Turkey may have received support from Nato partners after it shot down a Russian jet, but its resolve to fight Islamic State terror is being seriously disputed
The key fact is that the Russian plane, by Turkey's own admission, was in Turkish airspace for precisely 17 seconds. That's a little less time than it takes to read this paragraph aloud. The Turks shot it down anyway — and their allies publicly backed them, as loyal allies must. Nato Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg declared: “We stand in solidarity with Turkey and support the territorial integrity of our Nato ally, Turkey.” President Barack Obama called his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to assure him that the United States supported Turkey's right to defend its sovereignty. But privately, they must have been cursing Mr Erdogan. They know what he's up to.
According to the Russian radar data, it were the Turkish planes that crossed into Syrian territory. In this version of the story, the Russian planes were following a well-established route just south of the Turkish border, probably turning into a bomb run against Syrian rebels in latakia province. How strange that there was a Turkish TV crew in northern Syria, positioned just right to film the incident. (The Russsian plane crashed four kilometres inside Syria.)
Either way, it seems quite clear that President Erdogan really wanted to shoot down a Russian aircraft, and that the Turkish pilots were under orders to do so if they could find even the slightest pretext. So why would Mr Erdogan want to do thatIJ
Russian President Vladimir President Putin said bitterly that Mr Erdogan and his colleagues were “accomplices of terrorists”. That's hard to deny: Mr Erdogan is so eager to see Syria's President Bashar al-Assad overthrown that he left the Turkish-Syrian border open for four years so that recruits and supplies could reach the Syrian rebel groups, notably including the Islamic State.
Mr Putin also observed: “We have long been recording the movement of a large amount of oil and petroleum products to Turkey from IS-occupied territories. This explains the significant funding the terrorists are receiving.”
Black-market oil is the Islamic State's largest source of revenue, and almost all of it goes to Turkey — which could not happen without the Turkish Government's active connivance. And when the Nusra Front, Al-Qaeda's affiliate in Syria, was driving Mr Assad's forces back in northwestern Syria last spring, Turkey jammed the Syrian Army's telecommunications to help the rebels win.
Mr Erdogan is utterly determined that Mr Assad must go, and he doesn't really care if the latter’s successors are Islamist extremists. But he also wants to ensure that there is no new Kurdish state on Turkey's southern border. When Mr Erdogan committed the Turkish Air Force to the Syrian war in July, he explained it to the United States as a decision to fight against the Islamic State, but in fact Turkey has made only a token handful of strikes against the group. Almost all of Mr Erdogan's bombs have actually fallen on the Turkish Kurds of the PKK (who had been observing a ceasefire with the Turkish Government for the past four years), and above all on the Syrian Kurds.
Mr Erdogan has two goals: to ensure the destruction of Assad's regime, and to prevent the creation of a new Kurdish state in Syria. He was making some progress on both objectives - and then along came the Russians in September and saved the Syrian army from defeat, at least for the moment.
Worse yet, Mr Putin's strategy turns out to quite pragmatic, and even rather attractive to the US despite all the ritual anti-Russian propaganda emitted by Washington. He wants a ceasefire in Syria that will leave everybody where they are now — except the Islamic State, which they can all then concentrate on destroying.
This strategy is now making some headway in the Vienna ceasefire talks, but it is utterly abhorrent to Mr Erdogan because it would leave Mr Assad in power in Damascus, and give the Syrian Kurds time to consolidate their new state.