ISTANBUL — In the face of increasing international pressure, Turkey took decisive military action Monday — not against the Islamic State militants that Turkey’s Western allies have urged it to fight, but rather against the Kurdish militant group that has been battling the Islamic State.
Turkish warplanes struck positions of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, known as the PKK, in southeastern Turkey late Monday. The group, long an enemy of the Turkish state, had put down its weapons last year to talk peace. But on Tuesday, Turkish officials said the Kurdish militants had attacked a military outpost, leading to the government’s first airstrikes against the group in nearly two years.
The military action immediately reverberated well beyond Turkey’s borders because it is an offshoot of the PKK that is struggling to defend the Syrian Kurdish city of Kobani, which has been besieged by Islamic State militants for weeks.
As that battle has played out under the watch of news organizations, their cameras just across the border in Turkey, it has become a flash point for international criticism of Turkey’s unwillingness to take a greater role in fighting the Islamic State. But Turkey’s actions against the Kurds and its refusal to allow the PKK to shuttle reinforcements through Turkish territory to fight the Islamic State have led most analysts to this conclusion: that Turkey’s leaders see the battle for Kobani mostly as a chance to let two of its enemies duke it out, rather than as a cause for alarm.
“It’s a consistent approach to the conflict,” said Aaron Stein, a Turkey specialist and a fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based research organization. “And I think they are happy to have them kill each other.”
Turkey’s posture is one piece of what has become a tangled web of alliances and conflicting goals among the many countries who want to see the Islamic State eradicated. The United States, for example, has found itself sharing the battlefield in Iraq with Iranian-backed Shi’ite militias that once killed US soldiers. In Syria, though, the United States and Iran diverge, as Iran is a stalwart ally of the Syrian president, Bashar Assad, while the United States would prefer to see Assad leave power.
That dynamic of twisted allegiances has been starkly on display in the fight for Kobani, too.
While Turkey took military action against the PKK, the United States ramped up its bombing runs over Kobani, in support of the PKK’s Syrian splinter group, the Democratic Union Party, or PYD — even though the United States and its European allies have listed the PKK as a terrorist group.
For his part, the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has insisted that the Islamic State and the PKK pose the same threat and must both be confronted.
“Hey world, when a terrorist organization like ISIS emerges, you all speak out, but why don’t you speak out against the PKK as a terrorist organization?” Erdogan said recently, using an alternative name for the Islamic State. “Why don’t you call for a joint fight against them?”
Further complicating the picture, Turkey not only wants to extinguish Kurdish ambitions of autonomy, it also wants the international coalition to fight not just the Islamic State, but Assad’s government.
“Turkey is against both ISIS and Assad,” the Turkish prime minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, said Tuesday.
It may be clear, then, who Turkey’s enemies are, but it is far from clear what its strategy is to face them.
Coming as it did while Turkey is under pressure by the United States to do more against the Islamic State, the military action against the PKK represented, intentional or not, a pointed message to its Western ally.
“Airstrikes were not only a strong message to the PKK but also to the United States, saying, ‘I maintain my bargaining position in terms of what needs to be done in Syria,’ ” said Cengiz Candar, a columnist and expert on Turkey’s conflict with the Kurds. “It also legitimized not siding with the PYD.”
But the message Kurdish leaders are taking is that Turkey is happy to see them die on the streets of Kobani.
“It is not two terrorist groups fighting against each other,” said Idris Nassan, a spokesman for the fledgling Kurdish local government in Kobani. “Terrorist groups are attacking civilians. The Turkish government must change its attitude.”
Both sides in the Kobani battle have suffered heavy losses.