April 15, 2014 | Quote

Syria’s Conflict Raises Turkey Tension

Men sit playing cards in a cafe perched beside the turquoise waters of the Mediterranean. The craggy peak of Mount Aqraa stretches away in the distance.

For much of the past month, the roar of artillery fire has boomed down from the mountain and along the streets of the normally quiet seaside town of Samandag, a few kilometres from the Turkey-Syria border, in southeastern Hatay province.

“[Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip] Erdogan is trying to make a war,” said Enver Yarci, a waiter at the cafe. “I can't relax any more; the war is right there.”

“The eastern Turkish frontier has become the gateway to the Syria jihad. Some have gone so far as to deem it the Peshawar of this generation of jihadists,” said Jonathan Schanzer, vice president of research at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), referring to the Pakistani city known as a training ground for religious rebel groups. “This is not an exaggeration. Turkey has allowed this territory to become a safe haven, a logistics and planning base, and a zone of terrorism finance. It cannot be understated how important this is to the continued growth of the various jihadi factions fighting in Syria.”

“Turkey's permissive policies have inexorably led to the escalation of this conflict. Specifically, the Turks have not differentiated between jihadi factions and those without extremist ideological leanings,” Schanzer told Al Jazeera.

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Issues:

Syria Turkey