How Safe Are Turkeys Oil And Gas Pipelines?

By Claude Salhani | Thu, 30 October 2014 23:16 | 0

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Bashar Assad is a man of his word. In 2011, when the civil war began in Syria, President Assad
delivered a promise to the international community and a threat to his neighbors: the violence will
spread.

Today, Iraq is partially occupied by the Islamic State -- which can trace its beginning to the chaos of
war-torn Syria -- Lebanon has been repeatedly hit by Syria-related violence, and border towns and
villages along the Turkish-Syrian border have come under attack from various forces fighting in the
country. Even Jordan is suffering under the weight of more than a million Syrian refugees who have
created the countrys second-largest city, population-wise.
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For its part, Turkey badly miscalculated, believing Assad would be gone within months, a victim of
the same fate of other Arab Spring leaders.

Related: Kurds Are The Last Line Of Defense For The West In Kobani

But those who assumed Assad would fall failed to factor in Syrias complicated internal politics.
During the more than 40 years that the Assad clan has ruled Syria, they and their fellow members of
the Alawite minority have so infuriated other ethnic and religious sects in the country that there can

be no peaceful end to their rule. Assad cannot retire quietly to the countryside. He knows that losing
power means not only losing his life, but that his entire extended family would be killed, as would all
his close and even distant collaborators.

Unlike other Arab leaders who fled their country, slipping away in the dead of the night, Assad would
very likely be prevented from leaving by those he would leave behind.

Besides the occasional shelling and car bombs going off in border villages, Turkey is feeling the heat
from the Syrian conflict in other ways. The country that not too long ago had high hopes of
becoming a full member of the European Union has had that longtime dream shattered. The manner
in which Turkey is allowing IS combatants to unleash havoc on the border town of Kobani has cost
Ankara heavily in the public relations domain.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is, in a manner of speaking, holding the Kurds who are defending
the besieged town hostage to his foreign and domestic policies. You can rest assured that the
Turkish president is not winning hearts and minds anywhere west of the Dardanelles. And Turkeys
actions, or rather its inaction where Kobani is concerned, is starting to anger other members of
NATO.

At the same time, Erdogan has angered the countrys own Kurdish minority -- which constitutes
roughly 18 percent of the countrys nearly 90 million citizens by allowing the Islamic State to
continue its siege and bombardment of Kobani, despite the Turkish army being deployed just a few
hundred yards away.

Related: How Islamic State Uses Oil To Fund Its Onslaught

It didnt help matters when he called the Kurds who were defending Kobani terrorists just as NATO
war planes were bombing IS positions to help them. He further infuriated Kurds in the southeast of
the country when he ordered the air force to attack positions of the PKK, the Kurdish Workers Party,
which Ankara considers a terrorist organization.

Turkey has also painted itself in somewhat of a corner, diplomatically speaking, because in the past,
it allowed IS fighters to transit its territory, during which time they set up cells that could be easily
activated. It is almost certain that if Turkey makes a wrong move, IS or Syrian agents inside the
country will take action.

There is indeed much at stake, not only for Turkey, but for Europe, which gets much of its oil
through Turkey via a network of pipelines from Qatar, Azerbaijan, and Iraqi Kurdistan -- any of which
would make an easy target for a group wishing to cause trouble. And we know there is no shortage
of those.