From the Centre for European Reform, this is the CEO podcast.

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Hello, you're listening to the CER podcast. I'm Beth Oppenheim and today I'm with Luigi Scatsieri. Hi Luigi.

Hi Beth. And today we're going to be asking the question, where is Turkey going? And also, can its relationship with the West be rescued?

So to kick off with Luigi, could you just walk listeners through what's happened in Syria and what Turkey's involvement

has been there?

Sure.

So if we think to the first few years of the Syrian civil war, what was happening was

that the US was essentially trying to force Assad to step down.

What then happened was that as IS became stronger, US aims shifted to fighting the terrorist group. And soon, Washington

discovered that the only effective force on the ground was the Turkish YPG. And it started providing

assistance to the YPG. Now, this is actually greatly angered Turkey because it sees the YPG as the

Syrian branch of the PKK, which is a terrorist

group that for decades has been waging an insurgency against the Turkish state. So this was

obviously created very much friction between the US and Turkey. And Turkey's own aim shifted

from trying to push Assad out to at all cost preventing the establishment of a

Kurdish-led statelet in northern Syria and began to cooperate more closely with Russia and Iran

in that respect. And what was really worrying from Turkey's perspective was that whereas the

US's relationship with the YPG was initially supposed to be

transactional, temporary and tactical, it gradually became much more of a formalized alliance

...