Turkey has been following a new geopolitical strategy by building a defence line from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, and from Libya to Somalia, wrote foreign policy analyst Mehmet A. Kancı for the state-run Anadolu Agency on Tuesday.
The new strategy follows the orders Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish Republic, he gave during the country’s War of Independence, Kancı said. “There is no defence line, but defence area. This area is the whole of the motherland,” Atatürk said in 1921 in the midst of the Battle of Sakarya, one of the deadliest battles in history between the Greek and Turkish forces.
The implications in Atatürk’s remarks today indicates a greater urgency to Turkey’s need to expand its geopolitical line of defence over a larger area given the global struggle reaching chaotic proportions on all fronts, Kancı said. Turkey’s new defence territory covers on the one end the west and south of the Greek island of Crete and the headquarters of the Turkey-Qatar Combined Joint Force Command overlooking the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf and the Somali Turkish Task Force Command in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia on the Indian Ocean coast on the other, he said.
Turkey now wants to strengthen its defence line with a new link in Libya, the analyst said. A new military cooperation deal signed with the U.N.-recognised Libyan government of Tripoli opens the way for Ankara to deploy troops in Libya as well as a naval force, he said.
With that move, Turkey’s new defence territory can cover Cyprus, Libya and Qatar, giving the country an advantage in protecting its interests in the Mediterranean and in three continents, Kancı said. “On this path, which Turkey has been treading in keeping with the maxim ‘There is no defending a line, but rather a whole area is to be defended,’ that ‘area’ is now all of the world’s seas,” said the analyst.
Source: Ahval