My enemy’s enemy - Turkey’s blind eye toward Islamic State

Angry Planet

Matthew Gault

War, Politics, Conflict, Government, History, News

4.3 • 882 Ratings

🗓️ 29 June 2017

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Turkey is a member of NATO, an American ally and a bulwark against the broiling chaos of the Middle East. That’s the story at least. The truth is far more complicated. Recently, U.S. President Donald Trump announced he would arm the Kurds -an ethnic minority whose territory spreads across Iraq, Turkey, Iran and Syria. No one likes Daesh and the Kurds have done an incredible job pushing back against the religious zealots. But Turkey has a venomous relationship with the Kurds and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has repeatedly called them terrorists. Worse, there’s good evidence that Turkey is helping, or at least turning a blind eye to, Islamic State activity on its border. This week on War College, war correspondent Norma Costello walks us through the complicated history of the Kurds, Turkey and the Islamic State. According to Costello, the state sponsored violence against the Kurds in Southeast Turkey is one of the great unreported tragedies of the 21st century and Erdogan’s support of Islamic State is a calculated strategy to suppress the Kurds in Turkey. By Matthew Gault Produced by Bethel Habte

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Love this podcast.
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0:20.0	The views expressed on this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters News. When people talk about, you know, Erdogan supporting ISIS, they would like to say along the lines of, well, you know, he's a Salafist and he's what Abbey and he's all these things.
0:31.0	Okay, yeah, maybe he is, but one thing he really hates is the Kurds.
0:35.0	So if he can use proxies, be there the FSA or be they ISIS, to fight the war that he is fighting, but getting overwhelmed by by he'll happily do it.
0:45.0	So the idea that you know he would be supplying them with basic necessities or
0:50.6	allowing freedom of movement is you know it's just normal.
0:55.0	You're listening to Reuters War College, a discussion of the world in conflict, focusing on the stories behind the front lines. Hello, welcome to War College. I'm your host Matthew Galt. With me today is freelance journalist Norma Costello. Her work
1:25.9	has appeared on Vice, Wars Boring, Al Jazeera, and The Independent. She splits her time between Ireland
1:31.2	and the Middle East, and it's in Ireland that I catch her today. She spent a lot of her
1:33.2	today. She spent a lot of time in Turkey in the past six months and she's preparing for
1:37.6	another trip back as we speak. Norma, thank you so much for joining us.
1:41.8	Hi Matthew.
1:43.1	The elephant in the room today is US President
1:46.0	Donald Trump saying that he's interested
1:48.0	and is going to go forward with plans to arm the Kurds.
1:52.3	Obviously, this is going to upset Turkey and I'm
1:54.8	wondering if you can give our audience so they kind of have an understanding a
1:58.0	little bit of the background between the Turks and the Kurds and why there's some tension there?
	...

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