ISIL will turn on supporters to further its goals – professor
Press TV has conducted an interview with William Beeman, Professor, University of Minnesota, about the backlash of Turkey's support for the ISIL against Ankara with the leader of the Takfiri group threatening war against Turkey.
Press TV: Tell us about overall what ISIL is now telling Turkey and the irony of it all because was it not Turkey that on the one hand supported them in dealing with the situation of Syria and also is it not Turkey that is making sure that oil coming from the Kurdistan region and also from places held by ISIL that they are definitely making sure they help them financially.
Tell us your perspective on what exactly is going on.
Beeman: You are absolutely right. This ISIL group or ISIS group - they have many names - they come into various regions and they are very nice for just a little while until they get what they want and then they turn against the people that formerly supported them.
This has been true in Syria, it has been true in Iraq and they are now threatening Turkey and it has to do with water supplies for northern Syria and northern Iraq that are controlled by the Turks in damming up the Euphrates River.
They seem to have no sense of proportion in their ambitions to try to take over the entire Islamic world. I frankly don’t think that this is going to be able to be sustained, but for the time being they are definitely making threats anytime that they feel their situation is being thwarted.
Press TV: Do you think this may serve as a wakeup call to Prime Minister Erdogan? We have seen, many would say, that he’s made some interesting decisions when dealing with neighboring countries.
We see that he sided with the opposition against Syrian president Bashar al-Assad; we see that basically he has encouraged Kurdistan to go separate from Baghdad; and in general it appears that there is a lot of tension that a lot of the source could be Ankara itself. And now basically the ISIS or ISIL are also responding totally against him.
So, do you think that perhaps he understands that maybe he didn’t make the right decision?
Beeman: Well, this is the situation for just about everybody who was interested in supporting the forces that were opposing President Assad in Syria is that they thought they were merely supporting an opposition group to President Assad.
Little did they know that within that opposition group you had this extremist group - the ISIL or ISIS – that are now turning on just about everybody in the Islamic world.
They’ve threatened to overthrow the government of Jordan; nobody is sufficiently religiously conservative enough for them; and they’ve turned against Turkey as well now that they’ve gotten the support that they needed in order to try to establish a base northern Syria.
So I think that Prime Minster Erdogan has got to really realize that he has got a tiger by the tail and in supporting the ISIS or ISIL he has actually created a problem for himself.
By the way I should also mention that even in the United States supported ISIL/ISIS in the secret training camps in Jordan in 2012.
So, in many ways anybody who is supporting the opposition to President Assad has really been responsible for creating this horrible group that is threatening peace throughout the region.