” Despite this, immediately after the elections, the “Reconciliation Process” came to an end due to the PKK’s attacks on Turkish security forces that were mostly related to the developments taking place in Syria and Iraq.
Indeed, they burnt their tongue, or hit the wall, in the Second War on Iraq, which was stupid, and they squandered hundreds of billions of dollars of American resources, and the war was, in many ways, economically, strategically, politically, a disaster.
However, if the speaker was the main criterion for a public broadcast, it should be legally impossible to justify how, in 2011, a significant functionary of the terrorist organization PKK was allowed to be live streamed in a football stadium in Cologne from Iraq.
It suffices to remember that, as late as 2003, France led the opposition to the Iraq War within NATO, and Turkey surprised the world, including many Turks themselves, by refusing to participate in the US-led invasion of Iraq (although French foreign policy in general changed significantly during Nicolas Sarkozy’s presidency).
The terror attacks against the United States of America on September 11th 2001 and the following wars in the Middle East (Afghanistan, Iraq and, more recently, Syria) have proven that, far from ending, history is “alive and well” and accelerating on a dangerously unpredictable path.
Later, it tested the rural reactions of security forces along the Iraqi border to desynchronize their power and finally rurally based PKK terrorists were sent to urban areas around mid-October 2015.
During the Iran-Iraq war, as Sunni Arab states and Western powers united behind the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, Turkey maintained a neutral position.
The adaptation of a multidimensional foreign policy had increased Turkey’s economic cooperation with its neighbor countries (Russia, Syria, Iraq and Iran).
Eventually, the newly created Iraq and Jordan, alongside Palestine were put under British rule, whereas Syria and the newly created Lebanon (and parts of southern Anatolia) were given to the French.
Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen seem to be failed projects in terms of state-making and maintenance, as the mismatches between the social fabrics and the political structures of these political entities has generated deep grievances over the century.
Riyadh is one of Turkey’s most important allies in some of Ankara’s foreign policy actions, particularly in Syria and Iraq, and more broadly in its competition with Iran.
The country seemed to many a monolithic body which, say, pursued harmonious policies to preserve its strongholds in Iraq or Syria or conducted painstaking talks over its nuclear question.
Especially after the 2003 Iraq War, the tone of the critics sharpened as UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan pointed to a crisis of the international system, most notably the UN Security Council.
Eventually, the majority of PDK-S and KNC members have been pacified and forced to flee to Turkey or the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) in Northern Iraq.
Washington’s insistence on no boots on the ground and leading behind a strategy that relied on some state and non-state actors’ cooperation on the ground has so far failed to be successful in bringing a solution to the problems of the fractured states of both Iraq and Syria.