This Border Post Shows How Turkey’s ISIS Problem Keeps Getting Worse

Pipes, ammonium nitrate, and other bomb-making materials are being transported across Turkey's border into Syria by agents of ISIS while Turkish border guards look the other way, Jamie Dettmer of The Daily Beast reports.

And Ankara doesn't seem like it's willing to do much about it.

The relaxed border policies Turkey adopted between 2011-2014 enabled extremists who wished to travel to Syria and join the rebels in their fight against the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.

Turkey officially ended its open border policy last year, but not before its southern frontier became a transit point for cheap oil, weapons, foreign fighters, and pillaged antiquities. Smuggling networks all along the nation's 565-mile border with Syria managed to emerge and flourish while the policy was in place.

“That policy has ended now — but it’s very hard to go back to a nonporous border because you have already allowed all these smuggling networks to be established,” Soner Cagaptay, director of the Turkish Research Program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told The Wall Street Journal in February.

The Turkish town of Akcakale is a quintessential example of Turkey's still-inconsistent border policies. While some frontier cities have established a marked security presence to address the smuggling problem, with paramilitary forces patrolling the streets and manning checkpoints in armored vehicles, the town of Akcakale — separated from the ISIS-controlled Syrian town of Tel Abyad by a railway and a fence — is not one of them.

“Turkey is trapped now — it created a monster and doesn’t know how to deal with it,” one Western diplomat told WSJ.

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Jonathan Schanzer, a former counterterrorism analyst for the US Treasury Department and vice president of research at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, explained that Turkey's fear of attack from ISIS is a big reason the militants have been able to freely use a Turkish border crossing like Akcakale.

“Absolutely [fear of blowback] is part of the problem,” Schanzer, who warned about this problem in November, told Business Insider on Friday. “Initially the Turks allowed for ISIS to set up shop on the Turkish side of the border and my sense is … the longer this has persisted, the more difficult it is for the Turks to crack down because there is the risk of a counter strike, of blowback.”

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Read the full article here.