Turkey’s Syria offensive could have been delayed a year by coup plotters

There was a lot of talk about why Turkey was not doing more against ISIL. This article says it was the coup plotters holding plans up.

The Turkish government had been planning for more than a year to send troops into Syria to fight the Islamic State before it did so this week, but the intervention was opposed by military officers who later participated in July’s failed attempt to overthrow the government, a senior Turkish official said Thursday.

He spoke as Turkey dispatched additional tanks across the border to reinforce positions around the Syrian town of Jarabulus, which was captured from the Islamic State on Wednesday by Syrian rebels and Turkish troops in Turkey’s first significant foray into Syria since the war began five years ago.


Reluctance within the military to move across the border was reinforced by other issues that subsequently emerged, including Turkey’s November 2015 shoot-down of a Russian jet, which forced Turkey to suspend flights over Syria for fear of Russian retaliation and meant it could not offer air support to any advancing troops.


The suggestion, however, that military officers who were secretly plotting against the government all along had acted for more than a year to thwart its plans to intervene in Syria offers one possible new explanation for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s seeming reluctance to fulfill long-standing U.S. demands for Turkey to adopt a more active stance against the Islamic State in Syria.