(ANKARA, Turkey)
At least 19 people were reported killed in riots across Turkey, the
deadliest street unrest in years, after the Kurdish minority rose up in
fury at the government’s refusal to protect a besieged Syrian town from
Islamic State.
Street battles raged between Kurdish protesters and police across
Turkey’s mainly Kurdish southeast, as the fallout from war in Syria and
Iraq threatened to unravel the NATO member’s own delicate peace process.
There were also clashes in the commercial hub Istanbul and capital
Ankara.
Across the frontier, U.S.-led air strikes appeared to have pushed
Islamic State fighters back to the edges of the Syrian Kurdish border
town of Kobani, which the militants have been poised to capture this
week after a three-week siege.
Washington said its war planes, along with those of coalition ally
the United Arab Emirates, had struck nine targets in Syria, including
six near Kobani that hit Islamic State artillery and armoured vehicles.
It also struck Iraq five times.
Nevertheless, Kobani remained under intense bombardment from Islamic
State positions within sight of Turkish tanks that have so far done
nothing to help.
U.S. officials were quoted expressing impatience with the Turks for
refusing to join the military coalition against Islamic State fighters
who have seized much of Syria and Iraq. Turkey says it could join, but
only if Washington agrees to use force against Syrian President Bashar
al-Assad as well as against the Sunni Muslim jihadists fighting against
him.
Turkey’s own Kurds say President Tayyip Erdogan is stalling while their brethren are killed in Kobani.
Police fired tear gas and water cannon to disperse demonstrators who
burnt cars and tyres. Authorities imposed curfews in at least five
provinces, the first time such measures have been used widely since the
early 1990s, local media said.
Ten people died in clashes in Diyarbakir, the largest Kurdish city in
Turkey’s southeast, according to Agriculture Minister Mehdi Eker. In
live televised comments, he said an all-day curfew imposed in the city
from Tuesday night would be reviewed on Wednesday.
Pockets of protesters defying the curfew clashed with security forces there later on Wednesday, local media reported.
Others died in clashes between protesters and police in the eastern
provinces of Mus, Siirt and Batman. DHA news agency reported a death
toll of 19 from two days of clashes.
The Istanbul governor’s office reported 30 people wounded, including
eight police officers, and 98 people detained in “illegal protests” in
Turkey’s biggest city.
Unrest spread to other countries with Kurdish and Turkish
populations. Police in Germany said 14 people were hurt in clashes there
between Kurds and Islamists.
The unrest in Turkey, which has NATO’s second largest army, exposes
the difficulty Washington has faced in creating a coalition of countries
to intervene against Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, two countries
with complex, multi-sided civil wars in which every country in the
region has a stake.
The advance by the jihadists of Islamic State in northern Syria drove
180,000 of the area’s mostly Kurdish inhabitants to flee into adjoining
Turkey.
Islamic State fighters hoisted
their black flag on the eastern edge of the town on Monday. Since then,
U.S.-led airstrikes have been redoubled, and the town’s defenders say
fighters have been pushed back.
Intense gunfire and loud explosions could be heard on Wednesday
morning from across the Turkish border, and huge plumes of grey smoke
and dust rose above the town, where the United Nations says only a few
hundred inhabitants remain.
“They are now outside the entrances of the city of Kobani. The
shelling and bombardment was very effective and as a result of it, IS
have been pushed from many positions,” Idris Nassan, deputy foreign
minister of the Kurdish-run Kobani district administration, told Reuters
by phone.
“This is their biggest retreat since their entry into the city and we
can consider this as the beginning of the countdown of their retreat
from the area.”
Kurdish media reported that YPG fighters had thwarted an attempted
Islamic State car bombing on positions in Kobani, saying the vehicle had
detonated before it reached its target.
An Islamic State source on Twitter claimed the attack had destroyed a
police station where Kurdish forces were based. The attack could not be
independently verified, but a huge explosion could be seen from across
the Turkish border, sending a mushroom cloud high into the sky above the
town.
Islamic State has been advancing on the strategically important town
from three sides and pounding it with artillery despite dogged
resistance from heavily outgunned Kurdish forces.
The Turkish parliament voted last week to authorise cross-border
intervention, but Erdogan and his government have so far held back,
saying they will join military action only as part of an alliance that
also confronts Assad.
Erdogan wants the alliance to enforce a “no fly zone” to prevent
Assad’s air force flying over Syrian territory near the Turkish border
and create a safe area for an estimated 1.2 million Syrian refugees in
Turkey to return. Otherwise, he says, Turkish military action would only
make the situation worse.
Washington, which has so far managed to bomb Islamic State positions
in Syria without Assad raising objections, has not agreed to expand the
mission to confront the Syrian leader.
The conflict has already opened up a
fissure in relations between the United States and Turkey, its most
powerful ally in the area. U.S. Vice President Joe Biden was forced to
apologise last week after Erdogan took umbrage at comments Biden made at
Harvard University, in which he blamed Turkey’s open borders for
allowing Islamic State to bring in recruits.
An unnamed senior U.S. official told the New York Times on Tuesday
that there was “growing angst about Turkey dragging its feet to act to
prevent a massacre less than a mile from its border”.
“This isn’t how a NATO ally acts while hell is unfolding a stone’s throw from their border,” the official said.
At the same time, official diplomacy intensified. State Department
spokeswoman Jen Psaki said U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry had spoken
with Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu on Monday night and Tuesday
morning, and said Turkey was “determining what larger role they will
play”.
Retired U.S. General John Allen, charged with building a coalition
against Islamic State after it seized about a third of neighbouring
Iraq, was due in Turkey this week.
Ankara said on Tuesday it had urged Washington to step up air strikes against Islamic State to halt its advance on Kobani.
But, while taking in Kobani’s refugees and treating its wounded,
Turkey has deep reservations about deploying its own army in Syria.
Beyond becoming a target for Islamic State, which is active along much
of Syria’s 900 km (550 mile) border with Turkey, it fears being sucked
into Syria’s three-year-old civil war and perhaps even having to
confront Syria’s formidable army.
It also distrusts Syria’s Kurds, whom it sees as allies of its own
Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which waged a decades-long insurgency
for Kurdish autonomy in which around 40,000 people were killed.
The PKK’s jailed leader Abdullah Ocalan has said any massacre of
Kurds in Kobani would doom a fragile peace process with the Turkish
authorities, one of the most important initiatives of Erdogan’s decade
in power.
The street protests across Turkey were already making the prospect of
reconciliation with nationalists seem more remote, as protesters set
fire to Turkish flags and attacked statues of the founder of modern
Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
Selahattin Demirtas, co-chair of the HDP, Turkey’s leading Kurdish
party, condemned such acts as “provocations carried out to prevent help
coming to the east (Kobani) from the west”.
(Reuters)
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