Turkey's Hidden Agenda...?

The Republic of Turkey almost at the point of celebrating its centennial, no longer quite resembles the Turkey that its founder, Kamal Ataturk, left behind, as a secularly governed country more closely aligned with the West than with its neighbours to the East. Ataturk, a member of Turkey's military, evoked huge admiration and resolute loyalty in the military which, long after his death, managed the country's political affairs to ensure it would never return to its former state as a backward-looking Islamic parochial nation mired in squalor and ignorance.

Galata Bridge in Istanbul, Turkey, taken between 1880 and 1900.

The Republic of Turkey turns 90 today. On October 29, 1923, the Turkey officially became an independent nation from the Allied forces that occupied the country after the Ottoman Empire’s defeat in World War I.

The military did its work well, upholding Kamal Ataturk's standards and principles. Until the advent of a new political party taking inspiration from a huge movement erupting within the world of Islam of a purer form of Islam, hearking to the past, demanding of the faithful more stringent obedience to the precepts of original Islam. Now, where once any presence of symbolic Islamic cultural headgear was forbidden, Turkish women are once again cladding themselves in traditional garb and four members of the Turkish parliament appeared recently in headscarves.

Fellow MPs offered their support to the women wearing headscarves

The ruling Justice and Development Party, with its roots in political Islam, has overturned Turkey's 90-year-old secular tradition rooted in Kamal Ataturk's transformation of the country from an inward-looking to a Western-oriented country, bringing it to new standards of education, commerce, wealth, and connections to its European neighbours. Turkey is a member of NATO, and has been attempting for years, to be included in the European Union. It would be the only Muslim nation in the EU if it succeeded.

But Turkey has turned away under Recep Tayyip Erdogan, its Prime Minister under the AKP, from Ataturk's Turkey. He has recently scandalized NATO by seeking to purchase military equipment from China, an acquisition which would not permit Turkey to integrate its military communications with those used by other NATO countries. This, after Turkey had completely demoralized and truncated the power of Turkey's military by accusing senior officers of scheming to overturn the current government; placing them on trial and sentencing them to lengthy prison terms.

The European Union insists that before it can consider Turkey's wish for inclusion in the EU, it must see definite signs of improvement in its human rights record. Turkey has negotiated with its Kurdish population which has perennially been oppressed, its language suppressed and its culture denied; assaults committed against its people and the militants among them, killing thousands over the years, struggling to attain a country of their own; the largest ethnic group in the world without their own geography.

Turkey has sundered a decades-old friendship and cooperation with the State of Israel, favouring under the new Islamist government, re-awakening ties with the Muslim countries of the Middle East with whom formerly it had maintained a disinterested distance. It now supports the Hamas government in Gaza, and had rekindled ties with Syria and Iran. Since the Syrian conflict, however, Ankara has supported the Syrian Sunni rebels, while continuing to maintain arm ties of friendship with Shi'ite Iran, Syria's protector.

It has been recently revealed that hundreds of al-Qaeda recruits have settled temporarily in southern Turkey safe houses before moving on to fight as jihadists in Syria, against the Baathist Alawite Shia regime of President Bashar al-Assad, whom Turkey now fiercely opposes. As a member of NATO, Turkey's covert assistance to member of al-Qaeda represents a betrayal of its membership and its allegiance to Western values.

But there is a network of hideouts in place in Turkey enabling the transit of al-Qaeda members crossing the border to take part in Syria's brutally miserable civil war. "Every day there are mujahedeen coming here from all different nationalities", said Abu Abdulrahman, a Jordanian employed in managing the inflow and outflow of the foreign jihadists. The network of receiving centres for those aspiring to join al-Qaeda's Syrian branch are his business.

"We have to research you to make sure you are not a spy. If you are foreign, someone in our network needs to recommend you", he explained using Skype to communicate, and working with volunteers from countries including Britain. It is estimated that there may be around ten thousand foreign fighters now in Syria, some of them veterans of the Iraq war, others first-time jihadists from abroad, significantly from Western countries.

"When you see the women and children -- any human being -- being shot or raped or killed in front of their fathers and families, just because they pray to Allah, you have to be moved by the humanity of it. If just one person is injured and something goes against Islam, we must react", explained Abu Abdullah an Australian volunteer who came to fight in Syria because, he claimed "Western lifestyle stands against Islam".

Strange reasoning, that. Who is slaughtering the women and children of whom he speaks so movingly if not other Muslims? What has their slaughter to do with the West? It is the West that stands helplessly by, wringing its hands is misery over its inability to intercede between ferociously brutal strands of Islam; Sunni against Shia, tribal animosity against tribal vengeance. 

Ten thousand members of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant in Syria, and fifteen thousand Hezbollah fighters newly revealed to be preparing for another Quyresh-type conflict. They meet on the field of battle and they alone are responsible for the incalculable damage to the lives of Muslim men, women and children. If only their joining in conflict against one another might result in their own annihilation, the world they claim to care for and fight for, would find salvation.