The Turkish government has dismissed a report by American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh suggesting that the Turkish intelligence was behind a sarin gas attack in Syria last summer in cooperation with the al-Qaeda-affiliated organization al-Nusra Front. As the Syrian conflict enters its fourth year, many are questioning Turkey's role in it with some arguing that Turkey supports all factions of opposition including the radical groups and Al-Qaeda affiliated ones. The Turkish government, however, has repeatedly denied the allegations and only admitted it supports the Free Syrian Army by providing only logistical and non-lethal weapons. support. The Syrian National Council known as SNC was granted headquarters in Istanbul in 2011 and is recognized by several UN member states and was granted a seat in the Arab league in 2013. Despite Ankara's claims of not providing any arms to the rebels or to the radical groups in Syria, several reports and personalities in Syria claimed that Turkey turns a blind eye to the jihadists entering Syria from Turkish territories. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been outspoken about his wish of ridding Syria of President Bashar Al-Assad and was one of the early world leaders to call on him to resign. Following his recent sweeping win in the March 30 local elections, Erdogan declared in a post-election speech that Syria was in a state of war with Turkey. However, a recent article by the veteran and respectable investigative journalist Seymour Hersh brought a new dimension to Turkey's involvement in the Syrian conflict. Hersh argued in his latest piece for the London Review of Books published on April 6, that Turkey was behind the sarin Attack in Syria on August 21, 2013. Hersh wrote: "'We knew there were some in the Turkish government, a former senior US intelligence official, who has access to current intelligence, told me, ‘who believed they could get Assad's nuts in a vice by dabbling with a sarin attack inside Syria – and forcing Obama to make good on his red line threat.'" Hersh also maintained, citing intelligence sources, that Turkey and Saudi Arabia were producing chemical weapons that would be eventually used in Syria or handed over to the rebel groups to carry out attacks. The death toll of the August 21 chemical weapons attack was estimated at 1,500 civilians, including at least 400 children. "It seems he's relying on an unnamed source for this, and builds a narrative around what's he's being told," Eliot Higgins, an English blogger and investigator of the Syrian civil war who runs the Brown Moses blog, told Islamist Gate. "He ignores the ample evidence linking the munitions used to the Syrian military, and seems ignorant of the body of evidence that's been gathered since the attack." Hersh also referred to one incident, in which Turkish police arrested rebels in Turkey who had what was initially reported as sarin but was then claimed to be antifreeze, as an evidence of the Syrian rebels possessing chemical weapons. Higgins said that Hersh's argument lacked merit. "Anything he doesn't seem to be getting from unnamed sources has been debated to death elsewhere. For example, with the Turkish sarin arrest he doesn't question how the police were so sure they had sarin almost immediately after the arrests were made. One would assume they didn't give it a sniff to check. Until tests were done on the substance there was no way to know it contained sarin, so anything the police would have told the press would have been guess work. Hersh either ignores or doesn't appreciate this point." Some anti-government pundits accepted the article as legit and argued that the Turkish government and its premier were capable of doing such atrocity. They pointed out to a recent leaked recording of a closed-doors meeting between the Turkish Foreign Minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, and the head of the Turkish Intel, Hakan Fidal, among other government officials. The alleged recording was of a meeting regarding Turkey's Syria policy. Some argue that Fidal was heard as saying that he could fabricate an attack from within Syria in order to legitimize a Turkish strike against the Syrian government. The government decried the leaking of the recording as a threat to national security. "I don't buy this theory without seeing some concrete evidence." Ilhan Tanir, a Washington-based journalist and analyst, told Islamist Gate. "And I think it's not a coincidence that Hersh also cites the recent tape leak (he gets the tape details wrong) in which top officials of Ankara discussed kind of a false-flag operation into Syria. Hersh's accusations are much more complicated here than the ones allegedly discussed by the Turkish officials. And he ignores all the body of evidence published for months pointing the Assad regime for the 21st August CW attack." Other Syria and Turkey watchers and security experts expressed dismay over Hersh's article. They argued that Turkey could not possibly be capable of producing chemical weapons. "The Hersh story belies common sense and suggests that Turkey was able to manufacture a ton of sarin - no easy feat - and then smuggle that sarin into Syria," Aaron Stein, an Associate Fellow at RUSI and the nonproliferation program manager at the Center for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies in Istanbul, told Islamist Gate. "That Sarin is then loaded into volcano rockets that were fired from government controlled areas towards rebel positions. As Dan Kaszeta [security and CBRN specialist] has pointed out, there are "lose correlations in chemistry (such as hexamine, a possible sarin additive) between the trace evidence found in the field and the inventories disclosed by the OPCW [the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons]". Stein added that therefore "Hersh's article is at odds with science and common sense and suggests a deeper misunderstanding of Ankara's Syria policy."
