“Turkey really needs Russia’s blessing in order to be able to carry on this operation (in Syria.) And so I think they’re really going to try to get that kind of a concession out of the Russian side.”
“We have a heightened militarism inside Turkey. Ultra-nationalist feelings are boosted, there are all sorts of militant spectacles, and this helps crystallise anti-Kurdish sentiment.”
“I think it’s really important to contextualize Turkey’s foreign policy with the growing domestic repression and increasingly what we’re calling a one-man regime.”
“We are used to thinking about the U.S. as a superpower that’s able to step into problems and leverage responses favorable to its interests and its ideals pretty handily. [But in this case] we’ve so sabotaged ourselves that we’re not able to do it.”
“It isn’t that US officials didn’t know about Turkey’s concerns regarding the YPG/PKK. It is that they decided that the immediate benefits of cooperating with the YPG outweighed the longterm concerns of Turkey.”
“It’s likely that Erdogan would make life difficult for Europe if Europe made life difficult for him… [even] stringent sanctions contemplated by some US senators wouldn’t be sufficient to change the contours of Turkey’s policy at this stage.”
“It can be significant for an American president to publicly criticize America’s autocratic allies and lend rhetorical support to those in the region struggling against oppression and for human rights.”
“Afrin showed that when an insurgency transitions into a conventional conflict against a large conventional army, it will normally lose. But the PKK can always shift back to unconventional warfare.”
“Regardless of the oil’s origin and how many times it changed hands, it appears to have come to Turkey through Kurdish middlemen and smugglers. This is all part of the war economy we’ve been tracking along the Turkish-Syrian border.”