Most honorable outcome of honorable loneliness

From the moment our flag was lowered at the Tomb of Süleyman Shah on Sunday, the honorable breakdown of our foreign policy, which has been imposed on us as “honorable loneliness,” is as follows:

•    Syria: We do not have an ambassador in Syria. The forces of Bashar al-Assad are about to enter Aleppo, although two years ago we said he would to “be gone in three months.” The world’s leading countries have now gone back to the policy of “continuing with Bashar al-Assad.”

•    Egypt: We do not have an ambassador in Cairo. The leading nations in the world have recognized Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi. France has decided to sell 24 Rafalle war planes to Egypt.

•    Libya: Turkish citizens have been evacuated from Libya, and Turkey has almost been declared an enemy.

•    Yemen: Our embassy is closed. When the arms that Turkey secretly sent there were caught twice, we also lost this country.

•    Iraq: Do not count on the news stories that our relations with this country are recovering. Negative reactions against Turkey are growing in Iraq with each passing day.

•    Saudi Arabia: Our president’s rush to attend the funeral of the Saudi king did not in any way help to improve the chill in relations. A secret war between Saudi Arabia and the Turkish government is continuing at full speed.

•    Iran: Iran is currently the rising power in the region. Its influence over Iraq and Syria has increased to a great extent.

•    Qatar: Turkey’s only ally in the region, Qatar, has recently changed its policies, putting a distance between itself and the Hamas administration in Gaza.

•    Armenia: When Ahmet Davutoğlu was our foreign minister, he suspended the process of improving relations. Our relations remain disrupted.

•    Our Syrian border: Bashar al-Assad’s forces are about to shut down the road between Aleppo and Turkey. The Turkish border area is in either the hands of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) administration of Kobane or al-Nusra, which is pro-Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and pro-al-Qaeda.

•    Moderate opponents: The moderate Syrian opposition that Turkey was supporting is almost nonexistent now. Everybody in the region is sure that any weapons given to them will end up in the hands of ISIL or al-Nusra within three months.

•     Europe: The picture of the French president taken with two women from the Kudish PYD fighting in Kobane, which appeared in Hürriyet last week, sums up the European view of the region: “Against the beheading, torching alive and throwing-from-buildings brutality of ISIL, it is the Kurds - especially Kurdish women - who are fighting heroically. Turkey, by allowing the jihadists to cross the border, is indirectly supporting ISIL.”

•    Turkey’s defense minister returned from his recent visit to the United States without even having been able to meet the U.S. secretary of defense, let alone Barack Obama or Joe Biden.

•    And the tragic end: Turkey, the other day, declared the immediate vicinity of Kobane, where severe fighting was ongoing, a “Prohibited military zone,” and was forced to hide it from the eyes of the Turkish public and the world. Two days later, the flag that has been flown at the Tomb of Süleyman Shah for many years by our ancestors was lowered.

What made us lower our flag was not Bashar al-Assad, who our president declared his personal enemy, but rather ISIL, which we have positioned on our border with our own hands.

We saw on Sunday the honorable outcome of our honorable loneliness.

God save us from any other honorable loneliness...