Turkey Attacks Kurds in Syria Backed by US

We are soldiers. We are the police.

Like other conservative voters in Turkey’s pious, Anatolian heartland, 55-year-old Yasin deserted the ruling AK Party in June parliamentary elections, fearing it had gone soft on Kurdish militants after years of peace talks.

Wuthrich: Voters in Turkey have long despised coalition governments and crave the stability that comes from single-party majority governments, but the majority of Turkey’s citizens appear to also not want the AKP to be that single-party majority they dream of. “But if that weren’t enough, Demirtas has this charm”. The hero of the majority party, rushing from election victory to election victory, the father of a “new Turkey”, could not contend with the failure of the majority of voters to continue following him.

Turkey is muddling through bleak times. Kurds charge that the government failed to secure the events, while Erdogan and other AKP leaders alleged — without offering evidence — that the bombings were planned by a “cocktail” of Turkish enemies that included Islamist IS and the staunchly secular Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK.

Moreover, Turkey is the leading country in Europe for the number of work-place accidents, third worldwide, after Algeria and El Salvador, according to the ILO: on average three workers are killed and 172 are injured every day.

Turkey is now hosting nearly 2 million Syrian refugees. The Turkish lira is skidding just slightly above an all-time low.

This Sunday’s elections will take place in a climate of social and political tension. More recently, a pro-Erdogan columnist for the daily Yeni Akit, Abdurrahman Dilipak, said that Erdogan would become the new caliph once he has won the executive presidential powers he much desires. A few even call him the “Turkish Barack Obama”. But critics say he is more like Gerry Adams – the leader of the political wing of the Irish Republican Army – serving as a stalking horse for the ambitions of the outlawed PKK and its jailed guerrilla leader Abdullah Ocalan. After hopes that a cease-fire deal between the government and PKK Kurdish separatists in the east would finally bring peace, fighting erupted again over the summer.

As his brother went to jail for 12 years, he began a small law practice in Diyarbakir with a focus on human rights cases.

“You give them a finger, they take your arm”, he said, referring to the PKK, which has carried out a three-decade insurgency for greater Kurdish autonomy.

Suruç is close to the Turkish-Syrian border and the victims in the July horror were leftist activists who organized to rebuild the Syrian Kurdish town of Kobane, liberated from ISIS control at the beginning of this year.

But others describe a more fraught relationship that has developed between the PKK’s leadership and Demirtas – one that prompted them to engage Turkish forces after a two-year truce. Veli Sirin is European director of the Center for Islamic Pluralism. “That’s why they escalate. There are still projects in progress, we have a duty to follow them through”. Erdogan has lashed out at the HDP, calling it the political arm of the PKK, which Turkey and most Western countries consider a terrorist organization. In one such speech, he said that there is a “360 degree difference” between the Islam he defends and the Islam that the Islamic State defends.

Conversely, a share of the vote below 40 percent will be seen as a psychological blow to Erdogan and indication that his popularity is in an “irreversible downward trajectory”, Chatham House associate fellow Fadi Hakura said, adding that the president is intrinsically tied up with the AKP in the mind of the electorate.

Demirtas was the flawless spokesperson for this strategy.

“In the June 7 election, the main theme was disarmament”.

Baluken, part of the HDP delegation which visited Ocalan on his prison island of Imrali during the talks, said the process was in “intensive care” but emphasized the need to revive it. “Turkish society and the Kurdish people expect a rapid return to the peace process and the negotiating table”, he said.

“Some here believe Erdogan is playing with fire on the Kurdish issue and that once this thing gets out of hand it will be much worse than in the 1990s”, he said.

Although the PYD would probably avoid confrontation with Turkey, an AKP coalition with the nationalist MHP would raise the likelihood of a full-scale intervention against the PYD. But reformers in Europe and Turkey see the negotiating process as an effective way of pressing political and economic change. The Turkish government denies it supports Islamic State sympathizers, tacitly or otherwise, or that attacks were not properly investigated.