ISTANBUL – In the wake of Turkey's downing of a Russian war plane on Nov. 24, Russian President Vladimir Putin accused Turkish authorities of supporting terrorism.
Now Turkey’s prime minister has hit back by accusing Moscow of genocide in Syria.
Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu on Dec. 9 told reporters in Istanbul that Russia was attempting “ethnic cleansing in northern Latakia” to force out all Turkmen and Sunni Muslims.
“They want to expel them, they want to ethnically cleanse this area so that the regime and the Russian bases in Latakia and Tartus are protected,” he said.
Davutoglu’s strong words come as relations between Turkey and Russia have hit an all-time low, with Russia accusing Turkish authorities of being in cahoots with ISIL and committing a “war crime” after Ankara ordered a Russian plane shot down on the border with Syria. While Russia has claimed its plane was strictly in Syrian territory, Turkey’s air force maintains the aircraft had invaded its air space and repeatedly been warned to back off.
A similar incident in early October prompted Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to warn that he would not tolerate any further Russian incursions into Turkish air space. At that time, NATO echoed Erdogan’s concerns, with Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg saying the violations did “not look like an accident.”
Now, in addition to NATO’s concerns about Russia’s war against Ukraine, Western leaders fear that Russian aggression has spread to a region already fraught with war and instability.
While Russia began its intervention in Syria in late September with the stated goal of fighting the spread of the Islamic State terrorism, Syrian Turkmen leaders have appealed to the international community with pleas for help after Russian air strikes seemed to focus on them rather than the Islamic State, sometimes known as ISIS and ISIL.
Abdurrahman Mustafa, the president of the Syrian Turkmen Assembly, part of the Western-backed moderate opposition forces, told the Kyiv Post that Russia’s aims were clear from the get-go.
“Indeed the first places Russia hit under the cover of ‘fighting against ISIL’ were the city of Homs and the Turkmen areas of the Bayir-Bucak region,” he said.
He rejected Russia’s claims that moderate opposition groups are jihadists, attributing such ideas to a wider propaganda campaign accompanying the intervention.
“This war is not only executed by soldiers on the field. This war has psychological, political, local, regional and global layers,” he said, adding that accusations that Syrian Turkmen are jihadists was part of Russia’s “perception management.”
“First and foremost, Syrian Turkmen people are culturally, religiously and politically moderate. This is an accurate sociological and historical fact. We have cultural continuity with Anatolia. There is no extremism in our religious beliefs or cultural texts in any sense. … Russia is trying to use the ‘radicalism’ label in order to justify targeting Turkmen people,” he said.
Tarik Sulo Ceviczi, deputy chairman of the Syria Turkmen National Movement Party, agreed with Mustafa and called Russia’s accusations “absurd,” saying Russian leadership was “detached from reality.”
According to him, more than 25,000 Syrian Turkmen have been driven out of their homes by Russian air strikes in northwestern Syria, and at least 110 killed.
Asli Aydintasbas, an expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said the Turkish prime minister’s accusation against Russia was more hyperbole than fact – but he wasn’t wrong.
Saying his use of the term “ethnic cleansing” was just a “figure of speech,” Aydintasbas said his claims that certain groups were being targeted was completely accurate.
And most of the time, those groups did not include ISIL.
“According to my sources, 30% of Russia’s airstrikes have targeted ISIL-held areas, while the rest have targeted the opposition,” she said, adding that most of the attacks against ISIL have been limited to areas where the Assad regime was under threat.
“Russia seems very deliberately to be targeting these (moderate opposition) groups,” she said, noting that while Russia was not going after them for ethnic reasons, “most of the groups are Sunni.”
Assad is an Alawite, an offshoot sect of Shia Muslim.
Conceding that “Turkey doesn’t always support nice groups in Syria,” Aydintasbas said there is a strategy in Turkey’s policies to “carve out a safe zone” using the friendly opposition – “groups that America has vetted.”
With more than 100 different opposition groups, she said, the situation with the moderate opposition is overwhelmingly complicated, and often moderate simply means “people who are not chopping off hands and heads and who want some degree of democracy.”
The Syrian Turkmen at the center of Russian air strikes, she said, are “not all al-Nusrah front or Ahrar ash Sham, they are not all jihadists.”
“Both sides are exaggerating,” she said. But the Russian campaign was never solely about fighting ISIL.
“The Russian campaign – its timing and methods – all show that it is trying to undercut Turkey’s plan for a safe zone on the border between Kurdish areas.”
Mustafa was less restrained in his assessment.
“Huge numbers of our people have been forced to migrate,” he said, with some villages that had already been damaged by regime forces “now almost wiped off the map.”
“Their aim is clear: To dispel all the Turkmens who are seen as an obstacle to their global desires. An ethnic cleansing campaign is under way by Russia’s air strikes and the ground assaults of the Syrian regime,” he said.
