"Turkey’s messy war in the Middle East, explained" Topic

"After months of relative inaction, the Turkish military whirred into motion at the end of last week, bombing Islamic State positions across the border in Syria. But the militant group was not the only one in Turkey's crosshairs: Turkish jets also targeted the Iraqi mountain bases of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, an outlawed Kurdish group that waged a decades-long insurgency against the Turkish state until a cease-fire in 2013.

That fragile peace is now effectively dead, and the Turkish airstrikes come amid a spiraling "vortex" of violence inside the country. Turkish police rounded up more than a thousand suspected Islamic State, PKK, and lefitst militants -- but the vast majority appeared to belong to the latter two categories, and were not jihadists. Meanwhile, Turkey forged a security pact with the United States allowing American fighter jets and armed drones to launch from the NATO air base at Incirlik.

The geopolitical map is getting complicated, so here's a guide to whom Turkey is now fighting…"
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I'll bet their fight against IS is just for show

theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/26/isis-syria-turkey-us?CMP=share_btn_tw

US special forces raided the compound of an Islamic State leader in eastern Syria in May, they made sure not to tell the neighbours.

The target of that raid, the first of its kind since US jets returned to the skies over Iraq last August, was an Isis official responsible for oil smuggling, named Abu Sayyaf. He was almost unheard of outside the upper echelons of the terror group, but he was well known to Turkey. From mid-2013, the Tunisian fighter had been responsible for smuggling oil from Syria's eastern fields, which the group had by then commandeered. Black market oil quickly became the main driver of Isis revenues – and Turkish buyers were its main clients.

As a result, the oil trade between the jihadis and the Turks was held up as evidence of an alliance between the two.

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In the wake of the raid that killed Abu Sayyaf, suspicions of an undeclared alliance have hardened. One senior western official familiar with the intelligence gathered at the slain leader's compound said that direct dealings between Turkish officials and ranking Isis members was now "undeniable".

"There are hundreds of flash drives and documents that were seized there," the official told the Observer. "They are being analysed at the moment, but the links are already so clear that they could end up having profound policy implications for the relationship between us and Ankara."

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However, Turkey has openly supported other jihadi groups, such as Ahrar al-Sham, which espouses much of al-Qaida's ideology, and Jabhat al-Nusra, which is proscribed as a terror organisation by much of the US and Europe. "The distinctions they draw [with other opposition groups] are thin indeed," said the western official. "There is no doubt at all that they militarily cooperate with both."

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One Isis member says the organisation remains a long way from establishing a self-sustaining economy across the area of Syria and Iraq it controls. "They need the Turks. I know of a lot of cooperation and it scares me," he said. "I don't see how Turkey can attack the organisation too hard. There are shared interests."