Since the formation of Syria, Turkey has kept a close eye on political changes in its neighbourhood and the position of the Kurds. Turkey is taking advantage of various opportunities to achieve strategic aims. This has become easier with multiple excuses to fight the danger they believe comes from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
Approximately three weeks into Turkey’s incursion into the Syrian Kurdish enclave of Afrin and after several years of preparation for it, the leader of the military operation was surprised he could not advance despite intensive military air and artillery offensives. It seems the operation is doomed.
However, the issue is not simply military success or failure. This campaign has become a climactic project for Turkey with multiple aims. It is a project for political glory and greater ideological conquest – this is what Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said he wanted on January 24, wearing a military outfit and talking to his generals in the operation theatre room in Hatay province.
“You are here to change history and bring back the nation’s glory,” Erdogan told them.
Turkey now has a culture that advocates restoring historical domination in the Middle East, accompanied by war, with demographic and political changes.
It is not an exaggeration to say Operation Olive Branch was not born in the last two years. It is the child of many factors of recent Turkish energy and unification of the Turkish opposition, the nationalist MHP and the CHP with Erdogan’s AKP as well as religious players — recall preachers in mosques praying for the success of the operation.
Turkish media has been using the term kizil elma, meaning ‘red apple’ in its coverage of the Afrin operation. The term is an expression symbolizing long terms goals which united the Turkish tribes and the Mamelukes across history. It is a code for lands that have been selected to be invaded and controlled.
After Istanbul was conquered by Mohammed al-Fatah in 1453, kizil elma symbolized control of St. Peter’s church in Rome. In the Sulaiman al-Kanoni era, it symbolized control of Vienna and Rome.
During Operation Olive Branch, in widely-shared video clip, a Turkish soldier was asked, ‘What is your destination?’ He answered ‘kizil elma.’
The Afrin operation can be seen as the second stage of Turkey’s Euphrates Shield operation. What has been done within this operation reveals the real connection between the two phases and confirms that Turkey wants to occupy Afrin.
Since 2016, several Turkish ministers and officials have said they will build new cities in Syrian lands subject to control by the Free Syrian Army (FSA). Between August 2016 and March 2017, nearly 2,000 kilometers of land have been grabbed, from Jarablus to Aziz. They have built housing estates to settle hundreds of thousands of families loyal to Turkey, especially Turkmen tribes. The population has increased fivefold in these areas. In one year the population jumped from 48,000 to 236,000 according to a Turkish source, and to 500,000 according to others.
They have developed the area and recruited 6,000 Turkish teachers who were given intensive training by the Turkish authorities to teach Turkish language. Branches of Turkish post offices in three cities (Jarablus, al-Rahay, and Aziz) link them to Turkey.
In effect, it is a Turkish pocket within Syria where locals are recruited and others are brought in from inside and outside Syria. They have also trained militants under the supervision of Turkish special forces to transform 5,000 of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) into “police.”
More importantly, the Turkish government has pushed 30 armed groups to unite within a National Army, setting this up on December 30, 2017. Its last steps were to expand inside the Euphrates region and attack Afrin.
During all this, Jawad Abu Hatab, the interim Syrian opposition leader, said their priorities were to protect the Euphrates Shield region from the Syrian regime and other organisations like ISIS, the PYD, and PKK, according to state-run Anadolu Agency.
The Turkish writer, Fehim Tastekin, revealed another angle in Al Monitor on May 29, 2017, writing of Turkey’s wish to make demographic changes in this region on its borders, possibly with the idea of annexation.
It became clear that the Turkish army evicted residents of 70 Kurdish villages and brought in opposition members and their families. They were brought by Turkey from very far away. The new settlers are Turkmen who ran away from Tel Afar in Iraq, or came from Central Asia, and other poor Turkish cities, as well as some fighters and their families from the al-War neighbourhood in Homs.
If we link what the Turkish government has done in the region of Euphrates Shield between Jarablus and Aziz with Erdogan’s talk on the percentage of Kurds in Afrin and claims that most of the Kurds in Afrin migrated from other cities, then his intentions become clear: the resettlement of three million Syrian refugees.
We can prognosticate the nature of this substantial Turkish project, a desire to reclaim what is believed to be ‘greater Turkey,’ lost when the Ottoman Empire fell. The aim of the operation in Afrin is to start a new Turkish settlement and repeat the north Cyprus experience (equal to Afrin in area) in patches stretching from east of the Euphrates, even to the south of Kassab, all the way west to the Mediterranean Sea.
It is not unlikely that Turkey will achieve its aims in phases, in agreement with regional and international powers. It succeeded in controlling 2,000 square-kilometres during the Euphrates Shield operation and it is about to combine the Afrin region, which is another 3,000 square-kilometres, and, perhaps, parts of Latakia and Idlib.
This is an achievable goal as long as Syria continues to be a battlefield for geopolitical experiments and if the West does nothing to prevent the land grab and demographic changes similar to what Europe experienced in 1938.
The West must step in and right many of the wrongs as much of the difficulty in this region is due to the European disposition of territory in the aftermath of the First World War.
Azad Ahmed Ali is a Syrian Kurdish academic. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw.
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