Is Turkey preparing for an intervention in Syria?

Syrian refugees at the Reyhanli refugee camp in Turkey. (Photo: AFP)

The short answer is yes. Although it won’t happen tomorrow or without assistance especially from the United States, which is evidently first going to allow Kofi Annan to try his luck getting Iran to broker a peace deal. But Abdullah Bozkurt, a columnist at Turkey’s Today Zaman newspaper, outlines the legal case for intervention that wouldn’t require UN Security Council authorisation (read: the say-so of Russia and China). This strikes me as the most likely set of events to unfold:

What will happen if the UN cannot get its act together, and Russia and China end up using their veto powers for the third time? Ankara will probably invoke the 1998 Adana agreement with Syria to justify the military interference while calling on NATO members for the application of the Article 5 of the NATO Charter, which says that an attack on any member shall be considered to be an attack on all. The article was invoked by the US for the first time in October 2001, when NATO determined that the terrorist attacks on the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City were indeed eligible under the terms of the North Atlantic Treaty. Since the Assad regime allows the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and its affiliates to launch attacks on Turkish soil and harbors some 1,500 to 2,000 hard-core PKK militants in areas close to the Turkish border, Turkey can very well utilize the NATO security cover for assistance…

The Adana Agreement, which certified the beginning of more cordial ties between Ankara and Damascus, stipulated that Syria would not allow any activity from its territory that would threaten the “security and stability of Turkey.” It mainly referred to terrorist attacks from the Kurdish militant group PKK, which the Assad family has hosted in Syria for decades and with which Syrian military intelligence still enjoys a tactical co-operation. (For more on this, see the Henry Jackson Society report “The Decisive Minority: The Critical Role of Syria’s Kurds in the Anti-Assad Revolution”, written by Ilhan Tanir and Omar Hossino.)

The PKK, which are not represented in the main pro-revolutionary Kurdish National Council bloc of Syrian Kurdish parties, have said that if Turkey invades Syria they’ll launch counteroffensives. This has been a major disincentive for Turkish PM Recep Tayyip Erodgan to impose a buffer zone. However, his threat assessment is now changing after Syrian security forces waged a cross-border raid into a Turkish refugee camp last Sunday, wounding two Turkish nationals, and also because the number of Syrian refugees pouring over the border has increased exponentially. Of the more than 24,000 currently housed in the Hatay province, a third arrived only in the last three weeks, according to Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu.

Apart from how destabilising this refugee population is to Turkey’s own delicate sectarian balance is the fact that any human rights abuses committed against Syrians on Turkish soil fall within the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights. Anyone who has been following the British press in the last several months will know how Ankara must greet such a prospect.

Borzkurt highlights another interesting possibility. Because of yet another bilateral agreement between Turkey and Syria, signed in December 2010, both countries have the right to conduct joint operations in each other’s territory aimed at rooted out terrorists. Though Assad has labelled the whole opposition to his rule as “terrorist,” that term more aptly applies to the roving death-and-rape squads known as shabbiha that he has employed since the start of the uprising last year. It also applies to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and Hizbollah agents that have assisted in the regime’s crackdown. If Turkey were to recognise the Syrian National Council as a government-in-exile, then it could lawfully intervene in Syria with that government-in-exile’s express consent. And let’s not forget that the Free Syrian Army is still headquartered in Antakya.

However it all shakes out, Turkey’s forbearance isn’t going to last forever. Ironically, it may just be that Turkey’s “no trouble with the neighbours” foreign policy, which led to its rapprochement with Syria, becomes the ultimate platform for making trouble with the neighbour downstairs.

via Is Turkey preparing for an intervention in Syria? – Telegraph Blogs.