© SANA / Reuters
Syrian President Bashar Assad believes that by passively supporting the al-Nusra Front and Islamic State terrorist groups, Turkey is playing a most destructive role in the Syrian crisis.
"Turkey is playing a most negative role in our crisis. That's related directly to [President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan himself and [Prime Minister Ahmet] Davutoglu, because they both reflect the real ideology that they carry in their hearts, which is the Muslim Brotherhood ideology," Assad said in an interview with the French newsmagazine Valeurs Actuelles on Thursday.
The Syrian leader emphasized that, compared to Saudi Arabia and Qatar, Ankara was playing the most dangerous role in general, by giving all possible assistance to the terrorists.
"Some countries support al-Nusra Front, which is al-Qaeda, some other countries support ISIL, while Turkey supports both and other groups at the same time.
They support them with, human resources. They support them with money, logistics, armaments, surveillance, information, and even the maneuvers of their military through their borders during the fights in Syria.""Even the money that's being collected from the rest of the world passes through Turkey, and the oil that ISIL sells is through Turkey, so Turkey is playing the worst part of our crisis," Assad was quoted as saying by the Syrian news agency SANA.
Comment: In 1996 an Israeli think tank
published a paper titled "
A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm." In this paper the authors, which included Richard Perle (of
PNAC fame) and other staunch neoconservatives, advocated goals such as the destabilization of Syria through proxy warfare, and the removal of Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq, in order to create greater 'security' for Israel.
Earlier plans called for the use of Islamic fundamentalism to carry out this 'destabilization,' and established the rationale behind such a decision:
"[A] possibility, which could even be precipitated by [Islamic] fundamentalism, is what has late been fashionable to call 'Lebanonization.' Most of the states of the Middle East—Egypt is an obvious exception—are of recent and artificial construction and are vulnerable to such a process. If the central power is sufficiently weakened, there is no real civil society to hold the polity together, no real sense of common identity.... The state then disintegrates—as happened in Lebanon—into a chaos of squabbling, feuding, fighting sects, tribes, regions, and parties."
Given this context, and all that has played out on the world stage since, it is obvious that Turkey is playing a 'destructive role', but it is a role orchestrated by its stronger allies. What Turkey's goals are, in and of themselves, is a murky subject, but it looks like it's willing to remain the 'destabilization handmaiden' for some time to come. But, since Russia entered the picture, the situation is in a state of constant flux. It really seems that anything could happen.
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