Kurdish insurgency may lead to collapse of Turkey - analyst

 

The Kurdish insurgency could lead to the collapse of Turkey by gaining foreign support, Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute warned on Wednesday.

Turkey’s increasingly aggressive foreign policy may backfire if regional rivals respond by backing the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), said Rubin in an article for the National Interest. 

The PKK has been waging an armed insurgency in Turkey since 1984, a conflict that has remained largely internal.

But the rise of Kurdish groups with U.S. support in Syria has the potential to shift this dynamic, Rubin said, providing a precedent for other countries to begin arming the PKK.

This includes Saudi Arabia, which regards Turkey’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood as an existential threat, and Egypt, which is at loggerheads with Ankara over Libya and the Eastern Mediterranean.   

“Kurdish insurgents in Turkey may soon have at their disposal the type of weaponry and funding about which in the past they could only dream," Rubin said.

“Any Turk who buys into Erdoğan’s bombast and regional aggression is not enabling Turkish greatness as Erdoğan’s enablers may claim, but rather its ultimate partition.”

Source: https://ahvalnews.com/pkk/kurdish-insurgency-may-lead-collapse-turkey-analyst?language_content_entity=en