Tag Archive for: Turkey

Cyber wrap

Image courtesy of Flickr user Lee McKusick

Yesterday’s appointment of Malcolm Turnbull’s new ministry has followed through with the commitment made in last year’s Cyber Security Strategy to create a ministerial position for cyber security. Dan Tehan from Victoria has added Minister assisting the Prime Minister for Cyber Security, in addition to his other roles as Minister for Defence Personnel, Minister for Veteran’s Affairs and Minister assisting the Prime Minister for the centenary of ANZAC.

Part of Tehan’s responsibilities will be leading work with the private sector to implement the government’s cyber strategy. The other change relevant to cyber policy and security is Greg Hunt’s move to the Industry, Innovation and Science portfolio. Mitch Fifield remains in Communications, Angus Taylor retains Assistant Minister for cities and digital transformation, and Fiona Nash has kept the regional communications role.

In the US, Department of Defense leaders are apparently ‘frustrated’ by the pace of Cyber Command’s actions to disrupt Islamic State’s online activities. Cyber Command’s campaign against IS is the first time the US has publicly acknowledged that Cyber Command is engaged in operations, but the seven year-old command was established to tackle state actors, and apparently is having difficulty getting the right people and capabilities in place to overcome IS use of the internet for recruitment, operations and propaganda.

A new Joint Task Force, dubbed ‘Ares’ has been established to conduct cyber operations against IS and coordinate with Central Command’s plans and operations in Iraq and Syria. Officials suggested to The Washington Post that possible actions might include disrupting payment systems, chat apps and other online platforms such as IS’ magazine ‘Dabiq’, but that IS was able to counteract this by switching to new servers and other hardware to stay ahead of US cyber operations against them.

The attempted coup in Turkey over the weekend took advantage of the security features of messaging app WhatsApp to coordinate operations across the country. However it seems that despite realising the advantages of encrypted online communications for their planning, the coup’s leaders didn’t take account of the power of the internet and social media to rally resistance, as President Erdogan did via FaceTime from his plane. While they did seize control of two television channels, access to the internet and social media wasn’t significantly disrupted during the coup.

The military did attempt to throttle access to social media but this appears to have been quickly overhauled by the President after only a few hours. Security researcher ‘the grugq’ noted on Medium that by failing to cut access to cyberspace the coup was bound to fail, as Erdogan could still call on supporters to oppose the coup. Grugq goes on to compare the successful coups in Thailand in 2006 and 2014 to the failure in Turkey, noting that the Thai coups succeeded in part because they quickly denied access to mass communication by political leaders by either cutting the power, or detaining them en masse. He concludes that a successful coup plan needs to better incorporate cyberspace into its execution, and within the first hour cut power to main cities, neutralise leadership and take over all telcos, ISPs and TV stations.

And finally, Pokémon Go has literally taken over the world. Its popularity has made it a target for cyber criminals using third party apps infected with malware, and hackers seeking notoriety who brought down  servers for US and European players last Saturday. The DDOS incident was claimed by hacker group ‘PoodleCorp’, who promised more to come. But how can you join in and battle with your friends if you’re a spy and need to protect your identity, location and other sensitive personal information? Luckily the US government has created a guide for employees on how to catch em’ all without breaching operational security, kindly shared by Thomas Rid on Twitter. Some of the advice is good cyber security advice generally, such as avoiding play in areas you don’t want to be geo-tagged and not using personal Gmail accounts. Other tips such as ‘do not attempt to catch Pokémon while driving’ also seem pretty sensible. Wait, is that a Vaporeon?

The strategic consequences of Turkey’s failed coup

Image courtesy of Flickr user saragoldsmith

A military coup against an elected government typically unleashes a flood of analysis about the country’s future direction following the break in democratic rule. But failed coups can be just as consequential. The botched attempt by elements of the Turkish military to overthrow President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan will have far-ranging implications for Turkey’s foreign relations and regional role. Turkey’s relationship with the United States, in particular, is headed for considerable turbulence.

The coup attempt heralds a new and uneasy phase in the Turkey-US relationship, because Turkish authorities have linked it to Fethullah Gülen, an Islamic preacher based near Philadelphia since 1999 but with a core group of followers in Turkey.

Gülen was previously charged with establishing a parallel state structure primarily within the police, the judiciary, and the military. More recently, the Turkish authorities classified the Gülen movement as a terrorist organization—a label given new meaning by the failed coup. But, despite the growing evidence concerning Gülen and his followers, the impression in Ankara is that the US has so far refused to constrain the activities of his network, which includes a range of schools and many civil-society organizations.

This network allows the Gülen movement to engage in substantial fundraising, which the authorities claim sustains the nefarious operations of its affiliates in Turkey. As a result, Gülen’s continued residence in Pennsylvania has become not only a contentious issue in the bilateral relationship, but also an important source of rising anti-Americanism in Turkey.

The failed coup is set to compound this trend. In the post-coup era, the US will come under significant pressure to reconsider its laissez-faire attitude toward Gülen. The Turkish side already has signaled that it will initiate a formal request for Gülen’s extradition.

The coup has therefore brought a new urgency to the need for the two NATO allies to settle this important dispute. A failure to find common ground under these changed circumstances would weaken prospects for cooperation at many levels. The effectiveness of the joint fight against the Islamic State (ISIS), which relies heavily on air strikes originating from the Incirlik airbase in southern Turkey, would doubtless be jeopardized. More broadly, a breach in this key bilateral relationship would weaken NATO cohesion in its policy toward Russia, with Turkey seeking to move beyond the confrontational framework set out at the Alliance’s recent Warsaw summit.

The consequences of the failed coup are also likely to affect Turkey’s relationship with Europe. In March, Turkey and the European Union agreed on an ambitious package of measures designed to stem the flow of refugees to Europe. But, while the arrangement has been a clear success, it remains politically vulnerable. For Turkey, the biggest prize was the EU’s commitment to lifting visa restrictions on Turkish citizens traveling to the Schengen Area, a move scheduled for June. Instead, visa liberalization was postponed until October, owing to Turkey’s refusal to comply with a few remaining conditions.

At the core of the diplomatic impasse is the EU’s demand that Turkey amend its anti-terror legislation to ensure that it reflects more closely the norms established by the European Court of Human Rights. The aim is to limit the legislation’s implementation to genuine terror cases and prevent its use as a tool to restrain freedom of expression. But the post-putsch environment will reduce the government’s willingness to amend Turkey’s anti-terror framework.

As a result, a diplomatic crisis by October is likely, with Turkey claiming that the EU has failed to honor its commitments. The entire refugee package, under which Turkey continues to host more than 2.8 million Syrian refugees, could then come under threat, with consequences for the flow of asylum-seekers.

Finally, the botched coup will have repercussions on Turkey’s ability to contribute to regional security. The Turkish military will now undergo a painful process of purging its Gülenist elements, and morale and cohesion will inevitably be affected at a time when the armed forces play an instrumental role in Turkey’s efforts to combat Kurdish separatists and ISIS terrorism and in strengthening Turkey’s border controls, which has helped to impede the flow of foreign jihadists to ISIS-controlled territory in Syria. And weakened trust in the wake of the coup attempt will make interagency cooperation between the military, the police, and the intelligence services particularly problematic.

Just like successful coups, failed coups can have a major impact on countries’ foreign and security policies. Turkey’s botched putsch has already heightened the likelihood that critical milestones soon will be reached in the country’s relationship with the US and Europe.

Turkey or the Kurds? For the US, it’s a no-brainer

Image courtesy of Flickr user Kurdishstruggle

What’s more important: your relationship with Turkey—your NATO ally—or the potential to make significant inroads against Daesh in Syria? That’s the question Ankara is asking the Obama administration following a spate of deadly terrorist attacks in Turkey in recent months that have further inflamed tensions between the Turkish government and the Turkish Kurds. Despite attempts by the US to calm the waters, the answer may be one Turkish President Erdogan isn’t going to like—while Turkey remains an important strategic partner for the US, the US’s cooperation with Kurdish forces in Syria is indispensable.

Turkey’s interpretation of this dilemma is relatively black and white. For Turkey, the Democratic Union Party (PYD)—the Kurd’s main political force in Syria—and its armed wing, the People’s Protection Unit (YPG), are terrorist organisations directly linked to Turkey’s Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK)—which Turkey, the UK, US, EU and Australia all consider a terrorist group. Erdogan’s government has made the destruction of the PKK a priority since hostilities between the two sides resumed following the collapse of a two-year ceasefire in June last year.

Added to that tension, Ankara fears Syrian Kurds are manipulating the violence in Syria to carve out territory for an autonomous region—as Iraqi Kurds succeeded in doing in northern Iraq—along the border with Turkey, and have warned the YPG not to cross west of the Euphrates. Those fears aren’t unfounded, with the PYD announcing the formation of the Federal Democratic System of Rojava and Northern Syria on 17 March, a move that the US, the Syrian and Turkish governments—as well as rival Kurdish groups—have unanimously condemned. In a nutshell, from a Turkish perspective, any assistance to Kurdish forces on either side of the border equates to the support of terrorism against Turkey.

The US has taken a decidedly different approach to the issue of Kurdish forces. While acknowledging the PKK as a terrorist organisation and calling upon the PKK to cease attacks against Turkish citizens, the Obama administration has been at pains to distinguish the PYD from its Kurdish compatriots in Turkey. The Turkish government has been infuriated by this response, with Erdogan using a recent visit to Washington to call for the US to change its position on the PYD.

In an attempt to calm hostilities and direct attention back to Syria, Washington has urged all parties to focus on the common threat of Daesh, calling on Turkey to cease its cross-border artillery fire into Syria and warning the YPG not to ‘take advantage of a confusing situation’ and seize new territory on the Turkish border.

Regardless of Turkey’s displeasure, the US has little choice but to persist with its support for the PYD. The Obama administration has made it clear that its primary goal in Syria is the destruction of Daesh and time is running out to make significant progress before Obama leaves office. While the US currently has 50 special operations forces advising and assisting local fighters in Syria, it appears unlikely they’ll seek to increase their ground involvement in the near future. The US, therefore, must rely on Kurdish forces on the ground to drive back Daesh.

Successful campaigns over the past four years have proven that Syrian Kurdish forces, like their counterparts in Iraq, are a reliable and organised strategic partner for the US. They’ve filled the void left by Syrian government forces when they moved towards Aleppo in 2012, and have effectively established self-rule in three regions collectively known as Rojava in the country’s northeast. With the assistance of US-led airstrikes, they’re squeezing IS around its bastion in Raqqa and across the border in north-western Iraq, and are expected to move towards the Aleppo region, where the US is yet to play a significant role in countering Daesh.

While the PYD may not be the ideal US ally, there are no valid alternatives capable of achieving the US’ desired results. The US can’t support Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s brutal and historically anti-Western regime, despite the dictator solidifying his leadership position in recent months. Other potential partners for the US are equally distasteful, such as Hezbollah, the al-Qaeda-linked Nusra Front (considered a direct terrorist threat to the US) and a handful of relatively moderate, but largely disorganised, Sunni groups.

Intertwined with this is the Russia factor. Moscow appears more than willing to take advantage of any US hesitancy to fully support the Kurds because of fears it’ll further strain the US–Turkey relationship. Putin knows that Kurds aren’t pawns in the Syrian conflict, and will consider siding with whoever offers them the greatest security. Putin’s already stepped up Russia’s support for the Kurds in recent months. In perhaps a sign of things to come, the PYD opened its first foreign office in Moscow in February, with a ceremony attended by Russian foreign ministry officials.

To counteract this, the US needs to take Turkey out of considerations in Syria, and as it successfully managed to do so in northern Iraq, convince the Kurds to choose the West over Russia. While Ankara may continue to voice its displeasure and carry out attacks against the YPG in Syria, it won’t change Obama’s mind.

Turkey will need to accept that the US’s end-game—unlike their own—mightn’t necessarily feature the removal of Assad from power. Instead, Washington wants to eliminate the threat of Daesh, and they’re going to need the Kurds to do it.

Erdogan’s election triumph: the price of victory

H.E. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Prime Minister of Turkey, United Nations Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC) Rio Forum

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey proved once more this week he’s in a league of his own, securing a thumping victory for his neo-Islamist Justice and Development party in Sunday’s re-run of June’s general election, which had left the AKP without a majority for the first time since 2002 and the country with a hung parliament. With this latest victory in his long string of election triumphs, which not even the ruling party was expecting, Erdogan towers above his rivals.

Unhappily for Turkey, however, in over a dozen years in power Erdogan has come to confuse an absolute majority with his own absolutist rule. And he won in damaging part through polarisation tactics that have left the country deeply divided, at a time when the ethno-sectarian rifts tearing Syria and Iraq apart are spilling into Turkey.

From shortly after June’s inconclusive result, the main issue Turks were confronted with was violence. Fighting resumed between security forces and insurgents of the Kurdistan Workers party (PKK) after a long lull, and Isis bombers struck inside Turkey, most savagely with last month’s suicide attack on a Kurdish peace rally in Ankara, which killed 102 activists. The PKK, for its part, tore up a two-year ceasefire and attacked police and the army. This, it said, was in reprisal for government complicity in ISIS bombings of Kurdish targets.

Erdogan could scarcely believe his luck. He lectured the nation that this was the unhappy consequence of voters straying from the safety of single-party rule—and launched a military offensive, targeting the PKK and Kurdish activists more than Isis. Yet his real targets were electoral.

It was June’s electoral breakthrough of the People’s Democratic Party (HDP), a pro-Kurdish coalition that won over liberal and leftist opponents of Erdogan’s autocratic ways, that temporarily thwarted Mr Erdogan’s plans for one-man rule. Now, in a climate resembling a state of siege, the president fished for Turkish nationalist votes and, by tarring the HDP as PKK terrorists, worked to push down the Kurdish nationalist tally. He succeeded. The AKP won two million votes from far right nationalists, and an estimated one million of the religious Kurds who went with the HDP in June.

He gambled on confrontation and he won. Though constitutionally obliged to be a non-partisan president of all citizens, Erdogan has ruthlessly sharpened the Sunni, Islamist, and ethnic Turkish identity of the AKP and its constituency, ‘othering’ large minorities of ethnic Kurds and quasi-Shia Alevi, and dismissing the secular middle class of western and coastal Turkey as foreign and disloyal.

This at times makes the AKP sound like a neo-Ottoman Tea Party with a sickeningly sectarian stink. But it obscures something real that Erdogan has just shown Turkey and the world once again: his almost preternatural rapport with the adoring Anatolian masses—generally pious and conservative, often dynamic and entrepreneurial, and given access for the first time to modern schools and clinics, roads and airports, through the AKP.

The election result reflects the disconnect between the AKP’s Turkey, and scattered opponents struggling to find a credible alternative to Erdogan. Last month, for example, when Angela Merkel visited Erdogan—proffering a tawdry package of sweeteners to persuade Turkey to act as a holding pen for Syrian refugees streaming into Europe—the

German chancellor and Turkish president were pictured sitting on ornate, throne-like seats in an Istanbul palace that housed one of the last Ottoman sultans. This occasioned much merriment among the twitterati of Istanbul and Ankara. But Erdogan’s Anatolian heartland, impenetrable to his secular opponents, gets its news from TV stations now almost wholly in the grip of the AKP. What they saw is Europe’s foremost leader paying due court to their 21st Century sultan.

Indeed, at the heart of Turkey’s Erdogan problem is the way this president has used and abused state power, as well as control of public contracts and punitive tax audits, to dominate the media, purge dissident voices, and clamp down on social media.

Hundreds of journalists have lost their jobs, scores more are being charged with defaming the president. AKP mobs and trolls now openly menace independent media, while pro-AKP media meanwhile routinely smear opponents, real and imagined, mimicking the pugnacious and paranoid style of their leader. Executives from the traditional business elite describe how it paints them as ‘native agents’ of foreign powers, while Erdogan rails xenophobically against what he calls Ust Akil or ‘a mastermind’—the meta-agenda of a tentacular international conspiracy to bring him down. In the hands of the AKP’s stable of pens-for-hire, this narrative is starting to sound quasi-fascist and anti-Semitic.

This is a worrying condition to be in for a pivotal regional state. Turkey is a NATO ally of long standing but, because of its reluctance to fight ISIS and Erdogan’s flirtation with Vladimir Putin, is no longer seen as a safe pair of hands. Talks on its accession to the EU have long been stalled—initially because of Franco-German prejudice against a Muslim majority country that damagingly validated Erdogan’s neo-Ottoman delusions—but it’s hard to see how this illiberal democracy can now become an EU member. Turkey is also currently head of the G20 group of advanced economies. It’s hosting a G20 summit this month in Antalya. Yet the AKP has twice hosted Khaled Meshaal, the Hamas leader, as the star turn at its annual congress.

Erdogan now has a choice. Emboldened by his election triumph, he may carry out his threat to extend the fight against the PKK to its US-backed Syrian Kurdish militia allies, if they take any more territory below Turkey’s southern border. That would complicate the US-led campaign against ISIS. It would also make the breach with Turkey’s Kurds irreparable. But he could also start talking to legitimately elected HDP members of the Ankara parliament, about the Kurdish minority’s legitimate demands for more political and cultural space. Vindicated by the vote, he could choose to be a statesman. The world will be watching.