Erdogan miscalculating on multiple fronts: Analyst

Press TV has interviewed Alex Christoforou, director of theduran.com in Nicosia, about Turkey’s fighter jets targeting the positions of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) militants in the country’s southeast.

A rough transcription of the interview appears below.

Press TV: First of all I would like to get your interpretation basically of the way Turkey’s crackdown on Kurds has evolved from day one.  

Christoforou: Well this is nothing new. Erdogan has been waging a war in the southeast of Turkey for a while now and it has really gone underreported especially in the Western mainstream media.

So this is something that was expected. The minute the Kurdish freedom Hawks (TAK) claimed responsibility for the attack, it was pretty much unplanned for Erdogan to launch an attack on the PKK and even though they claim to be a splinter group to lump both groups together and continue his assault on the southeast of Turkey.

Now the interesting part to all of this is that while Erdogan and Turkey do not separate the TAK and the PKK and lump them altogether as terrorist and attack them as a whole in the southeast of Turkey, you have Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the US asking Russia, Iran and Syria to wait in order to separate the moderate rebels in Syria from al-Nusra, al-Qaeda and ISIS (Daesh), so you see a certain level of hypocrisy here playing out in Turkey and the balancing act of Erdogan is getting very precarious indeed.

Press TV: That is an interesting way to look at it but when we delve deeper into this, one has to question what the strategy at play over here is when it comes to this crackdown that we are seeing in Turkey. Is it Erdogan’s basically plan to annihilate the Kurdish population? Is it just focused on the Kurdish militant groups mainly the TAK or the PKK?

Christoforou: Well it is very simple for Erdogan and his plan all along has been to not have a Kurdish state spring up anywhere in the south and this is his balancing act that you have the Kurdish fighters in the north of Syria, in the south of Turkey and they are being supported by the United States in order to take on ISIS. For Erdogan this is unacceptable, so he has to kind of fight two wars here and that he has to attack the Kurds in the southeast in order to stop at any cost any type of Kurdistan or Kurdish Republic springing up underneath Turkey’s underbelly. In the meantime, you have his NATO ally  the United States working hand in glove with the Kurds in order to beat back ISIS.

So it really is a balancing act that Erdogan is finding extremely difficult to undertake and let’s not forget that this is going to hit at the heart of the Turkish tourist season which is already suffering from the incident with the Russian fighter jet that was shot down. So this is really also going to hit the average Turkish businessman and person looking for tourism this summer. So it was a heavy blow on Turkey this recent terrorist attack.

Press TV: So then what you are saying is that Erdogan miscalculated?

Christoforou: Erdogan is miscalculating on multiple fronts but he definitely has an agenda in play and his agenda is getting extremely difficult to balance and he is finding himself in hot water with the Russians, with the Americans, with NATO, with the Europeans and sometimes it seems like Erdogan is just demanding too much for the Turkish state and he needs to resort to some sort of diplomacy in order to calm down these multiple wars that he is engaged in.

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