'Turkey to lose big if ISIL wins against coalition'

Turkey and Western allies need to be in full cooperation in order to defeat the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), former British Defense Secretary and a prominent member of the governing Conservative Party, Dr. Liam Fox has said.

?Turkey will be one of the big losers if we don?t deal with ISIL successfully,? Dr. Fox told daily Hürriyet in an interview on Feb. 3. 

?Rising Tides: Facing the Challenges of a New Era,? a book Dr. Fox wrote on transnational terrorism and rising extremism and was published by TEAS in Turkish recently. 

?If ISIL goes on and we don?t deal with it properly, it will be a problem destabilizing one of your borders for a long time. It is Turkey?s interest, as well as our interest, to maintain a strong coalition and speak as a single voice as much as we can while dealing with this problem. If we don?t; the consequences for us all will be fairly dreadful,? Fox said. 

Turkey and the West need to have full cooperation in militarily and in intelligence, Fox said. ?In all these areas we need to see full cooperation from Turkey. And Turkey deserves full cooperation from the rest of us too.  We are going to deal with it by cutting off their money and financial flows, we must make the case actively that that type of society is barbaric and medieval,? he said.  

'Airstrikes are not enough'

Fox said air strikes by the coalition forces led by the U.S. on ISIL targets in Iraq and Syria can only be ?partly effective? and there needed to be a land battle against ISIL.  

?You can never win a war from the air alone. I have always thought that one of the key elements in Iraq and Syria is getting the Sunni tribes; especially the tribes in the Anbar province to active and to be the ground...