Neo-Ottomanist dreams bump into ISIL

The al-Qaeda splinter group the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), after it captured Mosul, took Turkey’s consulate. Right after this story erupted, the Turkish Foreign Ministry issued a statement, saying: “We are investigating the claims.”

It was known during the clashes of the previous day that bases in the region had been damaged and there was difficulty in communications, but I could not understand how the mighty Turkey does not have a satellite communication with its consulate!

In such an incident, an “investigation” is done this way: The person in the consulate is called through a satellite phone and the situation is asked about. That’s it.

“We are investigating the situation,” is nothing more than the expression of failure.

I am also curious, naturally, about this: Didn’t the intelligence organization of Turkey - the country that the Justice and Development Party (AKP) propaganda machine is pumping as a “prominent” country in the world - have any kind of activity in the region that it could not predict that such a development would take place?

So, we are faced with the risk of becoming neighbors, also in Iraq, with ISIL, which we have already become neighbors with in Syria and which we define as a terrorist organization.

If Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu had not opened our border so widely in order to topple Bashar al-Assad in Syria, it would not have been possible for such organizations to gain strength in the region.

When in those days we were criticizing and saying, “Do not do it; the Turkey-Syria border will turn into Peshawar,” we were being accused of "lacking a vision." Now it is openly seen whose vision was extending where, and we have become neighbors with a formation that the entire world defines as a terrorist organization.

There are three powers that Turkey can make an alliance with to fight ISIL: One is the Kurdish autonomous administration in Iraq; the other is the PYD, an extension of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in Rojova; and the last is the Nouri al-Maliki administration in Iraq.

Once more, Turkey has fallen into the dilemma of its “daydreamer foreign policies.”

In the fight with this al-Qaeda splinter group, it is required to cooperate with al-Maliki, with whom it was not on talking terms until very recently, or the PYD, or Masoud Barzani!

The architect of this daydreamer foreign policy is a candidate to become a “caretaker” prime minister in the event that Erdoğan becomes president.

Here is your advanced democracy!

Meanwhile, the justice system of the military junta in Egypt, which rules for death sentences as if it is eating sunflower seeds, is asking for from 15 to 25 years for the three al-Jazeera reporters arrested on charges of “making provocative broadcasts.”

Paul Greste from Australia, Canadian citizen Adil Fehmi and Egyptian producer Baher Muhammed - all working in the Cairo bureau of al-Jazeera - are accused of “broadcasting against Egypt.”

The biggest enemy of the junta in Egypt in the whole world is Turkey's Erdoğan, where two journalists (Daily Taraf reporter Mehmet Baransu and his editor Murat Şevki Çoban) are awaiting jail sentences between 26 to 52 years because they wrote a story.

The top limit of the punishment that the Egyptian fascists are demanding for the journalists corresponds to the lowest limit of the prosecutors who are under the control of our “advanced democrats.”

This is another example of the advanced democracy we are all enjoying here!