The Tragedy of Modern Turkey

In its obsession over the Kurdish movement, Ankara has enabled the rise of Islamic State.

Asli Aydintasbas

Last week, I was on an inbound flight to Istanbul when terrorists at Ataturk Airport blew themselves up, killing 44. My plane was diverted, and upon landing in Ankara I called a friend and we had a drink. It wasnbt that I wasnbt saddened by the attack, but like most people in Turkey Ibve grown dangerously accustomed to living with violence and death.

Between Islamic State and Kurdish separatists, across Turkey over the past year there have been 15 bombings and suicide attacks, resulting in nearly 300 deaths. In the countrybs southeast, where the collapse of peace talks last summer gave way to a Kurdish insurgency, the government claims it has killed 6,900 Kurdish militants. Military and security personnel have suffered about 600 casualties, and civilians killed in the crossfire between government forces and the Kurdish separatists have numbered a few hundred more.

And there you have it: 8,000 Turkish citizens dead in one year, and a return to the 1990s-style half-free, half-oppressive national-security state. An annus horriblis in every way.

Amid this whole mess, how can one worry about being in an airport attacked by Islamic State when there have been similar bombings on the subway, a pedestrian street in downtown Istanbul and a Kurdish peace rally in Ankara? I now understand how people could party in one part of Beirut while fighting raged on in another. In times of chaos, you become desensitized to death. You take precautions, then go about your business. How else to live?

Turkeybs descent into turmoil has largely to do with the current state of the Middle East and the spillover from the Syrian war. On top of hosting 2.5 million Syrian refugees, we live with a region infested with jihadists, stricken by sectarian wars, home to al Qaeda and Islamic State. A decade ago Turkey was a model Muslim democracy on its way to membership in the European Union. Now we are facing old-fashioned authoritarianism at home and the regional fallout from the Arab Spring.

The Turkish governmentbs decisions over the past few years have aggravated its maladies. At the outset of the Syrian war, Turkeybs ruling Islamists were so fervent about a regime change in Damascus that they turned a blind eye to the flow of jihadists into Syria. Thatbs how Islamic State prospered.

Turkey wasnbt alone in this mistake. Many European governments also watched as young men bought tickets to Istanbul and crossed into Syria early in the war. When I went to Syria in late 2012, I simply strolled across olive groves in Kilis, with no controls, no stamps. Groups of foreign fighters waited in the shade of trees to meet up with their opposition contacts.

In the years that followed, Islamic State and other groups used Turkey as a safe passageway, a recruitment ground and a corridor for goods and services. At one time, it may have been forgivable to see the Assad regime as the breal problemb and the jihadists as a bfuture problem.b But Turkeybs blindness has persisted. Ankara kept thinking it could develop a modus vivendi with Islamic State on its borders, until it was too late.

Far less forgivable is Turkeybs decision last year to overhaul its Syrian policy so it could prevent Syrian Kurds from gaining strength on its southern flank. bPYD is more dangerous than ISIS,b Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said about the Syrian Kurdish group. This was only a few months after the Kurds put up an epic struggle to expel the Islamic State in the town of Kobani on the Turkish border.

Ankara watched warily in 2015 as Kurds steamrolled through Islamic State-controlled territory on its border with the help of U.S. airstrikes. This should have been a cause for celebration. The Syrian Kurds are secular, well-organized and made up in part by volunteers from Turkeybs own Kurds. They are also affiliated with the Turkey-based Kurdistan Workersb Party, or PKK, which has been in peace talks with Ankara for years.

Instead, Ankara closed its borders to those towns captured by Kurds from Islamic State. Mr. Erdogan ended the peace talks at home and joined an international coalition against Islamic State, hoping to pull Washington away from its burgeoning alliance with the Kurds. Turkey continues to support a coterie of jihadists and nonjihadist opposition groups in Syria, but when it comes to Kurdsbour cousins, our citizens, our neighborsbwe become irrational.

Ankara sees the Kurdish movement as an existential threat and Islamic State as a nuisance. Its primary concern in Syria is the prevention of a contiguous Kurdish zone there, out of fear that a bKurdish beltb in northern Syria would entice Turkeybs Kurds to call for greater autonomy.

Thatbs no way to keep a country together, and it hurts Turkeybs long-term interests and the international fight against Islamic State. Turkey should support the idea of a Kurdish belt on its southern borders, grandfather a Kurdish zone, isolate itself from the instability in Iraq and Syria, and return to the peace talks at home. With nearly 20% of its population being Kurds, Mr. Erdoganbs anti-Kurdish policy in Syria aggravates the insurgency at home.

This is the tragedy of modern Turkey. Its current Islamist rulers burn with nostalgia for the Ottoman Empire. But they are the products of a timid 20th-century nation-state, narrow-minded and unable to provide lasting solutions to transnational ills. Both the Kurdish issue and the Islamic State mess are intertwined and require big thinking. The sensible solution would be to work with the Kurds to stave off Islamic State, not the other way around.

Ms. Aydintasbas is a fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.