Turkey joins the war against ISIS, sending airstrikes to Syria and conducting mass arrests at home. Reuters

A pair of ambulances leaving from a Turkish border station that came under ISIS attack. Yahoo/Reuters. 

Turkey has joined the fight against ISIS, sending airstrikes against ISIS targets in Syria and conducting large anti-terror campaigns at home. Reuters. Turkey has also agreed to let the United States use Turkish airbases to launch bombers from. The change in policy comes after a suicide bombing that killed 32 people in Suruc and a border clash that saw one Turkish soldier and one ISIS fighter dead. Three Turkish F-16's stuck the Syrian side of the border, destroying two ISIS bases and an assembly point. This is the first time Turkey has conducted airstrikes in Syria. As the airstrikes were going on, massive raids were conducted against ISIS cells located in Turkey. 250 people were arrested in a massive, country wide, raid that involved over 5000 officers. In Istanbul alone, over 100 locations were raided. The move has been called by the Turkish government as a switch between a passive defensive strategy to a more offensive one. 

My Comment:

I said a couple of days ago that bombing Turkey was a major mistake for ISIS. I predicted that it might draw Turkey into the war. Flash forward a few days and it looks like I was right. This has huge negative implications for ISIS, and it may even cost them the war. 

First, Turkey has a formidable military and can do real harm to ISIS fighters. They have modern equipment and seem to be quite apt at conducting airstrikes. Although I doubt Turkey will deploy ground forces, for the time being at least, their entry into the air war will cause more attrition for ISIS forces. It won't be a deathblow or anything, but it will hurt them.

Secondly, and far more seriously, it will cause Turkey to clamp down on their borders. This is incredibly bad for ISIS because Turkey is the pipeline for ISIS recruits and supplies. If you look at any of the various maps showing where ISIS has control, you can see that the largest uncontrolled border is with Turkey. With that border shut down, ISIS will have an extremely difficult time getting troops and weapons into areas they control. Sure, ISIS likes to capture weapons form their enemies and recruit locally, but cutting off outside sources might spell their doom. 

Finally, these raids inside of Turkey may have greatly disrupted their plans and logistics in the country. My guess that many of the people that were arrested were not militants, but facilitators and smugglers, that work to get recruits and supplies across the border. Once gone, these people will be very hard for ISIS to replace. 

So why did ISIS do it? My guess is because their ideology leaves them no choice. Even though Turkey wasn't really their enemy, they still viewed them as infidels who weren't following Islam correctly. Turkey is fairly secular, by middle eastern standards at least, and I doubt ISIS approves of the way they run their country. Since ISIS seems bound and determined to fight all people that don't follow their strict sect of Sunni Islam, it isn't really surprising. But it was the wrong move to make strategically. 

If there is any good news from this, it shows that ISIS is essentially doomed. No country can survive if they make an enemy out of everyone else in the region. Even a country with a military as strong as the United States would have a difficult time fighting everyone else. And ISIS isn't anywhere near as powerful. Without allies, or even friendly countries to help them, they will have to fall eventually. The question is now how long will they last and how many people will they take with them when they go.  

Turkey has always been far too lenient and disinterested in fighting ISIS. And for good reason as well. Until very recently ISIS spent much of their time killing enemies of Turkey. Turkey has no love for the Syrian regime and would love to see Al-Assad in one of ISIS's execution videos. They also loved the fact that ISIS was killing Kurds wholesale. I am convinced that Turkey would have never joined the war if ISIS hadn't attacked them first. Why fight when your enemies are killing each other for you? 

Now that Turkey is facing a direct threat, the question now becomes how involved with the Syrian civil war will Turkey get? I see a couple of options. First, they could do what they are doing now. Airstrikes against any ISIS targets that get too close to the border and massive police raids inside the country. Involvement in the actual war would be limited, much like other partners in the anti-ISIS coalition. 

The second option is a ground invasion. I think that this is possible, though not very likely. After all, Turkey does not want to risk their troops in the fight against ISIS. But I fear that Turkey would use the threat of ISIS as an excuse to fight who they really want to fight in Syria. That would be the Kurds and, to a lesser extent, the Syrian regime. 

Turkey views an independent Kurdish homeland as an extensional and political threat.  Turkey has a large and somewhat volatile population of Kurds and the fear is that any independent Kurdish state would inspire rebellion in Turkey. Turkey won't allow that to happen, so I think there is a real chance that they will use these attacks as an excuse to destroy and demoralize any Kurds that happen to be in the area. They will claim to be fighting ISIS but what their real goal will be preventing any Kurdish independence movement from getting momentum. 

If that ends up happening that Syria will become even more of a bloodbath then it is now. If Turkey joins the ground war they will be fighting all other factions except perhaps the secular rebels and non-ISIS Jihadis. I've said it before, but Syria is the war that everyone came to. And now one more country has shown up to the party...