![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/06\/kurds.jpeg\" "\\"kurds\\"")
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Photo: REUTERS<\/p>\n
How is one to explain these paradoxes? First let us have a quick look at the facts on the ground. Since the 1991 Gulf<\/a> War and much more so after the 2003 Gulf War Turkey has turned itself, slowly but surely, and against its better judgment, into the lifeline for Iraqi Kurdistan, which is led by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), the euphemism for a Kurdish state in the making.<\/p>\n The slow change in Ankara\u2019s policy towards the KRG was not due to any altruistic considerations but for very pragmatic, down to earth ones. Immediately after the 1991 Gulf War and the crushing of the Kurdish uprising which ensued, Turkey was confronted with the problem of a million Kurdish refugees on its border. Unwilling to burden itself with another million Kurds, Turkey devised with the Allies the \u201cProvide Comfort\u201d project for the fleeing Kurds to enable them to go back to their homes.<\/p>\n This plan, together with \u201cthe no-fly zone\u201d where the Iraqi army could not act against the Kurds, as well as the ruptured relations between Ankara and Baghdad due to the war, set in motion the schizophrenic relations that would develop between Turkey and the KRG.<\/p>\n On the one hand Turkey was extremely apprehensive of the possible contagious effects of the KRG on its own Kurds, hence Ankara\u2019s attempts to thwart any political and diplomatic gains by the KRG. On the other hand Ankara did its best to reap the fruits of its relations with the emerging entity, one of the most important of which were economic gains. This approach turned the Kurdistan Region into a huge investment area for Turkish companies whose number reached around 900 by 2012 and amounted to half of the companies acting in the KRG.<\/p>\n To this list one should add other large business, cultural and social ventures which turned the KRG into an undeclared Turkish sphere of influence. The net result was that no less than seven percent of Turkish exports went to the KRG.<\/p>\n Ankara\u2019s thirst for oil and gas and the pressure brought to bear on it to stop importing from Iran go a long way to explain the surprising pipeline deal it cut with the KRG on May 20, 2012, without the approval of the central government in Baghdad. If it materializes, the deal, which envisaged the building of<\/a> two oil pipelines and one gas pipeline from the Kurdistan Region to Turkey, might give further boost to Kurdish aspirations for independence.<\/p>\n Interestingly, the Turkish Minister<\/a> of Energy and Natural Resources, Taner Yildiz, declared on that occasion that \u201cTurkey should also be considered as the Regional Kurdish Government\u2019s gateway to the West.\u201d<\/p>\n A second important aim for developing these relations was the hope that the KRG would help in solving Turkey’s own acute Kurdish domestic problem, namely the ongoing attacks which the armed Turkish Kurdish PKK continued to launch against Turkish state targets.<\/p>\n However, Ankara\u2019s hope that the KRG would fight against, or at least contain the PKK, whose bases are found in Iraqi Kurdistan, was not fulfilled. The third and perhaps most important consideration was Ankara\u2019s need to attune itself to the region\u2019s changing geostrategic map, which pushed it to act according to the dictum \u201cmy enemy\u2019s enemy is my friend<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n The geostrategic considerations gathered momentum in the past two years due to several developments, all of which impacted negatively on Turkey\u2019s environment and its foreign policy configurations.<\/p>\n Before analyzing these changes it must be stressed that the stance of the AKP government toward the Kurdish domestic issue as well as towards the KRG underwent slow transformation, which distinguished the AKP from earlier Kemalist governments.<\/p>\n The geostrategic changes were quite drastic, including the \u201cArab Spring,\u201d which accelerated the collapse of the Turkish-Iranian-Syrian axis. Furthermore, the revolution in Syria not only turned Ankara and Damascus<\/a> into sworn enemies once again but also raised the specter of the influx of Syrian refugees. Worse still, it opened the Pandora\u2019s box of Syrian Kurds and their possible collaboration with their brethren in Turkey, not to speak of the PKK card which Damascus started to employ once again against Ankara.<\/p>\n The withdrawal of the American forces from Iraq in November 2011 and the vacuum left thereby was another very worrying development for Turkey, as it enhanced its competition with Iran for filling this vacuum.<\/p>\n Lastly, one should note the deteriorating relations between Ankara and Baghdad against the background of the Sunni-Shi\u2019ite rivalry in the region, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki\u2019s growing tilt toward Iran and his support for Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, as well as the growing personal antipathy between Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan and Maliki.<\/p>\n All this weakened Ankara\u2019s \u201ccommitment\u201d to the almost sacred notion of Iraqi unity and emboldened it in its bilateral ties with the KRG, the most challenging of which for Baghdad was the oil pipeline deal mentioned above.<\/p>\n Turkey\u2019s changing policy towards the KRG and its president Masu\u2019d Barzani found its expression on the symbolic level as well.<\/p>\n Barzani\u2019s April visit to Turkey was a case in point. While in the past Ankara treated Barzani as a mere \u201chead of tribe,\u201d in this most recent visit it accorded him a welcome befitting a head of state, thus turning him into one of its important allies in the region. Moreover, in this visit Barzani reiterated publicly the Kurds\u2019 right to self-determination but, interestingly enough, Turkish officials and the media chose to turn \u201ca deaf ear\u201d to this declaration.<\/p>\n Turkey is facing now a Kurdish problem on all three fronts, which has multiplied its dilemmas but which has moved it, so it seems, to adopt a flexible and non-conventional policy: Embracing the KRG so as to contain its own Kurds and Syria\u2019s as well. Should Turkey decide to give Barzani the green light<\/a>, he would not hesitate to go the extra mile and declare independence. One thing is certain: Turkey has willy-nilly helped the Kurdish genie escape from the bottle and it will be very difficult for Ankara to push it back inside.<\/p>\n Prof. Ofra Bengio is head of the Kurdish Studies Program at the Moshe Dayan Center, Tel Aviv University and author of The Kurds of Iraq: Building a State within a State.<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ankara has willy-nilly helped the Kurdish genie escape from the bottle and it will be very difficult for Turkey to push it back inside. Photo: REUTERS If there is one country that has helped build a Kurdish entity in Iraqi Kurdistan it is Turkey. This assertion seems paradoxical in view of Ankara\u2019s traditional opposition to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":54141,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[5983,8187,4899],"class_list":["post-54140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-iraq","tag-arab-spring","tag-kurdish-state","tag-kurdistan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54140"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54140\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/54141"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}