A new flood of Jihadi ‘refugees’ is about to hit the European Union. The new hotspot is the Bulgarian/Turkish border, where the numbers of ‘refugees’ trying to cross has increased rapidly since the failed coup in Turkey. Here’s why:
The failed US-backed coup, and the resulting rapprochement between Erdogan and Russia, has already produced changes in Turkey’s actions in Syria.
Turkey badly needs trade and tourism deals with Russia. Further, Erdogan takes things very personally, and Vladimir Putin condemned the coup attempt while John Kerry was still apparently hoping for news that he had been ‘shot while trying to escape.
While the primary reason for Turkey’s invasion of Syria is concern over Kurdish separatism, it does look as though Ankara has finally decided that ISIS is too dangerous a scorpion to try to keep as a pet to use against regional enemies.
This gives Erdogan and Turkish Military Intelligence (MIT) a serious problem. Since the early months of the Islamist rebellion in and invasion of Syria, MIT has overseen a system whereby the teeming Syrian refugee camps in Turkey have provided a continual source of new recruits for the terrorist war, as well as safe bases for Jihadis ‘on leave’ from the battlefields of northern Syria and Iraq.
The problem is that, with Islamist anger already growing at Turkey’s refusal to take on Russia and the increasingly effective Syrian loyalist forces, further ‘betrayal’ of the Salafist cause by a newly pragmatic Erdogan could add Al Qaeda to ISIS as a force which sees Turkey as an enemy rather than a safe haven, hospital and supply base.
This is a very dangerous position for Erdogan, given that his earlier policy of trying to use the Jihadis to fight a proxy war for a new Ottoman domination of Syria has led to the presence of many thousands of Daesh and Jabhat al Nusra terrorists in the refugee camps.
While the fortunes of the war in Iraq and around Aleppo continue to swing to-and-fro, the overall pattern is clear: Both terror armies are being slowly ground into dead meat and bloody dust.
Hence, for reasons of state (the need to cut a deal with Putin), human morale and the need to regroup in safe territory and launch fresh offensives, it is neither a realistic nor strategically attractive proposition for these now unwanted Jihadists to be shipped out to die in the hills and deserts south of Syria.
But if they stay in Turkey they are a clear and present danger to a now unstable and paranoid regime, and there are too many of them and they are too well armed to crush by force.
So what to do with these newly unwelcome guests? Send them to Europe, hidden in the midst of a renewed ‘refugee’ flood!
This solution is doubly elegant, given that Brussels’ discomfort with Turkey’s post-coup human rights record has led to the virtual breakdown of the blackmail deal whereby the EU had agreed to pay 4 Billion Euros and provide visa free travel in exchange for Turkey turning off the migration tap.
A renewed refugee flood, which not even the seemingly woefully ill-informed security services of the West can fail to notice is awash with battle-hardened Jihadists, is likely to panic Brussels into renewed surrender. Ker-ching!
The mainstream Western media and political elites may try to keep the new flood out of the headlines for a few weeks. But in the end, sensationalist refugee stories sell well, so the truth – about the numbers, if not the bloodthirsty extremism of the next wave of “Merkel’s Children” – will soon be out.
Too late, in all probability, for Europe to avoid importing an entire Jihadi army.
Which will serve the EU regimes right for having treated terrorism as a tame scorpion they could drop in their neighbours’ boots whenever they felt the need. It’s just a shame for their innocent citizens, who are the ones who are going to be very badly stung!
