Turkish warplanes attacked Islamic State targets in Syria for the first time on Friday, with President Tayyip Erdogan promising more decisive action against both the jihadists and Kurdish militants at home. The air strikes, which followed a phone conversation between Erdogan and US President Barack Obama on Wednesday, were accompanied by police raids across Turkey to detain hundreds of suspected militants, including from Kurdish groups.
Ankara also said it had approved the use of its air bases by US and coalition aircraft to mount strikes against Islamic State, marking a major change in policy that has long been a sore point for Washington. Turkey has long been a reluctant partner in the US-led coalition against Islamic State, emphasising instead the need to oust Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and saying Syrian Kurdish forces also pose a grave security threat.
But Friday's attacks, which officials said were launched from Turkish air space, signalled that Ankara would crack down against Islamic State across the Syrian border, while pursuing the banned Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) - which Ankara describes as a separatist organisation - at home. "In our phone call with Obama, we reiterated our determination in the struggle against the separatist organisation and the Islamic State," Erdogan told reporters. "We took the first step last night."
Turkey has faced increasing insecurity along its 900-km (560-mile) frontier with Syria. A cross-border firefight on Thursday between the army and Islamic State, which has seized large areas of Syria and Iraq, left five militants and one soldier dead. Turkey has also suffered a wave of violence in its largely Kurdish southeast after a suspected Islamic State suicide bombing killed 32 people, many of them Kurds, in the town of Suruc on the Syrian border this week.
But Erdogan's critics say he is more concerned with keeping Syrian Kurdish fighters in check, afraid that gains they have made against Islamic State in the Syrian civil war will embolden Turkey's own 14 million-strong Kurdish minority. "Even though Erdogan has so far failed to achieve his goals in Syria - the overthrow of Assad - and Islamic State has become a problem, it is nevertheless a convenient instrument for him," said Halil Karaveli, managing editor of The Turkey Analyst, a policy journal.
"Now he has all the excuses he needs to go after the Kurds and also it makes him look very good in the eyes of the US, which will be happy that Turkey is on board in the coalition." Opposition lawmakers from the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party said Erdogan is intent on "obstructing" the advances made by the Syrian Kurds against Islamic State.
"The real aim of today's operations is not the Islamic State, but the democratic opposition," they said in an e-mailed statement. News of the military operations further unnerved jittery investors, helping send the lira down nearly 4 percent on the week. Three F-16 fighter jets took off from a base in Diyarbakir, southeastern Turkey, early on Friday and hit two Islamic State bases and one "assembly point" before returning, the prime minister's office said.
"We can't say this is the beginning of a military campaign, but certainly the policy will be more involved, active and more engaged," a Turkish government official told Reuters. "But action won't likely be taken unprompted." Police also rounded up nearly 300 people in Friday's raids against suspected Islamic State and Kurdish militants, Prime Minister Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said after vowing to fight all "terrorist groups" equally. Local media reported that helicopters and more than 5,000 officers, including special forces, were deployed in the operation. Anti-terror police raided more than 100 locations across Istanbul alone, broadcasters CNN Turk and NTV reported.
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