Turkey faces the ISIL front with losses in Syria

The dead bodies of 16 Turkish soldiers were buried in 14 different provinces across Turkey, all att about the same time on Dec. 23.

Those soldiers were killed a day before in the Turkish army campaign to wrest control of the Syrian town of al-Bab from the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL) and to prevent it from falling into the hands of the Democratic Union Party (PYD) militia, the Syria extension of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which has been in a fight with Turkey for more than three decades.

Turkey has been the target of many terrorist attacks in the last two years, both by ISIL and the PKK. In the last two weeks, there were major suicide bomb attacks in Istanbul and Kayseri by the PKK. There have been thousands of funerals of soldiers and police officers so far in the fight with the PKK. For example, the commando brigade in Kayseri alone has lost 23 soldiers in the PKK fight in the Turkish mountains in the last five days.

In ISIL bombings, hundreds of people and civilians were killed in places like Ankara, Istanbul, Gaziantep and Suruç.

But those 16 soldiers killed in one day, 14 of them in a suicide bombing attack in the residential outskirts of al-Bab, shocked the Turkish people into another reality. Yes, there have been losses in Turkey's campaign in Syria since Aug. 24 together with the Free Syria Army (FSA) militia to push ISIL away from the border while obstructing the PYD/PKK from completing a corridor along it. And the fight against ISIL occurred largely either in police operations in urban areas with the arrest of suspects, or strikes by the Air Force and artillery from distance. Now the Mehmetçiks, the Turkish GI Joes, have been killed in Syria for land that will not be kept but will be handed...