History is repeating itself! All should remember what had said the chief of turkish intelligence Hakan Fidan in 2015 “I can send 4 of my agents to the syrian side ordering them to throw bombs to the turkish side in order to create a pretext for military interfence in Syria”.
In the leaked recording, then-Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu, then-Foreign Ministry Undersecretary Feridun Sinirlioğlu, MİT Undersecretary Hakan Fidan and then-Deputy Chief of General Staff Gen. Yaşar Güler are heard discussing military operations in Syria in Davutoğlu’s Foreign Ministry office on March 13, 2013.
Fidan says in the recording: “If needed, I would dispatch four men to Syria. [Then] I would have them fire eight mortar shells at the Turkish side and create an excuse for war.”
A top-secret meeting was held at the Foreign Ministry with the participation of the minister, his undersecretary, the MİT undersecretary and the deputy chief of general staff. The conversation in the meeting was illegally recorded for reasons of political and military espionage, and the recordings were posted online. The Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office launched this espionage case on March 27, 2014 in investigation file No. 2014/47602,” the court said in its ruling.
The conversation in the audio recording also focuses on whether the Turkish military should enter Syria to protect the tomb of Suleiman Shah, the grandfather of Sultan Osman I, founder of the Ottoman dynasty. The tomb used to be located at Jaber Castle, a historic fortification within Syria’s borders and a highly sensitive location protected by a Turkish army contingent. It was later moved to another location after the castle was flooded due to dam construction. In early 2015 Turkey moved the tomb 22 kilometers (14 miles) west of Kobani to protect it from the threat posed by the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).
According to the Treaty of Ankara, which was signed on Oct. 20, 1921 between colonial power France and the Turkish Parliament, the compound housing the tomb of Suleiman Shah is considered Turkish territory. The 2003 protocol between Turkey and Syria gave Turkey transit rights through Syrian territory to access the tomb in order to maintain and repair it.
The Turkish Foreign Ministry issued a statement regarding the audio at the time, saying the recording of the highly sensitive meeting attended by people who are responsible for the security of Turkey was leaked to social media and claimed that it had been tampered with. In an attempt to spin the story, the Foreign Ministry said the senior officials were meeting to make a contingency plan in the event of an attack on the tomb of Suleiman Shah, and it reaffirmed Turkey’s determination to defend the tomb.
Yet Turkish court documents, revealed in January 2019, did not include any claim of tampering and did not support the Foreign Ministry’s statement, which was an apparent attempt to contain the damage and manipulate the leak.
In the recording the voice of Davutoğlu can be heard saying that the “prime minister said this [Jaber Castle] must be considered an opportunity at this juncture.” Two weeks before the leak, clashes between opposition groups — specifically, the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and ISIL — had intensified in the region around the castle. The news that ISIL had taken control of a town near it prompted immediate reactions from Turkish officials. When in the recording Fidan asked why they were being persistent on pushing an attack on the tomb of Suleiman Shah, Davutoğlu responded by saying that the pretext for an incursion must be acceptable to the international community.
The Turkish foreign minister also said, “Without a strong pretext, we cannot tell US Secretary of State [John] Kerry that we need to take extraordinary measures.” Davutoğlu added that Kerry had asked him whether Turkey was determined to strike Syria. According to the audio file, Fidan said: “If needed, I would dispatch four men to Syria. [Then] I would have them fire eight mortar shells at the Turkish side and create an excuse for war. We can have them attack the tomb of Suleiman Shah as well.”
Then-Foreign Ministry Undersecretary Sinirlioğlu, who currently serves as Turkey’s ambassador to the United Nations, was also recorded as saying that Turkey’s national security had turned into cheap material for domestic political consumption. Gen. Güler warned, “What we are going to do is a direct reason for war.”
The recent decision that verified the content of the recording was made in case No. 2016-238 by the Ankara 4th High Criminal Court, which has also tried suspects over their affiliation with government critic Fethullah Gülen, a Turkish Muslim cleric who has been living in exile in the United States since 1999.
