What will it take for Ankara to wake up?

Again we see that Ankara is bedeviled by events just across its border, which it can’t control or prevent because of the futile way the government is trying to impose its conflicting agenda on developments that have their own dynamics.

Turkey is currently the least effective of all players as matters in Syria unfold in a manner that contradicts almost everything President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu say. Take Erdoğan’s persistence in equating the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and the Democratic Union Party (PYD), and using this as an excuse for not helping the Kurds in Rojava (Syrian Kurdistan).

While the link between the PKK and the PYD is known, no one in the world seems to care today. What matters is what is going on in Syria with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). All that Turkey has achieved is to force Washington to declare that it does not see the PKK and the PYD as the same thing, and to admit that it is supplying arms to the PYD’s armed wing, the People’s Protection Units (YPG).

So what is Ankara doing despite Erdoğan’s open declaration that Turkey cannot condone arms being supplied to the YPG? Absolutely nothing – the simple reason being that it can’t do anything, except eat humble pie and accept the situation.

It is trying to save the day now with talk about opening a corridor for the Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga to enter Rojava, but even that is not free of confusion. If Ankara had pursued a more hands-on policy with regard to the Syrian Kurds, instead of first wasting time on the argument that they are allies of Bashar al-Assad, and second on trying to convince the West that the PKK and the PYD are the same thing, matters would have been different.