Turkey and the War Next Door

Three weeks ago, Turkey officially joined the war effort against ISIS, a move that Washington had long hoped for and quickly applauded. But three weeks later, it’s still not clear whom exactly Ankara is fighting. These five stats will help you make sense of this complicated story. This piece has been repurposed from my column in TIME.

1. A Faltering Economy

Just five years ago, Turkey was an emerging market darling, growing at an impressive 9.2 percent clip in 2010. By 2013 that GDP growth had fallen to 4.1 percent. The tumble continues, and this year’s growth is projected at 3.1 percent—an optimistic forecast given the country’s 11 percent unemployment rate. The sudden fall from economic grace has hit the Turkish population hard.

There’s no immediate economic benefit for joining an open-ended war against ISIS—but there’s an immediate political benefit for distracting an anxious population from a faltering economy.

(IMF World Economic Outlook, Bloomberg, Global Peace Index)

2. Stumbling AKP

It’s been more than a decade since the Islamic Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan first rose to power. The AKP has gone on to win four consecutive elections—2011 was a particularly good year for the Turkish economy, and the AKP was rewarded with 49.9 percent of the vote, a solid figure in a multiparty system. Erdogan enjoyed a personal popularity rating of 71 percent back then. Today that figure is at 37.5 percent. Turkish elections this past June saw the AKP lose 69 seats in parliament (which has a total of 550 seats) along with its absolute majority.

Two months after the election, the AKP has yet to form a coalition government—and it’s hoping it won’t have to. By going to war in Syria, Erdogan plans to tarnish the up-and-coming HDP party for its historical association with Kurds (more on this below) and to drum up enough nationalist sentiment for the war effort to steal back voters from the right-wing MHP. If the AKP’s numbers start inching back towards 50 percent, expect Erdogan to call snap elections as early as this fall.

(Brookings, Guardian, Al-Jazeera, Reuters, graphic h/t: Guardian)

3. Syrian Refugees in Turkey

More than two million Syrian refugees have streamed across Turkish borders to date, and experts estimate another 500,000 Syrians will join them by year’s end. Put another way, more than 50 percent of all Syrians that have fled their country to escape civil war are currently residing in Turkey. By most accounts, Turkey has taken good care of these displaced people, establishing 25 refugee camps and spending upwards of $5.5 billion on their care. But given Turkey’s own economic woes, it’s not clear how much longer Ankara will be able to shoulder the costs. The sooner the fighting in Syria ends, the sooner the refugees can return to their homes—a fact not lost on the Turkish government.

(European Commission, UNHCR, Al-Jazeera, photo h/t: European Commission/ECHO)

4. Violent History with the Kurds

On July 20, an ISIS suicide bomb tore through the Turkish border town of Suru?; 32 people were killed. The victims were Turkish Kurds with loose ties to the YPG, the Kurdish separatists currently battling ISIS in Syria. For Turkey, the Suru? bombing meant the war had finally come home. Erdogan quickly declared war on ISIS to deflect criticism that he was soft on terrorism. But he wasn’t quick enough—many Turks blamed Ankara for not protecting its citizens; Kurds went further and accused the Turkish government of being complicit in the attacks.

Prior to Suru?, Turkey had been reluctant to engage ISIS directly because the jihadi group was battling Bashar al-Assad in Syria, whom the Turks have long wanted gone. More importantly, ISIS was preventing Kurdish militias from carving out territory along the Turkish border, which would fan the nationalist aspirations of the Kurdish minority back home in Turkey.

Turkish Kurds have been trying to declare independence for decades now; Ankara has refused them at every turn. The result has been 40 years of violence, claiming the lives of 40,000 people. A ceasefire was agreed to in March 2013, but it didn’t last long. According to Turkish security authorities, militant Kurds have carried out over 2,000 acts of violence in 2015 alone. And now with the war in Syria, things look to get even worse between the two groups.

(Reuters, Wall Street Journal, Middle East Monitor)

5. A War Against…Whom?

Why worse? Because so far Turkey has done a much better job bombing Kurdish separatists than ISIS fighters. Ankara is obviously unnerved by the progress Kurdish fighters are making in Syria, fearing that they are laying the groundwork for an independent Kurdish state. When Turkish police launched security raids across the country following the Suru? bombing, Kurdish militants detained outnumbered ISIS affiliates by more than 6 to 1. In the first days of Turkey’s air campaign, 75 Turkish jets flew 155 sorties against 400 Kurdish targets. Over the same time span, Turkey hit just three ISIS targets.

For Turkey, the fight against ISIS has become a fight against Kurds, an awkward problem for the US and other NATO allies who favor the former effort and oppose the latter; it’s hard to know where one war ends and the other begins. Only time will tell if this political and military strategy will succeed.

(Reuters, The Independent, Al-Monitor, New York Times, photo h/t: Max Pfandl)

Banner photo h/t: Fatih Kocaman