© REUTERS/ Khalil Ashawi
Reliable sources in the Middle East have told Sputnik that after setting up a military base in the Aktarin district to the north of Aleppo, Turkey has now set up another military facility in the city of al-Bab which was recently liberated from Daesh.
The base was set up near the Akil hill which is considered to be a strategic height. The sources also said that Turkey is setting up a facility near the city of Azaz.
Kurdish politician Rezan Hiddo, the Chairman of the Syrian Democratic Council, which also includes the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), commented to Sputnik Turkiyeon the above reports.
"We have no intention to advance towards al-Bab as it is the area of deployment of the Turkish Armed Forces and the Forces of the Free Syrian Army operating within the Operation Euphrates Shield," he told Sputnik.
Meanwhile, he said, the residents of al-Bab and its environs have told us that Turkey has set up a military base on the strategic hill of Akil and is gradually stepping up its presence there. Ankara has also set up a military base in close vicinity to the city of Azaz, he said.
By setting up the bases, the politician said, Turkey is not fighting against terrorism but is rather trying to annex the captured Syrian territories.
"Turkey is trying to present the cities of Jarabulus, Al-Rai and Azaz as Turkish territories. Ankara is constantly talking about the borders set up in the National Pact of 1920, a document adopted at the last session of the Ottoman parliament in Istanbul on February 17, 1920, and which considered the territories of the northern Syria and Iraq as Turkish.
Turkey wants to annex the territories of Aleppo, Manbij, Jarabulus and Al-Shaykh, which we think is its ultimate goal, the politician finally stated.
Comment: Further reading: Nostalgia & 'soft power' in Turkey's neo-Ottoman blueprint
While the War on Syria is proving itself to be a failed enterprise for all of its culprits, especially Turkey, it also saw the eventual administrative-political tweaking of Neo-Ottomanism. Turkish scholar Dr. Can Erimtan warned in late-2013 that "the government's long-term goal (as arguably expressed in the AKP's policy statement Hedef 2023) is to transform the nation state Turkey into an Anatolian federation of Muslim ethnicities, possibly linked to a revived caliphate. In this way, Turkey's future (as a nation state) would arguably become subject to Anatolia's past as a home to many different Muslims of divergent ethnic background."
What this basically means is that the devolution of the unitary Turkish state to a federation would give Ankara the flexibility to incorporate/annex territories under its wing which are populated by people of a separate ethno-nationalist identity in order to build the post-modern/post-Western 21st-century Neo-Ottoman Caliphate. In practice, this could allow for all or part of Syria become part of a reformatted Turkey, as well as Syrian and Iraqi "Kurdistan", and the geographically large Sunni areas of Iraq. In fact, the"federalization" of both Syria and Iraq would amount to an internal partition in both cases and the emergence of a transnational sub-state "Sunnistan" which could, under Dr. Erimtan's analyzed template of the future Turkish state, come under Ankara's eventual control.