Turkey, however, sees
everything differently. Early
this summer, Erdogan was
enraged when Kurdish forces
in Syria liberated the town of
Tel Abyad from ISIS, and the
Turkish military drew up a plan
to invade Syria, not to fight
ISIS but to set up a 30kilometer-deep buffer zone to
prevent the Syrian Kurds from
controlling their own home
country.
“We will never allow the
establishment of a state on our
southern border in the north of
Syria,” Erdogan said. “We will
continue our fight in that
respect whatever the cost may
be.”
Ponder the ramifications of that
hard-line assertion for a
moment. Our NATO ally was
enraged because ISIS lost
territory and says it’s willing to
invade Syria, not to fight ISIS,
but to suppress American
allies.
American foreign policy
makers and analysts have been
arguing for years which is
worse, the Syrian-IranianHezbollah axis or ISIS.
Obviously they are both awful.
ISIS is more likely to kill
Americans at home and abroad,
but Iran is the world’s biggest
state sponsor of terrorism. In
Turkey, however, the argument
is over whether ISIS or the
Kurds is the greater evil.
Ankara doesn’t like ISIS. It has
nothing in common with ISIS.
But unlike the Kurds, ISIS
hasn’t been at war with the
Turkish government for the last
30 years. In that respect, ISIS
is, from the Turks’ point of
view, the lesser of two evils.
“ISIS commanders told us to
fear nothing at all [from
Turkey],” a former ISIS
communications technician
told Newsweek, “because there
was full cooperation with the
Turks and they reassured us
that nothing will
happen . . . ISIS saw the
Turkish army as its ally
JOY FEELINGS | DECEMBER ISSUE
179