Some may be wondering about the title of this article. After all, although Jabhat al-Nusra is fighting a regime Ankara wants to eliminate in Syria, shouldn’t the radical Islamist group's announcement of its affiliation with al-Qaeda be enough reason to consider it a threat to the "secular and democratic” Turkish republic?
A senior Turkish official spoke on Sept. 4 in Istanbul to a small group of columnists with the condition that they not reveal his name and position. He said, "Al-Nusra is also a threat for us. The entire political echelon shares this feeling. It is out of the question for Turkey to support Al-Nusra in any manner.”
By "political echelon," he meant the Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its government. From this statement we deduce that the Islamist AKP also sees al-Qaeda as a threat. Since we used the official’s message of normalization as the headline of this article, you wouldn’t be far off in thinking we had considered Ankara's earlier position regarding Al-Nusra as abnormal or irregular.
One doesn’t need expert intelligence to grasp the abnormality of the earlier situation. It was enough to have minimal knowledge of current issues and decent judgment to look at a map of Syria and understand that Al-Nusra and other jihadist organizations alongside the Free Syrian Army had total freedom of movement in Syria’s border area with Turkey. Turkey did not need to train or arm the jihadists. But it would have impossible for these militant groups to achieve such superiority against regime forces in the region that includes Aleppo without logistical support from sources in Turkey and unhindered access to the border.
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