When Sultan Erdogan realized that the scale in Syria had tilted towards Russia after the latter’s intervention about five years ago in the ongoing crisis there, he started to take a new approach.
He is no longer announcing the red lines, calling to pray in the Umayyad Mosque, or setting deadlines for Syrian president Bashar Assad to leave.
Rather, he hastened to adopt a new policy based on deals and bartering at the expense of the Syrians’ blood and fate, so the Aleppo deal was the first, and then the Euphrates Shield, Olive Branch, and Peace Spring operations.
All of these ended with Turkey’s occupation of large areas of northeast Syria, and during all of this Syria’s Kurds were a target for its military operations.
This new reality is that Erdogan’s security and military services have taken over the Turkish-backed opposition armed groups in northern Syria, as Turkey controls them, selects leaders for them, trains their members militarily, supplies them with weapons, defines their battles, and pays their salaries.
On the ground, Turkey adopted the policy of imposing the Turkish identity through demographic change, dealing with the Turkish currency instead of the Syrian pound, adopting the Turkish language and curricula in education and teaching, and linking the infrastructure of these areas with Turkey.
The same happened in Northern Cyprus when Turkish forces invaded it in 1974, and so the Syrians who once demonstrated in the name of revolution found himself in front of a Turkish authority besieging him everywhere, controlling his fate, and using him as a tool in Erdogan’s never-ending wars. They were used in his wars against the Kurds, especially in Afrin, in which the most horrific crimes and violations against “mankind, identity, rights and the properties” were committed.
Erdogan actually began using these as mercenaries in exchange for money, so he sent them to fight in Libya via Turkish planes, and today he sends them to the raging war between Azerbaijan and Armenia, amid reports that he has sent numbers of them to Mali, Somalia, Yemen, Qatar, Lebanon and other countries in which Erdogan interferes their internal affairs or coordinates with their regimes.
This is also the case in Qatar and Somalia in favor of Erdogan’s agendas, dreams, and expansionist Ottoman fantasies; in all of this, he exploited a set of factors to make these mercenaries a phenomenon threatening security and peace in many regions, and perhaps the most important factors are:
- After the calm of the fighting fronts in northern Syria due to the Russian-Turkish agreements, the militants there found themselves unemployed and in difficult living conditions, especially after the authorities responsible for them stopped paying their salaries, which made their conditions worse in light of poverty and the high prices of basic materials. They had no choice but to work as mercenaries for Erdogan’s wars for money, without any consideration of any other value.
- The pressure exerted by the Turkish authorities on the people of northern and eastern Syria, as well as on the Syrians inside Turkey, and the exploitation of poor groups and their needs, was not limited to the militants, but included civilians and children. Turkish authorities often put these groups between the options of going to fight or exposure to penalties and deterrent measures, which encouraged them to engage in a culture of violence and commit crimes and violations, especially in the occupied Afrin region.
- Ideological motives are takfiri and Ottoman, as a large part of these militants are among the most extremist, militant, and terrorist groups such as al-Nusra Front, al-Qaeda, and even ISIS, as well as the groups that raise Turkish and Ottoman flags and names. It is not a coincidence that these groups called themselves Turkish and Ottoman names such as Sultan Selim, al-Fatih, Bayazid, Suleiman Shah, Mutassim, Turkestan, Uyghurs, and Samarkand. They are all subjected to brainwashing operations by Turkish intelligence services, which made Erdogan the spiritual father of these groups, as the army commander Mustafa Sejri said on his Twitter that Erdogan is the only hope left for them.
- The negative role of the Syrian opposition forces affiliated with Turkey, especially the Syrian National Coalition controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood, and its military wing known as the Syrian National Army. These groups are acting on orders from Turkey and carrying out their agenda regarding the Syrian crisis at the expense of their cause, and they seem captive to the Turk and his decisions. They are unable to move outside his agenda, as these people are based in Turkey and they receive salaries and aid through it, and whoever disobeys it will be imprisoned, as happened with Brigadier General Ahmed Rahal. They may also be fired or forced to flee, as was the case with Hawwas Egid, a member of the Kurdish National Council affiliated with the Syrian National Coalition, amid a constant threat to them to open their private files and expose their secrets.
Turkey, as a history of mercenarism
Since the beginning of the Syrian crisis, Erdogan hastened to exploit it, especially in the issue of refugees, by opening his country’s borders for them. He turned them into a tool with which to blackmail Europe, and today he made the phenomenon of mercenaries the ugliest phenomenon in the history of Syria and distorted their image in front of the world in the ugliest forms.
Syrian society was not subjected to the phenomenon of mercenarism, which was an Ottoman phenomenon, as the Turks adopted it in their wars throughout history. What Erdogan did was preceded by his Ottoman ancestors, as the pages of history say that the Ottoman Sultan Murad I was the first to resort to this method when he established the Janissary corps, which consisted of mostly prisoners of young war and young men from the Caucasus separated from their families.
These were the most discourteous of the Ottoman fighting groups, as their only task was to kill, burn, and pillage.
Modern history also tells us how, at the end of 1980s, Turkey formed the system of village guards (kurucu) in the Kurdish regions of Turkey, and how it trained and armed the people to fight against the Kurdish movement in Turkey under the pretext of combating terrorism. The number of guards affiliated with this system reached around 100,000.
These individuals were encouraged by the Turkish government to commit many violations, including the burning and destruction of entire villages, the displacement of their people, and the assassination of intellectuals, politicians, and human rights defenders.
Today, Turkey has established many organizations and companies that train mercenaries and send them to the battlefields. Chief among them is the SADAT company, which is led by Adnan Tanriverdi, who was appointed by Erdogan as a military advisor to him after he was a retired officer. Tanriverdi now has powerful influence within the military and security institutions in Turkey.
Where is the responsibility?
In talking about the phenomenon of mercenarism that Turkey is spreading, there is a fundamental issue that must be addressed, which is the issue of legal, moral, and humanitarian responsibility for its spread, and its transformation into a threat to the security of the countries and peoples of the region, and here are two basic issues which should be addressed:
The first: Where does international and humanitarian law stand for this dangerous phenomenon adopted by Turkey? International law tells us that the Geneva Convention in 1949 and its 1977 appendix contains dozens of articles that criminalize mercenaries and strip mercenaries of the rights stipulated for prisoners of war.
A mercenary here, according to the legal definition, is every person who fights on a land other than the land to which he belongs and is recruited by another country.
The question here is: In what capacity does the Syrian militant fight in Libya and Azerbaijan?
Without a doubt, Turkey’s responsibility is clear given that it is the country that is recruiting these people without deterrence.
The second is the responsibility of the countries involved in the Syrian crisis, and the responsibility here is related to the failure of these countries to achieve a peaceful settlement of the Syrian crisis. Whenever the political solution to the crisis is delayed, the phenomenon of mercenarism expands, especially since Erdogan does not stop waging wars for political and ideological reasons that he depends on in looking forward to achieving his expansion project in the future.
The question here is, When will the international community move to hold Turkey accountable for spreading the phenomenon of mercenaries in separate regions of the world?