Turkey “should be playing nice,” said Merve Tahiroglu, research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. She was a guest on Rudaw’s The Washington Perspective on May 3, 2019.
All these issues are “part of the same set of negotiations” between the US and Turkey, she explained.
Because they are so tied up together, and given each government’s priorities, the Kurds of northern Syria just might benefit.
The United States formed a strategic military alliance with the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) of northern Syria in the war against the Islamic State. The US provided military training, weapons, and air power for the YPG and the umbrella Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) that is led by the Kurdish armed group. This support enraged Ankara, which considers the YPG a branch of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has repeatedly threatened a military offensive against the YPG. The US stepped into broker a truce between its NATO ally and its partner on the ground in northern Syria. Washington and Ankara are now discussing establishing a safe zone along the border in order to assuage Turkey’s security concerns.
Relations between Turkey and the US took another blow when Ankara decided to purchase a missile defence system from Russia, the S-400. NATO members quickly called foul and Washington has said they could drop Turkey from the program developing a fifth-generation fighter jet, the F-35. The Pentagon has halted delivery of the jets to Turkey. On Friday, acting US Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan said that if Ankara goes ahead with its purchase of the S-400, then the US will move F-35 work “out of Turkey,” AFP reported.
Erdogan recently said the whole program will fail without Turkey’s involvement.
With those disputes as a background, Turkey also needs “favours” to rescue its ailing economy, said Tahiroglu.
Industry makes up a third of Turkey’s GDP, which the International Monetary Fund (IMF) predicts will shrink by 2.5 percent in 2019. Turkey’s industrial growth is heavily dependent on energy imports from Iran, said Tahiroglu.
Ankara received one of the eight six-month waivers Washington handed out when it imposed sanctions on Iran’s oil sector last November. Those waivers expired this week and will not be renewed, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has stated unequivocally.
Turkey had expected to get an extension. A day after the waiver expired, Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said it will take time to find an alternative to Iranian oil.
“It does not seem possible for us to diversify the sources of the oil we import in a short time,” he said in a press conference on May 2. “We have to renew the technology of our refineries when we buy oil from third countries. That would mean the refineries remaining shut for some time. This, of course, has a cost.”
Already in a recession, it’s a cost Turkey might not be able to afford. Ankara will have to weigh which issue it wants to press harder in talks with Washington. Tahiroglu thinks Iranian oil is more important to the Turkish government than its concerns about Syrian Kurds.
“Ultimately, it’s harder for Turkey to stop, cut down its oil imports from Iran to zero within a month or within the next three months. It’s harder for Turkey to do that than to agree to a compromise on the safe zone issue,” she said.
That compromise may already be happening. Tahiroglu cited reports that the latest proposal for the safe zone may have reduced it from a 32-kilometre-deep stretch to just eight kilometres (5 miles).
