Turkey and Russia promised
on Wednesday not to go to war over the downing of a Russian fighter jet,
leaving Turkey’s still-nervous NATO allies and just about everyone else
wondering why the country decided to risk such a serious confrontation.
The reply from the
Turkish government so far has been consistent: Don’t say we didn’t warn you.
Though minor
airspace violations are fairly common and usually tolerated, Turkey had
repeatedly called in Russia’s ambassador to complain about aircraft intrusions
and about bombing raids in Syria near the border. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan
said on Tuesday evening and a Pentagon spokesman later confirmed that before a
Turkish F-16 shot down the Russian Su-24 jet, Turkish forces had warned the
Russian plane 10 times in five minutes to steer away.
“I personally was
expecting something like this, because in the past months there have been so
many incidents like that,” Ismail Demir, Turkey’s undersecretary of national
defense, said in an interview. “Our engagement rules were very clear, and any
sovereign nation has a right to defend its airspace.”
While that may be
true, analysts said Mr. Erdogan had several more nuanced reasons to allow
Turkish pilots to open fire. These include his frustration with Russia over a
range of issues even beyond Syria, the Gordian knot of figuring out what to do
with Syria itself and Turkey’s strong ethnic ties to the Turkmen villages
Russia has been bombing lately in the area of the crash.
Turkey has been
quietly seething ever since Russia began
military operations against
Syrian rebels two months ago, wrecking Ankara’s policy of ousting the
government of President Bashar al-Assad. The Turks were forced to downgrade
their ambitions from the ouster of Mr. Assad to simply maintaining a seat at the
negotiating table when the time comes, saidSoner Cagaptay, a Turkish analyst at the Washington Institute for Near
East Policy, a nonpartisan research group.
“That would require
Turkey-backed rebels to be present in Syria, and I think Turkey was alarmed
that Russia’s bombing of positions held by Turkey-backed rebels in northern
Syria was hurting their positions and therefore Turkey’s future stakes in
Syria,” Mr. Cagaptay said. “So this is also an aggressive Turkey posture in the
Syrian civil war to prevent the defeat of Turkey-backed rebels so they can hold
onto territory and have a say in the future of Syria.”
But the fate of the
particular rebels the Russians were bombing in the mountainous Bayirbucak area
where the plane was shot down is more than just a policy matter to the Turks.
Mr. Erdogan particularly emphasized the ethnic tie in a speech Tuesday evening,
saying, “We strongly condemn attacks focusing on areas inhabited by Bayirbucak
Turkmen we have our relatives, our kin there.”
The Turkish prime
minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, said as much on Wednesday while dismissing Russia’s
explanation that it was fighting a common enemy, the Islamic State. “No one,”
he said, “can legitimize attacks on Turkmens in Syria using the pretext of
fighting the Islamic State.
The bombing was
creating political problems for Mr. Erdogan, Mr. Cagaptay said. “In the days
leading up to the incident, many newspapers, especially the pro-government
publications, were running headlines highlighting the suffering of the
Turkmens, who are closely related to Anatolian Turks,” he said. “I think the
government felt that, in terms of domestic politics, it had to do something to
ease some of this pressure that had resulted from the Russian bombardment
against Turkmens in northern Syria.”
Russia’s bombing of
Turkmen villages was to be the principal issue Turkey raised with Russia’s
foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, in talks that had been set for Wednesday
but were canceled after the shooting down of the plane.
Mr. Erdogan’s
emphasis on helping the Turkmens has another important political dimension in
Turkey. Mr. Erdogan’s political party emphasized Turkish ethnic identity and
Sunni Muslim faith in the campaign leading up to critical elections on Nov. 1, as it competed
with one rival party heavily composed of Turkey’s Kurdish minority and another
committed to preserving Turkey’s status as a secular society and state.
Mr. Erdogan managed
an important victory in that election, preserving his chances of winning
legislative approval to change the Constitution and turn the country’s
parliamentary system into a presidential one.
Complicating
matters further, Turkey and Syria have a longstanding border dispute in exactly
the area where the Russian plane, a Sukhoi Su-24, was shot down, and Russia has
sometimes voiced support for Syria’s claim. It is a narrow strip of territory,
the Hatay Province of Turkey, that runs south along the Mediterranean Sea, deep
into Syria.
The province is a
melting pot of ethnic Turks and Arabs. It is also a religious mélange, with
many Muslims but also a large Christian population, as Hatay includes the
biblical city of Antioch. And the province has an acrimonious history.
The League of
Nations granted Hatay Province to France after World War I as part of France’s
legal mandate over Syria. Ethnic Turks led the province’s secession from Syria
and declaration of an independent republic in 1938, and that republic then
joined Turkey the next year much as
Texas seceded from Mexico a century earlier, became a republic and soon joined
the United States.
Syria has periodically
questioned the loss of Hatay over the years. “If you look at Syrian maps, that
province, that chunk of territory, is shown as belonging to Syria,” said Altay
Atli, an international relations specialist at Bogazici University.
When Hatay seceded
from the French mandate of Syria, Hatay’s borders did not encompass all of the
ethnic Turks in the area; many Turkmens remained just across the border in what
is now northernmost Syria. For decades, it was difficult for families divided
on either side of the border by the secession of Hatay to even visit one
another. Tensions finally began to ease during the years immediately before the
Arab Spring, but they have resumed in the last several years as Turkey has led
calls for the removal of Mr. Assad.
The fact that
Russia has over the years expressed sympathy for Syria’s claim to Hatay makes
the province even more delicate for Turkey, and Tuesday’s incident with the
Russian jet even more important, said James F. Jeffrey, a former American
ambassador to Turkey who is now a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near
East Policy.
He questioned
whether the Russian jet had strayed into Hatay Province’s airspace accidentally
or whether Russia might have been deliberately allowing incursions by its jets
during military activities in Syria because of Hatay’s tangled history.
“Turkey was tired
of Russia’s intimidating Turkey,” he said.
The Russian and
Ottoman Empires battled for centuries for control over the area from the
Balkans to the Black Sea, and vestiges of that bloody rivalry keep arising. One
of those is reflected in Turkey’s deep concern about Russia’s annexation of
Crimea from Ukraine, said Murat Yesiltas, the director of security studies at
the Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research, a large research
group in Ankara with close government links.
Turkey now faces
across the Black Sea a much wider arc of territory occupied by Russian forces.
Many in Turkey are further upset by Russia’s treatment of the Crimean Tatars,
who speak a Turkic language and have opposed the Russian annexation. Most of
the Crimean Tatars’ leaders have been forced into exile by Russia, and this
week Tatars have been blocking repair crews from restringing crucial power
lines to Crimea that were mysteriously
blown up over the weekend, producing a nearly
total blackout on the peninsula.
“Turkey wants to
protect the territorial integrity of Ukraine,” Mr. Yesiltas said. Turkey has
already provided economic assistance to Ukraine, but it has been reluctant to
confront Moscow more publicly because Russia is one of Turkey’s biggest export
markets and supplies three-fifths of Turkey’s natural gas.
With President
Vladimir V. Putin of Russia saying things about the jet’s downing like, “We
will never tolerate such crimes like the one committed today” and warning of
“serious consequences,” the biggest question perhaps is what comes next.
Russia on Wednesday
announced plans to deploy its most modern air-defense system, the S-400 mobile
antiaircraft missile, to its air base outside Latakia. But while most experts and
Mr. Erdogan himself, in remarks on Wednesday play down concerns of a wider
confrontation, many worry that the biggest losers from Tuesday’s incident could
be the Turkmens.
While the jet’s two
crew members were able to eject from the plane, Russia said that one of them
was killed possibly by fire from the
ground as he floated to earth as was a
marine sent in a helicopter that was shot down by local ground forces while
trying to rescue the pilots; the Kremlin said the second crew member had been
rescued by Russian special forces.
Several experts
warned that Mr. Putin may step up his country’s attacks on the Turkmens in
retaliation.
“They’re the real
target,” Mr. Jeffrey said. “He can just plaster them.”
