It’s Time Turkey Owned Up to Its Misadventures and Ends Them

A Turkish court on Friday ordered the release of seven staff members of a Turkish daily but ruled out the release of five others, all faced with charges of supporting terror – charges which are widely seen as frivolous. The daily Cumhurriyet is being targeted for exposing the Turkish government’s role in providing military aid to Syrian “rebels” in 2013-14.

The hearings of the daily's 17 journalists and executives ended on Friday after being held for more than 270 days. According to reports, the charges against them include “membership of an armed terrorist organization” and “helping an armed terrorist organization while not being a member of it.”  

Six have already been released pending trial while eleven of the suspects have been held in jail under arrest. The trial against the staff-members including the Editor-in-Chief of the newspaper Murat Subuncu has revealed Turkey’s larger role in the Syrian conflict, much to the embarrassment of Turkey’s authoritarian government. The military aid provided to the Syrian “rebels” by Turkey is also seen in the backdrop of the rise of extreme Islamist outfits like the Islamic State (IS) which the country is fighting now alongside NATO.

In December 2015, the newspaper’s then Editor-in-Chief Can Dundar alleged in a Guardian article that Turkey’s regime not only smuggled guns into Syria, it also used “state security” as an excuse to imprison the journalists who reported it.

Earlier that year in May, Cumhurriyet published a video footage that showed security forces intercepting the Turkish intelligence agency’s (MIT) truck carrying weapon parts to Syria. The paper ran an explosive front-page scoop against the Turkish regime exposing Erdogan’s intervention in the Syrian civil war.

Cumhurriyet did not reveal how it obtained the video, but said it dated back to January 19, 2014. The charges were vehemently opposed by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and claimed the trucks were carrying humanitarian aid to Turkmen in war-torn Syria.

Cumhurriyet’s reportage of Turkey’s misadventures in Syria was also corroborated with a similar report published in the Belgian newspaper Trud on July 2. Trud exposed the smuggling of huge quantities of weapons to Syria by Azerbaijan’s state-run Silk Way Airlines (SAA) in at least 350 diplomatic flights in the past three years. Many countries including Turkey turned a blind-eye to allow these flights to transport huge caches of arms and ammunition to Syria.

The report also pointed out that weapons used by a militant outfit fighting north of Aleppo were apparently transported on a Turkey-bound flight which landed in Diyabakir city, 235 km away from the Turkey-Syria border.

Although the extent of Turkey’s support to extreme Islamist militants in Syria still remains mostly under wraps, its flirtation with these outfits cast a shadow on President  Erdogan,  one of the first world leaders to urge Assad to step down. The ruling AKP leader moved in hastily to try and put an end to the Assad regime in Syria but later found himself caught in an intractable quagmire.

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