Ankara recently made a move towards repelling Islamic State group (IS) in an attempt to foil the threat near the Turkish borders, yet the campaign has more to do than just fighting extremists. Kurds are not safe and it would sound gullible to think otherwise. The Syria intervention has long been a prospect and a decoy. Turkey surely couldn't rely on a NATO resolution in creating a buffer zone but it managed to reel the US for gearing up to rout the IS group from a strip of Syrian territory along the Turkish border, a plan – as highlighted by The Herald News - "that opens the possibility of a safe haven for tens of thousands of displaced Syrians but one that also sets up a potential conflict with U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish forces in the area."
After a suspected Islamic State suicide bomber that killed dozens of youths in the town of Suruc, Turkey cried vengeance. It launched airstrikes on IS targets and carried out a number of arrests of suspected militants in Istanbul and other cities.
The PKK has stirred a rather long insurgency in southeastern Turkey, yet maintains rear bases in northern Iraq and Ankara regards the main Syrian Kurdish group fighting IS — the Democratic Union Party (PYD) — as the PKK's Syrian branch, according to The Sun Daily.
After its defense of Kobane, Turkey was clearly driving autonomous PYD to take the offensive assisted by the coalition airstrikes and Syrian opposition elements. In July 2015, PYD captured the town of Tal Abyad, connecting two of its self, as reported in an Edem report. Turkey has launched its campaigns against the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and IS together in what they called a "war on terror," despite the animosity already brewing between the secular PKK and Islamist IS.
Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said that Turkey would press ahead with military operations against the outlawed (PKK) until the group disarmed. However, Turkey's war does seem like a transparent Trojan horse. And, to further twist the knife in the wound, U.S. State Department spokesperson John Kirby supported Turkey by saying it had a "right to defend itself" against the PKK, which the US already considers a terrorist organization.
According to Today's Zaman newspaper, the Peoples' Protection Units (YPG), armed wing of PYD, has been the only partner so far on the ground for the US-led alliance against IS in northern Syria. But the advances by Syria's Kurds have alarmed Turkey, which fears they will stir separatist sentiment among its own Kurdish community; a paranoid thought at best, a vicious crack on minorities at worst.
