Erdogan's Kurdish phobia rears its head again.

Erdogan's Kurdish phobia rears its head again.(HD).Prime Minister Erdoğan cannot have it both ways. Referring to Sunni Arabs who have risen against the al-Assad regime as “freedom fighters who are combating state terror,” but then turning and calling the equally oppressed Kurds who are making political headway now in the confusion that reigns in Syria “terrorists” is hypocritical. Developments in Syria, with Kurds controlling parts of Northern Syria along the border with Turkey, have reanimated the Kurdish phobia of nationalist Turks, who are now seething with anger over the prospect of “another northern Iraq” emerging on Turkey’s southern border.
Prime Minister Erdoğan, who for all his “Kurdish opening,” which was supposedly aimed at alleviating Turkey’s Kurdish problem, has been relying more and more on nationalist quarters over these past few years. This is why with the news coming from northern Syria he wasted no time in playing to the nationalist gallery. With Syria’s “Kurdish reality” suddenly dawning on Turks, Erdoğan clearly feels he has to do this, even if his remarks are aggravating as far as Turkey’s own Kurdish problem is concerned, and also risk spoiling Ankara’s developing ties with the Kurds of northern Iraq.
“It is our most natural right to intervene [in northern Syria], since those terrorist formations would disturb our national peace,” Erdoğan said last week during a television interview. Turks consider the armed Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), which is only one of the Kurdish groups active in Syria, in the same light as the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). PYD leader Salih Muslim, a Turkish-educated urbane Kurd, admits sympathy for the PKK but insists that the PYD is a different group, with its own agenda that has nothing to do with Turkey. Given that it has ties with the PKK, despite Muslim’s remarks, the PYD nevertheless provides political ammunition for the Turkish government, enabling it to raise the specter of “Kurdish terrorism.” Ankara’s phobia, however, is not just towards the PYD alone, but to the resurgence of any Kurdish entity in northern Syria. The idea that the Syrian Kurds, with support from the northern Iraqi Kurdish Regional Government (KRG), may establish their own autonomous or even independent region along the border with Turkey is simply too much for nationalist Turks who fear Kurdish separatism.Read the full story here.