Turkey Angers the Jihadists It Once Tolerated

With Turkish authorities now singling out the Islamic State as the chief suspect in this weekend's terrorist attack in Ankara, many media outlets have turned their anger toward the government. Did Ankara invite this attack with a lax policy toward jihadists in Syria?

For years the government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan allowed fighters, money and guns to flow into Syria, to the jihadists fighting the regime of Bashar al-Assad. That began to change over the summer. U.S. military officials tell us that the Turks have recently done a better job of patrolling the border. In August, Erdogan also allowed U.S. and NATO aircraft to fly missions against the Islamic State from its military base in Incirlik, after nearly a year of negotiations.

This is in contrast to the Turkish security service, which was willing at times to turn a blind eye to the Islamic State and other jihadists in Syria who saw the Turkish border as a lifeline for cash, guns and fighters.

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Aykan Erdemir, who served in the opposition to Erdogan in Turkey's parliament until June and who is now a nonresident senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told us Erdogan's policy for most of Syria's civil war has been to support what it at first considered to be the moderate Islamist opposition to Assad, but slowly ended up supporting far more radical groups, like al-Qaeda's affiliate in Syria known as al-Nusra Front. “Unfortunately Turkey is suffering the blowback from its entanglement with its proxy wars with what it considered moderate Islamists,” Erdemir said of the attacks in Ankara.

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