Turkey seems to be siding with ISIL in its war with the Kurds

Michael Totten:

Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is furious that the Kurds in Syria are advancing against ISIS.

Ponder the ramifications of that sentence.

Turkey is a member of NATO. On paper, at least, it’s one of America’s greatest allies. ISIS, meanwhile, is the world’s most deranged army of psychopaths. Even Al Qaeda disowns it. The Kurds, though, are America’s most reliable allies in the Middle East alongside the Israelis.

So our nominal ally thinks it’s a problem when one of our real allies makes gains against the most vicious terrorist army on the planet.

We’ve been arguing amongst ourselves here in America about which is worse, the Syrian-Iranian-Hezbollah axis or ISIS. I can make a case either way. Iran is the world’s biggest state sponsor of terrorism, but ISIS is more barbaric than any of Iran’s proxies. ISIS is more likely to kill Americans in America, but it may not be possible to defeat them until after the Syrian-Iranian-Hezbollah axis is defanged because a substantial percentage of the Middle East’s Sunni Arabs see it as the only thing standing between them and Iranian overlordship.

There’s no obvious answer. We can have a healthy, reasonable, civil debate about how to proceed.

In Turkey, however, the conversation is different. The question over there is whether ISIS or the Kurds are the lesser of evils.

Twenty five percent of Turkey’s population is Kurdish, and Erdogan—like most of his ethnic Turkish countrymen—are terrified that Turkey may lose a huge swath of its territory if Syrian Kurdistan liberates itself alongside Iraqi Kurdistan. Turkish Kurdistan could very well be the next domino.
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Turkey has been a lousy ally from the beginning in dealing with ISIL refusing to allow US and coalition plans to fly from their air bases.  They have also failed to block the supply routes from Turkey into ISIL territory as well as the flow of fighters joining ISIL.   This failure has led the Kurds to defend themselves from the ISIL threat so Turkey has earned its current dilemma through its inaction.  At this point the Kurds have earned the support of those who want to destroy ISIL, and the Turkes and others in the region should learn to live with an independent Kurdistan.