Turkey’s increasingly desperate predicament poses real dangers

Russia, Turkey’s oldest and nearest rival, is expanding its presence around Turkey’s borders — in Syria to the south, in Crimea and Ukraine to the north, and in Armenia to the east. On Saturday, Russia’s Defense Ministry announced the deployment of a new batch of fighter jets and combat helicopters to an air base outside the Armenian capital, Yerevan, 25 miles from the Turkish border.

Blowback from the Syrian war in the form of a string of suicide bombings in Istanbul and Ankara, most recently on Wednesday, has brought fear to Turkish streets and dampened the vital tourist industry.

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The 2015 PKK rebellion refers to the ongoing third phase of the Turkey-PKK conflict between the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and the Turkish government, beginning in late July 2015. The 2015 rebellion erupted following a two-and-a-half-year-long peace process, aimed at resolving the long-running conflict. The Turkey-PKK conflict has been going on since 1984, resulting in some 45,000 killed, as well as 2 to 3 million displaced.[14]

The 2015 conflict between Turkey and the PKK broke out following two year-long peace negotiations, which began in late 2012, but failed to progress in light of the growing tensions on border with Syria in late 2014, when the Siege of Kobani created an unprecedented wave of Kurdish refugees into Turkey. Some of the Kurds accused Turkey of assisting the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) during the crisis, resulting in widespread Kurdish riots in Turkey involving dozens of fatalities. The tensions further escalated in summer 2015 with the July 20 bombing in Suruç, allegedly executed by an ISIL-affiliated Turkish group against Kurdish supporters; some PKK supporters then claimed responsibility for the July 23 killing of two Turkish police officers in Eastern Anatolia, describing it as a retaliation.[15] (A week later, Group of Communities in Kurdistan (KCK) spokesman Demhat Agit denied official PKK involvement, saying "these are the units independent from the PKK. They are local forces which organized themselves and not affiliated with us."[16])

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