Turkey is a ticking time bomb, and the local authorities know it. Protests continue in 30 of its cities, state buildings are attacked, there are troops on the streets and curfews have been reinstated after decades, BBC reports. And the situation is escalating fast.
There are fights going on between the Kurds’ opposing factions – the banned Kurdistan Workers Party and the Islamist Hezbollah group, strongly backing the Islamic State. The main protests of the Kurdish citizens of Turkey are directed towards the Turkish government, though – they feel that the refusal of the army to intervene in the border town Kobane (Ayn al-Arab) might lead to its fall to the IS. The Turkish army’s refusal to let the Kurds cross over into Syria to join the fighting militia has added to their frustration. They demand Turkey to recognize that the real enemy is not the Kurdish movement, but the Islamic State closing in on their borders.
According to a statement made by Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, his country will only get more involved in Syria if the coalition led by the United States will target both the Islamic State and the regime of Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad. In response, the US State Department has reiterated that the coalition will only focus on the Islamic State at this time, which means that Turkey will not take any military action for the time being.
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Right from the beginning of the conflict in Syria, Turkey has turned against the government led by President Assad. This stance attracted a series of critics from the international community, especially after Erdogan backed armed groups that became even more extreme as the conflict continued. Turkey was only convinced by the threat the Islamic State poses on them after the extremist organization kidnapped over 40 citizens in June. Still, Erdogan considers that the IS and the Kurdistan Workers Party are the same, and it is wrong to consider them different from each other.