Erdogan Rising

by Hannah Lucinda Smith

  When the Kurdish peace process broke down in mid-2015, it was the PÖH who led the fight against PKK insurgents in the towns and cities. The government announced in March 2016, eight months into the renewed violence, that it was increasing their numbers in response to the terror threat. When I arrived in ruined Kurdish towns where curfews had been newly lifted, I would find their graffiti – PÖH KOMANDO – scrawled all over the rubble.

  In April 2016, three months before the coup and as the terror attacks were at their height, I saw the heavily armed PÖH officers in their camouflage uniforms and black balaclavas on patrol in Istanbul for the first time, guarding the entrance of the high-class Marmara hotel in Taksim, the heart of the city. Around the same time, a military adviser told me that Erdoğan was ‘giving the PÖH everything, turning them into Tayyip’s boys’. The military was growing concerned with the creeping power of the police, the adviser added, and they believed that the conflict in the Kurdish south-east was being used as the PÖH’s training ground. On the night of 15 July the special units proved their mettle: the PÖH’s Golbası headquarters in Ankara was bombed by rogue pilots, while the special forces officers led the fightback against the revolt. A few months later, one of Erdoğan’s advisers let slip to me that the PÖH and their gendarmerie counterparts, the Jandarma Özel Harekat (JÖH) are the only officers the president trusts. By 2017, their combined numbers had soared from 11,000 to an estimated 40,000, an almost four-fold increase in seven years.

  Their rigid selection process – recruits must be able to run 2.5 kilometres wearing a ten-kilogram backpack in less than fifteen minutes – precedes gruelling training. Over sixteen weeks, the PÖH recruits are schooled in advanced weapons techniques, sharpshooting, waterborne operations, reconnaissance and intelligence gathering, and hostage rescue. At least some of that training is now conducted by a shadowy private company with close ties to Erdoğan.

  SADAT, a defence and consultancy firm, was established by a group of former Turkish military officers. It is headed by Adnan Tanrıverdi, a one-star general who was forced into retirement in 1996 due to his suspected Islamist sympathies. He told journalists at the time of SADAT’s incorporation in 2012 that the company’s focus would be African and Middle Eastern countries, and that it would provide services solely to state institutions, not private individuals. A banner on SADAT’s website warns that it will only work with the police and militaries of ‘friendly countries’.

  SADAT says it operates in twenty-two Muslim nations, although it doesn’t specify which ones. The world map on its logo shows Turkey coloured in red, and in Islamic green a swath from Senegal in the west to Kazakhstan in the east, taking in the Arab peninsula and some isolated areas: Bangladesh, Indonesia, the Muslim parts of the Balkans. Independent reports claim that SADAT won a contract in 2016 to train the Saudi Arabian air force, and bid unsuccessfully for one with militias in Libya in the same year. Meanwhile the company’s brochure, which I picked up from its stand at the biannual Istanbul arms fair in May 2017, reveals a deeply anti-Western undertone to its mission. The bald, grey-bearded Tanrıverdi writes in his introduction to the company:

  Today, there are around seventy ‘International Defence Consultancy Companies’ which are controlled by Western developed countries and which provide service in parallel to and under the control of the armed forces and foreign affairs departments of their countries.

  All of these companies were established after the World Wars I and II, and they operate in around 20 Muslim countries. They carry out the most confidential military operations of countries in which they operate. Some of them instigated the civil war in their countries by means of impudent leaders while some turned neighbouring Muslim states into enemies, some were left behind to maintain control in lieu of the armed forces that retreated after the actual occupation and some others committed major crimes against humanity with their ‘hired armies’. As a result, this area was used as a means of exploitation by the West. This situation imposes a liability on us. When other countries needed a military personnel, who have served for the long-established Turkish armed forces with a view to build, train and arm the military forces of friendly and Muslim countries, we were encouraged to form SADAT in order to ensure such countries find the opportunity which organises skilled and idealist commissioned and non-commissioned officers who will attach primary importance to the national interests of such countries and the joint interests of the World of Islam.

  In August 2016, a month after the coup attempt, and as the pro-Western generals were being purged from the Turkish military, Erdoğan appointed Adnan Tanrıverdi as his senior adviser. Then, seven days later and with the military chain of command brought firmly to his heel, Erdoğan launched a war he had long been craving. Turkish special forces and allied Syrian rebels stormed across the border into Syria, with the stated aim to drive Isis out of the borderlands. Days earlier, though, the Kurdish YPG had taken the nearby town of Manbij from Isis. In fact, Erdoğan was desperate to stop them advancing further towards the Turkish frontier.

  The generals had always blocked Erdoğan’s demands to put troops on the ground inside Syria, fearing they would get sucked into the quagmire. But the Second Army – based in the eastern city of Malatya and in charge of protecting Turkey’s southern borders – was stripped out entirely in the post-coup purge. General Adem Huduti, the commander of the Second Army, had previously briefed junior staff officers that he would not allow an incursion into Syria; he, and all of the 150 brigade commanders along the Syrian and Iraqi frontiers, were arrested and decommissioned straight after the coup attempt even though there had been almost no coup activity in those areas.

  Erdoğan’s Syria operation in August 2016, codenamed Euphrates Shield, progressed quickly in its early stages and then became bogged down. The town of al-Bab, twenty miles inside Syrian territory, was an Isis stronghold where the jihadists had dug in. Turkish forces had not managed to set up a fully functioning supply line from the border by the time winter descended. The death toll began to mount: almost every day, another Turkish soldier died. On the bloodiest day, fourteen were killed in one bomb blast on the outskirts of al-Bab. Days later, Isis released one of its glossy, gruesome propaganda videos. Two Turkish soldiers captured by the group in the borderlands in 2015 were shown shaven-headed and dressed in orange jumpsuits, shackled by their necks and caged. They were dragged out on leashes by an Isis fighter who was also Turkish, forced to read statements to camera, and then doused in petrol and set on fire. ‘If you do not retreat, this will be the end of all your fighting soldiers,’ the Isis terrorist, who called himself Abu Hassan al-Turki, told the camera.

  The Turkish government claimed the video was a fake, and shut down Twitter and YouTube for four days to stop it spreading. They never made any more official statements, wagering that it would be quickly forgotten. They were right; few Turks I mention the video to today have even heard of its existence.

  Afrin: Erdoğan’s second Syrian war

  In January 2018, Erdoğan launched Operation Olive Branch, his second war in Syria. This time his target was a mountainous pocket of Kurdish territory in the north, just across the border from Antakya and controlled by the YPG.

  Erdoğan’s already shaky relations with the militia and its US backers had crumbled further in the wake of Operation Euphrates Shield. Once Isis was routed from al-Bab the Turks started threatening to attack nearby Kurdish positions. There were minor skirmishes, and the Pentagon eventually made clear that it would not be withdrawing its own special forces from that area. Erdoğan had hoped the flaky new US president, Donald Trump, might be talked into withdrawing support for the YPG. Trump mulled it over, and then went in entirely the other direction, upping US weapons shipments to the Kurds.

  Erdoğan had threatened a full-scale attack on the Kurds near al-Bab but knew it would also lead him into a fight with US troops – and an internecine NATO clash of the type last seen in the Cyprus war of 1974. Instead he swung his guns on Afrin, an isolated bubbl
e to the west of the Kurds’ main territory, where the YPG was supported by Russian advisers in early 2018, but not by American special forces. The YPG occasionally fired rockets into Turkey from Afrin and killed soldiers at the mountainous border posts, provocation enough for Erdoğan to claim they posed a threat to the nation. Public support for the Afrin operation was overwhelming, despite the fact that, again, Turkish soldiers were dying almost daily. In Istanbul, shopkeepers plastered on the walls of their arcades billboards cheering on the Turkish troops, and thousands turned out to the funerals of slain soldiers, turning them into nationalist PR events for Erdoğan’s second war. One month in, with the offensive progressing less rapidly than hoped, the government announced that it was sending PÖH and JÖH officers to join the fight alongside the army in Afrin.

  Erdoğan declared victory in Afrin on 18 March 2018, Çanakkale (Gallipoli) Day, the 103rd anniversary of Atatürk’s defeat of British and Australian troops in 1915. In his speech to mark the day the president deftly blended past and present, while praising again the might of the Turkish people during the coup attempt and throwing in a swipe at the Kurds’ Western backers: ‘They assumed that our nation no longer had the courage and perseverance which it had back in Çanakkale. They assumed this nation no longer harboured that unwavering faith. However, they saw in every step they took that they were mistaken.’

  The YPG’s fighters had eventually turned and fled from Afrin when they realised the US bombers would not be coming to save them. What could have turned into a months-long urban battle had come to a thankfully swift end – although almost a hundred thousand civilians fled and hundreds were killed. It is a scandalous mark of the scale of Syria’s plight: a small city’s worth of people are forced out of their homes and it barely registers with the rest of the world. Kurdish activists worldwide shrieked that no one was protesting about Afrin because no one cares about Kurds. But that was not what was behind the ghastly silence. Seven years in, more than half of Syrians have been displaced. No one protested about Afrin because ruined towns and the sight of their fleeing inhabitants have become ubiquitous and mundane.

  Forty-five Turkish soldiers were among the dead. The news filled with jingoism, mock-ups of the battle and stories of the army’s glorious progress through the mountains of north-western Syria. ‘More towns cleaned of terrorists!’ the headlines screamed. ‘More terrorists neutralised!’

  ‘The notion of martyrdom is very different in Turkish culture,’ said Faruk Loğoğlu, when I asked him how many Turkish soldiers must die before public opinion started turning against Erdoğan’s Syrian adventures. ‘Look at the parents of those who lost their lives in the operation. They are saying that if they had another son they would send them there, too. It is what I called a magnetic effect of the Mehmetçik’ – ‘Little Mehmet’, like the ‘Tommy’ of the British army. ‘Everybody lines up behind that notion. And the media keeps pumping this.’

  The government issues Turkish journalists with a list of exacting instructions for covering the battle. They are not to trust any reports of civilian casualties coming from the Kurdish enemy, either armed or civilian – those are just ‘information pollution’. Neither are foreign journalists’ reports to be trusted. Anything that might ‘boost the morale’ of the other side is banned, and readers and viewers should at all times be reminded that the operation is being conducted with newly hatched, Turkish-produced weaponry. It is a campaign designed to stir nationalist hearts. Since the coup attempt, Erdoğan has repeatedly claimed that Turkey is embroiled in its second war of independence.

  The international press corps is less easy to control, but the government’s media men are trying. We get a flurry of emails from the press ministry, pictures with big green ticks and red crosses showing us how the YPG is circulating fake images of dead children. The main press spokesman reminds us that if we try to embed with the Kurdish militia, we will be enabling the terrorists’ propaganda and will be treated accordingly. In lieu, a select few foreign journalists are offered escorted trips across the border with a Turkish government minder, to look at the sprawling refugee camps Ankara is bankrolling and meet families who insist they are pleased the Turkish army is coming. Two weeks into the offensive, a handful of us are called to a meeting with İbrahim Kalın, Erdoğan’s spokesman, in Istanbul’s Yıldız Palace.

  I ask Kalın a question about the prestigious Turkish Medical Association and its venerable board, all of them arrested and jailed for an anti-war statement published on their website during the first week of the Afrin operation. The statement, which did not mention Afrin, nor Kurds, nor Turkey, was the broadest kind of protest against harm to civilians. The Turkish government says it was terrorist propaganda.

  ‘Did they oppose any other war before this one?’ Kalın asks. ‘No. So they are doing propaganda for the terrorists.’

  I try arguing back, but Kalın’s wall comes down. More than three hundred people have been arrested for criticising the Afrin operation, yet they find little sympathy from their countrymen. The war is an easy sell. The YPG’s affiliate, the PKK, have wrought chaos in eastern Turkey for three decades. Many of its leaders and fighters in Syria, especially in the earliest days, were Turkish Kurds. The group spits hatred into Turkey from its Syrian stronghold and occasionally fires rockets across the frontier. Even secular Turks who are no fans of Erdoğan’s government fill their Instagram pages with patriotic messages and pictures of Turkish soldiers kissing the flag.

  Having fended off an hour of journalists’ questions with the skill of a practised propagandist, Kalın switches seamlessly into another role – that of impeccable host. The Yıldız Palace is where the Ottoman sultan Abdülhamid II holed up as his empire withered and a group of scheming officers, including Mustafa Kemal, plotted a coup. Abdülhamid had been scorned and ridiculed in the early Republican era as a man who squandered both the power of the empire and his own dignity. The liberalising Ottoman reforms of the 1830s were rolled back under his rule, and he dissolved the empire’s first parliament and constitution. He tried to muzzle journalists who criticised him and cartoonists who made fun of his big nose. He saw conspiracies everywhere – some of them real. Several revolutionaries tried to assassinate him, and in the end he was unseated by the officers.

  But Erdoğan has rehabilitated Abdülhamid II. A glossy, hagiographic TV series, Payitaht, tells a version of his story so whitewashed it makes historians cringe and swear. Erdoğan says Turks should watch it to learn about their history. In the same week that Kalın called us to the Yıldız Palace, the new Turkish establishment marked the centenary of Abdülhamid’s death. All of the sultan’s descendants – who had been banished from the republic but have recently returned to the limelight singing Erdoğan’s praises – were handed Turkish citizenship.

  To celebrate, we are served a halva dessert that was a favourite of the sultan’s. And as I suck the sugary paste from the spoon, I study Kalın’s intellectual face and wonder what he really believes.

  Turning war into myth

  Erdoğan’s transformation to war leader is complete; in April 2018, two weeks after the Turkish victory in Afrin, he tours the troops at the Syrian border. Herds of celebrities are bussed in, including Ibrahim Tatlıses, a much-scorned singer of kitsch Arabesque music who tends to attach himself wherever power lies. Erdoğan wears the same uniform as the rank-and-file soldiers who line up to shake his hand – drab camouflage, with his name patch over the right breast.

  There are murmurs of early elections. The presidential and parliamentary ballots are scheduled to be held in November 2019 – seventeen months from now – but the economy is sliding fast and Erdoğan knows it. After the next polls, Erdoğan’s reformed constitution will take effect. Whoever gets the keys to the presidential palace will be running an almost one-man show. And right now, in the wake of Afrin, Erdoğan is riding a wave of nationalist fervour.

  ‘They are now playing the war game,’ Faruk Loğoğlu tells me. ‘They are using this entire episode for domest
ic political reasons.’

  The Erdoğan-hating part of the country snickers; the president still looks out of sorts in fatigues. He wants to be the war hero, that is clear – but he will never quite pull off the look. The jokes are made behind closed doors, at private dinner parties that are becoming more uproarious as Turkey’s public spaces become small-talk-only zones. These days, my friends and I use code words when we discuss Turkish politics in cafés or on buses. In the evenings, within the comfortable circles of close friends, all the words and thoughts and hilarities we have been bottling up all day spill out. With the dearth of reliable information about what is going on in the country, and all the TV channels churning out minor variations on the government’s line, we delve into conspiracy thinking. It’s probably not true but it could be – and we can never know either way.

  ‘OK! I have a new theory,’ says a friend. ‘How about if, actually, the coup succeeded and now the army is in charge and keeping Erdoğan drugged all the time, and wheeling him out for these appearances!’

  We laugh until we cry.

  Ayşe Hür, a radical Turkish historian, is unimpressed by Erdoğan’s latest rebrand. When I meet her in a bustling diner on Taksim Square, three weeks after Erdoğan’s appearance in military garb, she has just been slapped with a five-year suspended prison sentence for tweeting that she doesn’t believe the PKK is a terrorist group. She must have known it would land her in trouble.

  ‘What am I meant to do?’ she says with a broad white smile. ‘Somebody asked me what I thought of the PKK and I answered. Somebody asked me and I felt obliged to give a correct answer. Maybe I am a Christian. Even if somebody asked and there was a police officer next to me, I would answer. People are asking questions and I am a historian journalist writing about historical issues. I should answer these questions correctly. It is my job.’