Apparently for Turkey’s extremist Muslims, this is a war between “us good Muslims” and “those infidels.”
First, Turkey is running a military show in Arab Syria: targeting Muslim Kurds who it claims are terrorists. Erdogan has vowed that after Syria, the military campaign will target northern Iraq.
In the meantime, Erdogan’s “Arab friends” are showing signs of hostility, one after the other.
The events in the last couple of weeks seem to confirm that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ambitions for a Turkey-led ummah (Muslim community) are not welcome in the Arab world. This emerging divide among Sunni Islamists — Turkey, Saudi Arabia et al — is important for the West.
In Turkey, a hysteria has set in. It appears a national competition of patriotism that has captured the Turkish imagination. Screams of martyrdom and jihad can be heard echoing across the country. Even children are not spared from the ugly “death talk.”
There is a story behind this jihadist euphoria. In 2016, Turkey’s Religious Affairs General Directorate (Diyanet), the ultimate religious authority in the country, issued comic books to the nation’s children telling them how glorious it is to become an Islamic martyr. One cartoon was a dialogue between a father and his son. “How marvelous it is to become a martyr,” the father says. Unconvinced, the son asks: “Would anyone want to become a martyr?” “Yes” the father replies, “one would. Who doesn’t want to win heaven?”
Students, including kindergarteners, have been asked to conduct military marches and recite ultranationalist poems at schools . Some state schools have replaced their recess bells with Ottoman military marches.