With Friends Like These....

"We ultimately had no choice but to agree to disagree. The Turks frankly worked with groups  Salafist Islamists) for a period, including al-Nusra, whom we finally designated as (being groups) we're not willing to work with."
former U.S. Ambassador Francis Ricciardone

Turkey, a U.S. ally, a long-standing member of NATO, a country straddling Europe and the Middle East, with a hundred-year history of secular governance after reformist Mustafa Ataturk drew his country away from its Ottoman past into the world of the West, but which, over the last several decades, the Islamist party of Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Justice & Development Party has returned  to its Islamist past, transforming it into a country supporting terrorist entities like Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas poses as a friend to the West.

Whereas Hezbollah, Hamas and their master-state Iran, are considered terrorist groups in the West, they are acclaimed as responsible 'governments' by Turkey which also has been estranged from Egypt over its listing of the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas as terrorist groups. Given the current state of affairs in Turkey, supporting the extremist Islamist groups in Syria became a natural fit for the country. The volatile-tempered Erdogan, though allied with Iran, Syria's sponsor, decried Syria's slaughter of its own.

The former U.S. ambassador to Turkey has deep-sixed the confidentiality of diplomacy, informing the press that he had attempted, on behalf of the United States, to persuade Turkey to close its borders to the Islamist fanatical groups, but got nowhere. Turkey was determined to keep its borders open as a conduit for aid to the rebels, weapons and volunteers leaking into Syria from the beginning of the uprising.

It saw little difference between "moderates" and extremists. And possibly that's because Turkey itself has undergone such a change from a moderate to an extremist Islamist regime.

Finally, it was said, and out in the open by an American official willing to air the fact that Turkey was working with al-Qaeda. Jabhat al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda affiliate Islamist group now appears downright moderate in comparison to the Islamic State which had splintered off from al-Qaeda taking thousands of recruits and their weapons along with them, including territory they controlled in the east of Syria.

Now that the Islamic state has established recruiting stations and supporters well within Turkey, the Turkish government cites its concerns that should it become involved in the conflict to battle ISIS/ISIL, there would be a backlash within the country itself. Apart from that, the fact that when Islamic State stormed Mosul, and acquired all the U.S.-provided weapons that the fleeing Iraqi Shiite army left, the Islamists took Turkey's 49 consulate staff into their custody.

"For a long time the Islamic State militants have operated under the policy of 'benign neglect'", admitted a former diplomat and head of the Istanbul foreign policy think-tank Edam. Who also claimed that Turkey would be working quietly, on its own, to dislodge the IS forces from Turkey. This is the same Turkey that has withheld permission for U.S. forces to launch military raids on IS positions from Turkish territory.

Even while as a NATO ally it is host to a major U.S. airbase in the south of the country, at Incirlik.