In the aftermath of the Arab Spring in 2011, Ahmet Davutoglu, then
Turkish minister of foreign affairs and now prime minister, vowed that
Turkey would be the “game setter” of the Middle East. Today, such
notions of grandeur seem outrageous. After the bombing of a military convoy in Ankara on February 17,
which the Turkish government blamed on the Kurdish People’s Protection
Units, Davutoglu stated that the latest Kurdish territorial gains in
Syria against Islamic rebels such as al Nusra Front—what Turkey calls
“moderate” rebels—represent a threat to the “survival of the state” of
Turkey. Ankara has apparently felt this way for a while. Since last
year, the Turkish army has turned the Kurdish cities in Turkey’s
southeast into war zones in its effort to dislodge Kurdish militants
who have barricaded themselves in these areas. More recently, Turkey
has even started firing on Kurdish forces in northern Syria.
Understanding
Turkey’s fears—and its reaction to them—requires a look at the long
history of the territory that it covers. The Turkish republic,
established in 1923, was built on a weak foundation:
throughout its existence, its population has been divided ethnically
and along sectarian lines. When we study Anatolia, the peninsula that
covers 97 percent of Turkey, we see that it has been difficult to unite.
It took two millennia—from antiquity to the Byzantine era—before the
adoption of a common language: Greek. It took another thousand years
before the Hellenistic majority transformed into a Turkish one (in terms
of language) and adopted Islam as its religion. This process began in
1071 when Turkish tribes entered Anatolia after the Seljuk army defeated
the Byzantine army in the Battle of Manzikert. Over a few centuries
more, indigenous Christians gradually—but largely
superficially—converted to Islam, making Anatolia nominally majority
Muslim.

The ethnic groups and popular religious sects in
Anatolia resisted the attempts by successive states to impose
centralized control and cultural uniformity through orthodox religion.
Until the foundation of Turkey, there had been only two Anatolian states
that controlled most of the peninsula: the first was the Hittite Empire
in the second millennium BC, and the second was the Turkish Seljuk
sultanate from the eleventh to the thirteenth century. The latter
succeeded in winning over large parts of the Greek-speaking, Christian
peasant population because it did not impose an orthodox religion. That
is how the Byzantine Empire lost Anatolia. The principalities in
Anatolia also put up a fierce fight against the Ottomans,
who conquered the region in the fifteenth century. Still,
Anatolia continued to resist the empire’s centralization and
imposition of religious orthodoxy. In fact, the Ottoman Empire nearly
collapsed in the early seventeenth century after a particularly
aggressive series of popular uprisings in Anatolia. The revolts were
crushed, but the long-standing struggle between the Anatolian provinces
and Istanbul has never ended.
The transformation of Anatolia into
the heartland of a Turkish nation-state was even bloodier. At the
beginning of the twentieth century, a fifth of the population in
Anatolia—Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians—remained Christian. The Ottoman Empire sanctioned genocide
against these groups and forced their migration to create a homogeneous
country. But even among those who were left, ethnic and religious
divisions remained. The Kurds and the Alevis, a heterodox Muslim
minority that has been oppressed for centuries, have resisted
assimilation.
The Turkish state, fearful of crumbling, sought to suppress its remaining ethnic minority, the Kurds, by either internally displacing or slaughtering them,
as it did in 1931 in Agri province and in 1937 and 1938 in Dersim
province. Not surprisingly, the brutal policy failed to bring about
national homogeneity. In the 1980s, after staging a coup to crush the
ascendant political left the military made a renewed effort to bolster
both Turkish nationalism and Sunni Islam as an antidote to leftist
ideas. The military regime made religious instruction compulsory and
built a mosque in nearly every village that did not already have one.
However, the combination of Turkish nationalism and Islamization was not
enough to check the rise of secular Kurdish nationalism, which became a
serious challenge after the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) began its
insurrection in 1984.
The moderate Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP),
which came to power in 2002, appeared to be a unifying force for the
divided country, since the party appealed to both conservative Turks and
conservative Kurds. Its rise suggested that Turkish-Kurdish unity could
be secured on the basis of Sunni Islam. In 2012, shortly after the
Kurdish region in Syria known as Rojava declared autonomy, the Turkish
state began to conduct talks with Abdullah Ocalan,
the PKK’s imprisoned leader. These talks bore fruit in 2013, when
Ocalan called on his organization to end violence against the Turkish
state. By then, around 40,000 people, mostly Kurdish militants, had died
in the clashes between the Turkish state and the PKK. The government
hoped to secure the PKK’s disarmament without having to make any
significant concessions to the Kurds. It thought that the solution to
the Kurdish question was to emphasize that the Turks and the Kurds were
united by an Islamic “brotherhood.”

Ocalan also evoked the unity of Turks and Kurds, who,
he said, had “been marching under the banner of Islam for a thousand
years.” Ocalan extended this vision of unity beyond Turkey’s borders,
arguing that Turks and Kurds were the “two fundamental strategic
elements of the Middle East,” who have a regional mission to unite
“Kurds, Turkomans, Assyrians, and Arabs” in Iraq and Syria who had
wrongly been separated from Turkey after the end of the Ottoman Empire
following World War I. In fact, Ocalan’s vision was very much in line
with Turkish goals. A former deputy head of Turkey’s National
Intelligence Agency had likewise stated that “Turkey’s settlement of the
Kurdish problem [could] bring about changes of the borders and of the
map in the region,” which implied that parts of Syria and Iraq,
populated by Kurds, might be incorporated into Turkey.