Turkish gov't warns against sectarian spillover from Syria

"If the Syria resistance fails, there will be a face-off with the sectarian barbarians of Shah Ismail in Anatolia. Everyone should prepare for that." This tweet posted on Dec. 13 by Abdülkadir Şen, an academic at the Malazgirt University in eastern Turkey, started a serious debate and had a snowball effect in the country. 

The reference to Shah Ismail was a not-so-veiled address to Turkey's Alevis community. In a battle in 1516, Iranian armies led by a Shiite Turk, Shah Ismail, were defeated by Ottoman "Yavuz" (Brave) Sultan Selim I, and many Anatolian Turkish Alevis sided with Ismail. 

In another tweet posted on the same day, Şen said "the sectarian barbarians will pay [for Aleppo]. You have become shahs [again], so we'll become Yavuz." The "sectarian barbarians" he was referring to were clearly Turkey's Alevi community, estimated to make up over 10 percent of Turkey's population of 78 million people.

Şen was suspended by his university after uproar over his tweets. The main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) took the issue to parliament and asked how such a person - who had also been detained in the past on accusations of making propaganda in line with Al-Qaeda - could possibly be employed at a public university.

But anti-Alevi coverage and hate messages on social media only spread as civilians living in districts of Aleppo under the control of rebel militias struggled to leave the town in one piece due to attacks by the pro-Iranian Hasdi Shaabi militia and the Syrian army of the Bashar al-Assad regime, breaking the agreement between Turkey and Russia for evacuation.

Government spokesman and Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmuş sounded concerned as he answered questions from the Hürriyet Daily News over the...