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While the War on Syria is proving itself to be a failed enterprise for all of its culprits, especially Turkey, it also saw the eventual administrative-political tweaking of Neo-Ottomanism. Turkish scholar Dr. Can Erimtan warned in late-2013 that "the government's long-term goal (as arguably expressed in the AKP's policy statement Hedef 2023) is to transform the nation state Turkey into an Anatolian federation of Muslim ethnicities, possibly linked to a revived caliphate. In this way, Turkey's future (as a nation state) would arguably become subject to Anatolia's past as a home to many different Muslims of divergent ethnic background."
What this basically means is that the devolution of the unitary Turkish state to a federation would give Ankara the flexibility to incorporate/annex territories under its wing which are populated by people of a separate ethno-nationalist identity in order to build the post-modern/post-Western 21st-century Neo-Ottoman Caliphate. In practice, this could allow for all or part of Syria become part of a reformatted Turkey, as well as Syrian and Iraqi "Kurdistan", and the geographically large Sunni areas of Iraq. In fact, the"federalization" of both Syria and Iraq would amount to an internal partition in both cases and the emergence of a transnational sub-state "Sunnistan" which could, under Dr. Erimtan's analyzed template of the future Turkish state, come under Ankara's eventual control.
Comment: Erdogan wants in on the fight in Northern Syria for several reasons besides fighting Daesh: To gain favor with Russia, to keep troops in Syria with a legitimate excuse, and to eliminate the Syrian Kurdish population as part of a genocidal operation ongoing in SE Turkey. Protocol demands Russia's invite and approval. What happens after that regarding Turkey's agenda is wait and see.
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