Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan seems to believe that not only is he the country’s strongman but also its saviour. And that image was further reinforced when his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) won the November 1 parliamentary elections. Earlier, on June 7, the ruling party lost its parliamentary majority though it still had the most seats with 41 percent of the vote. The victory on November 1 was engineered by creating an image of a security crisis for the country from the separatist Kurdish militant movement (PKK). The period between the June and November elections saw an explosion of violence with two suicide bombings, one on July 20 in the border town of Suruc, which killed 33 people, and the second in the capital of Ankara on October 10, killing 102 people during a peace march. In both cases, Islamic State (IS) was believed to have been behind the explosions and most of the victims were Kurds. Before the November 1 elections last year, the Erdogan government blamed it all on the PKK and the Kurds in general, and started a crackdown in the predominantly Kurdish populated area of southeastern Turkey. This continued even after the ruling AKP won its parliamentary majority. In the November elections, even though the predominantly Kurdish party, the People’s Democratic Party (HDP), still managed to secure just over 10 percent of the votes as mandatory requirement for parliamentary representation, it was unable to hold on to the 13 percent it had won with the support of some non-Kurdish minority votes, as Erdogan sought to paint them as well as a security threat. In other words, all Kurds in Turkey, constituting 15 to 20 percent of its population, were suspects of some sort or the other. And it has destroyed a political process that was going on, before violence erupted recently, that had sought to accommodate some of the Kurdish cultural and political sensitivities without making them sound anti-national. Erdogan declared, soon after the parliamentary elections, that his government would go after the PKK “until all its members surrender or are eliminated”. He added, “The period ahead of us is not one of talks and discussions.” And now the Kurdish southeast region of Turkey has turned into a battle zone, and the region is under seige. And why has Erdogan gone back on this path, which once marred Turkey in a prolonged, bloody conflict with the Kurds costing about 45,000 lives and causing devastation to much of the predominantly Kurdish southeastern region? And therein hangs a tale that keeps getting more tangled and dangerous. When Islamic State (IS) emerged as a major regional threat after the fall of Mosul in June 2014, Ankara was shaken when its 40-odd consulate staff was taken hostage. However, despite IS’ usual barbarity in disposing of their hostages, in this case they released their Turkish hostages without any harm, and that was a welcome surprise. When asked about how it happened, Turkey’s Prime Minister (PM), Ahmet Davutoglu, said that the hostages were freed through the Turkish intelligence agencies’ “own methods”. It certainly was not done through any rescue operations. It would, therefore, appear that there was some tacit understanding/agreement that Turkey would refrain from becoming part of the US-led aerial operations against IS. That received credence when Turkey kept out of the military coalition against IS and when it did not grant the use of its bases for bombing IS targets and territory even though it is a NATO ally. This, though, changed a little later, as we shall see. During the US-led operations against IS, the Kurds emerged as a very effective force on the ground to fight IS, making them a virtual US ally. Ankara saw this as a threat to Turkish national unity, as the YPG (Syrian Kurdish movement) virtually carved out an autonomous Kurdish region in northern Syria on the Turkish border. The Assad regime, overstretched as it was, had earlier withdrawn from Syria’s Kurdish region. And the YPG is the one fielding its fighters on the ground, successfully pushing back IS, as the US keeps bombing IS positions. The US supports the YPG fighters in Syria that are engaged against IS, while it goes along with Turkey, which has outlawed the militant PKK. However, Turkey does not make any distinction between the two — the Turkish-based PKK and Syrian-based YPG. They are both ‘terrorists’. Indeed, Turkish PM Ahmet Davotoglu reiterated his country’s position during a recent visit of US Vice President Joe Biden, which is that the YPG in Syria is part of the larger PKK movement. He also reportedly said that the YPG had become an increasing threat to Turkey and it would attack its positions in northern Syria. This Turkey is doing now so that they do not consolidate their hold on the northern Turkish border. While Turkey is firing at YPG positions, it fears that a recent bomb explosion in the Turkish capital of Ankara might have been the handiwork of the Kurdish YPG. It could as well be IS as was suspected in earlier bombings but Ankara is inclined to put it on the YPG. For quite sometime now, Ankara has been pushing the US to put up a no fly zone over northern Syria to both frustrate Kurdish designs as well as to deter Russian bombing missions. In other words, Turkey would like NATO to be drawn into the whole complicated business of fighting its multiple enemies. The question is: will the US and its NATO allies widen the stakes to make it into anti-Russian operations and in the process be distracted from the main game of destroying IS? So far, Turkey is not succeeding in this. There are two problems with Erdogan and his administration. First: he sees Turkey in his own larger-than-life image where he is the new sultan and wants the world to recognise and respect him in that role. If and when this does not happen, he tends to overshoot, so to say. Its most blatant example was the shooting of a Russian plane to force Moscow to stop propping up the Assad regime, which has backfired. At the same time, it has not been happy with the US for not getting rid of the Assad regime when it allegedly used chemical weapons on its citizens. President Obama had promised, more or less, to do this, as it was tantamount to crossing his ‘red line’. Erdogan showed his annoyance by keeping out of the military coalition against IS and denying the US the use of its air base for bombing IS positions, until now. But its obsession remains with the Kurds, where the YPG in Syria has carved out an autonomous region and its perceived links with the PKK. Ankara sees that its perceived threat is already a reality. This accounts for a major part of Erdogan’s irrational policies both at home and abroad. The writer is a senior journalist and academic based in Sydney, Australia. He can be reached at sushilpseth@yahoo.co.au