials in Ankara were conspiring with Tehran to “draw a new map of the region in which there would be no place for the Kurds”. As proof of such a conspiracy, he pointed to the rise in the number of death sentences meted out against members of the Bijak, another branch of the PKK, following the recent visit of the Iranian foreign minister to Turkey and the normalisation of relations between Tehran and Ankara. Iran hoped to see renewed fighting between the Turkish army and the PKK, he said, in a statement quoted by most Turkish dailies, adding that “there is no sense whatsoever in continuing peace talks unless they respond to the Kurds' legitimate aspirations. As long as the Turkish refusal to recognise the existence of the Kurdish people persists, patchwork solutions will be of no use.” The PKK leader's veiled threat of a renewed recourse to arms escaped no one, not least the AKP leaders, who now realise their dilemma. As sincere as they may be in their desire to reach a political solution to Turkey's Kurdish question, the task appears to be beyond the powers of the Erdogan government. There is a threshold beyond which this government is reluctant to tread for fear of alienating broad sectors of public opinion that oppose what they would regard as concessions that could compromise the unity of the Turkish Republic. At the same time, Iraqi Kurdistan seems unlikely to hold the answer to the problem, in spite of the close cooperation between Ankara and Kirkuk on security and energy. It was at this stage that Iraq emerged as a possible avenue out of the fog that has been closing in on the powers-that-be in Ankara, causing them to turn to Baghdad. They realised that they could no longer afford to boycott the Iraqi government and would have to work out an accommodation with it in the hope that by turning a new leaf in the relationship they would be able to resuscitate Turkish foreign policy in a region where its previous approaches are looking increasingly moribund.
