Sore point

Gwynne Dyer

February 2 , 2015

Turkey's prime minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, was in London recently, telling the Western media how helpful Ankara was being in the struggle against the terrorist "Islamic State" that has emerged in northern Syria and Iraq. Turkey is doing everything it can, he said - although, of course, "We cannot put troops everywhere on the border."

Turkey's open border has become a sore point with its Western allies, who suspect that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is deliberately allowing a steady flow of recruits and supplies to the Islamic State because he still wants the Sunni rebels, most of whom arejihadi extremists, to overthrow Bashar al-Assad, Syria's Shia ruler.

But Erdogan's motives are irrelevant, because Turkey simply cannot put troops everywhere on its 820-kilometre-long border with Syria. Or so says Davutoglu, and only an enemy of Turkey (or somebody without a grasp of basic mathematics) would say otherwise.

I am no enemy of Turkey, but I can do basic arithmetic. If you stationed Turkish troops along the entire length of the Syrian border at 10-metre intervals - that's enough for a machine-gun nest every 50-metres - it would take about 82,000 soldiers to cover the entire 820 km. The strength of the Turkish army (never mind the navy and air force) is 315,000 soldiers. Even if you allow for frequent rotation of the soldiers manning the border, it would take much less than half the strength of the Turkish army to shut the border to foreign fighters. Maybe a few jihadis would still get through, but the vast majority wouldn't. The only reason Ankara doesn't shut the border is that it doesn't really want to.

More horrors

Cutting off the flow of jihadi volunteers to Syria would not greatly change the local military balance: the Islamic State uses them mostly as mere cannon-fodder. The point is that Turkey is not fully committed to the destruction of the Islamic State, and indeed will give it deniable help in order to further the goal of a Sunni victory in Syria, in spite of being part of a "coalition of the willing" that is nominally dedicated to destroying the Islamic State.

The same goes for Saudi Arabia, although it has sent some token aircraft to bomb the Islamic State. Riyadh tries to prevent any Saudi citizen from going to fight for the Islamic State, and it certainly does not want the Islamic State brand of radicalism to come to the kingdom. But Saudi private individuals have been a major source of financing for the group, and until recently Riyadh just turned a blind eye to it. Even now Saudi Arabia doesn't want the Islamic State destroyed if that means Assad gets to stay in power in Syria.

Then there's Iran. In Iraq, where Islamic State controls half the country's territory and threatens a Shia-dominated regime, Iran and the United States of America are fighting almost side-by-side to defend Haider al-Abadi's government. (They don't actually talk to each other, but they each tell the Iraqis where they are planning to bomb so there are no collisions over the target areas.)

But next-door, in Syria, it's different. Iran has sent troops, weapons and money to defend Assad's regime, while the US is still pledged to overthrow it. They both see the Islamic State as an enemy, but Washington still believes that it can create some other, more "moderate" army of Sunni rebels that will eventually take Assad down.

And so on, and so forth. Not one of the major outside powers that is opposed to Islamic State in principle has a clear strategy for fighting it, nor are they willing to cooperate with one another.

So the Islamic State will survive, at least for some years to come, in spite of the horrors it inflicts on the innocent people under its control. It may even expand a bit more, though the end of the siege of Kobane shows that it is far from unstoppable.