Alwaght- Turkey to some degree orchestrates its own policies on Syria, Iraq, and Yemen issues in line with Saudi Arabia, and still clings to this policy high on its agenda. One of these issues is Mosul, the capital of Iraq’s Nineveh province. The Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in September announced that he did not recognize the Lausanne Treaty because it was a terrible loss for Turkey. Signed in1923, the Lausanne Treaty specifies the Turkish borders with Iraq and Syria. Erdogan, however, asserted that he did not approve of this bordering fashion. Accordingly, the Turkish President both in northern Syria and northern Iraq, particularly in Mosul, is trying to send military forces in a bid to get shares there once the regions are cleansed of presence of ISIS terrorist group.
Erdogan argued that there were ethnic groups in Iraq that needed the Turkish protection, in a reference to the Turkmen minority of Iraq. This comes while the Turkmens of Iraq are 40 percent Sunni Muslims and 60 percent Shiite and Baktashi Muslims. When ISIS captured Mosul and other Iraqi cities with a support from the Iraqi Baathists and Turkey, some of the Shiite Muslims were slaughtered and their women were enslaved.
The Shiite Turkmens also suffered from ISIS’ arrival. They were forced to move to the country’s central regions. They are now organized under the Public Mobilization Forces (PMF), a popular voluntary force formed to fight ISIS. They want to fight the terrorist group and return home. But Erdogan argued that they had no right to enter Mosul because they were “criminal Shiite Muslims” who sought massacring the Sunnis. He also claimed that Mosul's residents were 100 percent Sunni Arabs, with some Sunni Kurds and Sunni Turkmens living there. He emphasized that the demographic structure should not change in Mosul and the Sunnis must save their majority in the city. In fact, he is against deployment of non-local forces to Mosul like the PMF or the Shiites, otherwise, a sectarian and civil war, he warned, will erupt in Iraq.
The Turkish President also said that the Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi was “provoked by the others” into protesting against Turkish deployment of military forces to northern Iraq. Erdogan maintained that PM al-Abadi himself urged Ankara to send military units to the Iraqi territory and now wanted them out of the country. He stated that Turkey will not pull its forces out of Iraq’s north, adding that the Turkish army did not take orders from the Iraqi PM, and that al-Abadi was not in a position to order the Turkish forces out of Iraq. Erdogan continued that Turkey was not a country to send forces at the others' request and get them out when they do not need them.
The Turkish president said that he “will not allow Mosul to get out of ISIS’ occupation and fall to other terrorists.” At the same time, Erdogan said that Turkey will take part in Mosul liberation operation along with the US-led international military coalition. He even warned that only Turkey and Mosul’s local forces, namely Hashed Al-Watani or Guardians of Nineveh, led by the former Mosul’s governor Atheel al-Nujaifi, were qualified to take part in the liberation assault. The Turkish leader said neither the Iraqi army nor the PMF were allowed in the battle to retake the ISIS-held northern city.
Furthermore, recently Ankara sent its chief of staff of army to the US. He was set to discuss with the commander of the US-led anti-ISIS coalition the issue of participation of the Turkish forces in fight to reclaim Mosul from the terrorist group. In fact one of the goals of the Turkish president is to strip al-Abadi of his ruling powers. Erdogan has recently said that Turkey was not enemy to the Iraqi people but if the Iraqi PM continued his “hostility” to the Turks, Ankara will respond to him. He stated that if al-Abadi wanted to behave in good faith with Turkey, Ankara will respond in the same manner.
The Turkish officials have adopted an offensive and militaristic policy in dealing with Baghdad, and it is very likely that these tensions produce armed clashes. Iraq's Badr Organization and Hezbollah Movement, both key anti-terror paramilitary organizations in the country, have demanded the Turkish forces to withdraw from Iraq by themselves, or “their dead bodies will be sent back home.” Reacting to the warning, Ankara leaders have said that they will not care about such threats, and that the Turkish army was too strong to pull back after the Iraqi warnings.
It is not unlikely that this militaristic approach of President Erdogan leads to serious military escalation between Ankara and Baghdad at the end of the road. It seems that Turkey is adopting such policies with a reliance on the US and NATO, otherwise, it has no potentials for such a flexing of muscles on its own.
