| 10-6-23 AL MONITOR Turkey got its first female central bank boss this week with Hafize Gaye Erkan, a high-flying finance executive who worked at Goldman Sachs and San Francisco-based First Republic Bank, among others, as Ezgi Akin reported. Rumors that she would be tapped for the job were swirling around when it emerged that the new finance minister, Mehmet Simsek, also profiled by Ezgi, had been meeting with her. The pair are meant to instill market confidence in the run up to local elections in March next year. An early test of a return to reason as Simsek pledged will be the Central Bank’s policy meeting on June 22 where interest rates will be set.
Turkey’s spy boss Hakan Fidan stepped out of the shadows to become foreign minister. (For more on the new cabinet you can read my piece here.) Fidan’s already had a hand in Turkish diplomacy, as Ezgi explains in her notes on him.
As the head of Turkey’s national intelligence agency, MIT, Fidan was in charge of the Iraq and Syria files and took part in backchannel efforts to mend ties with Israel, Egypt and, more recently, Syria.
Fidan, an ethnic Kurd on his father’s side, also oversaw the targeted assassinations of alleged Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) operatives in Iraq and Syria and illegal renditions of individuals linked to Fethullah Gulen. This week two more mid-level PKK militants were killed in a Turkish drone strike near Sulaiymaniyah in Iraqi Kurdistan. A senior Iraqi Kurdish official speaking not for attribution said Turkish attacks against the PKK are set to escalate even further in the coming days.
Fidan’s appointment in effect crystallizes Turkey’s shift to what academic Arzu Yilmaz calls an “intelligence state” akin to Iran and Israel, meshing muscular diplomacy with covert rather than direct military force.
A former Iraqi Kurdish spy chief told me that Fidan admired the late Qassem Soleimani, the former IRGC commander who was assassinated in Baghdad, though that doesn’t make him “pro-Iran” as some claim. Some draw parallels between the pair, though Fidan apparently loves to puff on shisha and Soleimani famously abhorred smoking and smokers.
Fidan is probably also on a tighter leash — as a former US ambassador to Ankara Eric Edelman observed the boundaries are set by Erdogan and the president’s overarching goal is to keep himself in power. That’s the lens through which one needs to keep analyzing Turkish policy writ large.
Pressure is piling on Turkey to ratify Sweden’s accession to NATO ahead of the alliance’s July 12 summit in Vilnius. President Joe Biden called Erdogan both to congratulate him on his win and nudge him on Sweden. Nazlan Ertan spoke to numerous experts who aired cautious optimism about the prospects of a breakthrough. Ezgi Akin has more in her piece about Fidan’s phone call with Swedish Foreign Minister Tobias Billstrom. Sweden’s Supreme Court ruled in favor of the extradition of a Turkish national previously convicted in Turkey on drug charges. On Friday, the Nordic country charged a Turkish citizen for gun crimes and raising money for the PKK.
But, as I reported here, Turkey’s demands on Sweden may be more of a foil. What Turkey really wants are F-16s from the United States. Senator Bob Menendez, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has been blocking the sale. The issue came up in Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s congratulatory phone call to Fidan as described here. Will Bob budge? He’s said nothing about it recently.
Meanwhile Erdogan resumed mediation in the Ukraine conflict, calling Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy to discuss the collapse of the Nova Kakhova dam, which each of the warring sides blames on the other, as Ezgi reported.
The National Security Council convened its first session since the May 28 presidential runoff. As Ezgi noted, the body raised the issue of the need to repatriate close to four million Syrian refugees, marking the first time it acknowledged this publicly. Turkey is planning to send at least some Syrians back to areas it occupied in northeast Syria during its 2019 Operation Peace Spring. These include Tell Abyad and Ras al Ain. Qatar has reportedly agreed to help finance the construction of housing there. If executed, the plan would serve the dual purpose of reducing the number of Syrians in Turkey and re-engineering the demographics along the Turkish-Syrian border whereby Kurds would be replaced by ethnic Arabs. |