For what and for whom are Turkish troops dying?

Musa Özuğurlu 

We have been told that we are in Syria because of “the authority gap that has emerged,” that this was “based on the rights granted in international law and the Adana Agreement” and that was “due to reasons of terror and similar threats.” How correct is this statement? The public cannot keep up with all the information due to extremely rapid developments and sees the issue as though it began with, and is limited to, only the most recent developments. 

In order to better understand this process that is particularly focused on Idlib, through the cliche phrase of “being able to see the big picture,” we need to remind people with deceitful aims in Syria and those who make propaganda for them of the following: 

There are compact jihadists in the northwest Syrian town Idlib who have been transferred from several places to there at several different times. I call them compact because the vast majority of the moderate ones have already agreed to settle with the Syrian administration and have separated from these groups. A large portion of the remaining ones are made up of those who want to wage jihad, or holy war, because of their religious ideologies. 

These groups themselves emphasize openly that they have no aims such as democracy. They have no political ideology for society. Their aim is just like what they have done in several towns before, like ripping the head off the sculpture of poet and philosopher Abu al-Ala al-Ma’arri in the northwestern Syrian city of Ma’arrat al-Nu’man. They want to remove all traces of thinkers, poets, mathematicians, musicians, and astronomers from the earth — such as the work of people like Al-Farabi, Avicenna, Al-Kindi and al-Khwarizmi — and constitute an order within the framework of their own Islamic understanding. They don’t care about human rights, or the worker’s rights, women’s rights, children’s rights or animal rights. Their relationship to technology and science is limited to weapons and communication tools that help them conduct their own jihad. They have no idea about the concepts of production, industry and development.

Because these groups are acting with a jihadist mindset, they would not hesitate a second before slaughtering anybody they see as an obstacle to their aims. For this reason they do not care about the law and thus they constitute a huge danger to society.   

They regard all the Sunnis, Alevis, Christians, Yezidis, Armenians, Arabs, Turks, secularists, leftists and socialists who are not like them and who do not think like them as enemies and think they should be destroyed.  

Some of these armed groups are accepted as “terror organizations” by Turkey, Russia and several other states. As a matter of fact, all groups who are armed and have control over an area of Idlib are terror organizations. 

Some of these groups rejected the Idlib demilitarization agreement right away from the beginning; none of the armed groups recognized the ceasefire for even an hour, and continued their attacks. 

The majority of civilians in Idlib do not approve of these groups; however, those who have not been able to escape and who do have many options are doomed to these organizations. Some of them are the families of these jihadists and have no other option.  

The circumstances are maturing in Syria now for the start of a political process. However, the political process has been sacrificed for these groups. For this reason, there is not one single political group or party that is ready to sit at the negotiation table with the government except for the Kurds. Countries engaged in the Syrian process act as though Sunnis do not do politics or that they are bound to these jihadists and as though Sunni Muslims are forced to follow “sharia,” the religious law and order.  

Under these terms and conditions, when many countries have withdrawn from Syria, Turkey is persistently continuing its chain of mistakes. 

The area that Turkey is in belongs to Syria; in other words, it is the territory of another country.

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan says the Adana Agreement provides this right, but this is not true. Who is the addressee of the Adana Agreement? Syria. Do we recognize the Syrian administration? No, we don’t. Against whom and for the benefit of whom are we using this agreement that has been designed as “against terror”? We are using it against the Syrian army, the country which has signed the agreement, while we are siding with Al-Nusra and the like, the ones we have recognized as terror organizations (frankly, we have been obliged to do so.) 

What good is holding Turkish Armed Forces units in Idlib and other regions and making them fight?  Is there a terror threat, really, coming from these regions? Not from the east of the Euphrates. On the west of the Euphrates river, on the other hand, there are those jihadists who are spineless and who would fight side-by-side with whoever gives them a few pennies more. Well, where does the real danger stem from? It is coming from exactly these groups who we sacrifice our soldiers for? 

No matter how you slice it, in light of the facts written above, the government deploying troops in that region and making them fight is against wisdom, logic, international law and neighborliness.

The government, despite all the efforts of the public relations staff, has not been able to convince the streets about the presence of troops there. When one starts talking to a citizen on the street, they start asking, “What business do we have over there?” There’s no rocket science involved, no situation that requires extraordinarily high intelligence that we bird-brained people are somehow unable to understand. 

Let us finish with two questions that those running the country should answer: 

The first: Why are our troops dying? 

And the second: Is the goal to annex Idlib?