Michael Rubin: Turkey’s Demographic Games Come to Caucasus

In an article published by the American magazine "The National Interest", former Pentagon researcher and official Michael Rubin said that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is using the mainly Sunni Syrian refugees and his mercenaries to weaken the population of other nationalities at home and abroad for his benefit.

The resident researcher at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington confirmed that Erdogan has exploited refugees in Turkey to wage a demographic war against ethnic minorities for political gain.

Rubin quoted Turkish parliamentarians as saying that the Turkish authorities "give the Syrian Arab Sunnis an opportunity to avoid living in refugee camps and obtaining the privileges of obtaining Turkish citizenship, as long as they will settle either in the Alawite-majority areas of Hatay or in the Kurdish towns and villages in Bakur Kurdistan."

"Either way, Erdogan's goals are simple: to use the Syrian Arab Sunnis to change the demographics of those areas for the benefit of his party," Rubin added.

Rubin said Turkey had implemented a similar strategy in the Syrian conflict in the recent fighting in Karabakh.

He explained that the truth of Erdogan's policy is "the ethnic cleansing of the Syrian border areas to expel the Kurds, Christians and Yazidis and replace them with the Sunni Arab Islamic societies."

Meanwhile, Russia, France and Armenia accused Turkey of sending thousands of Syrian mercenaries to support Azerbaijan in the recent fighting over Karabakh.

Azerbaijan and Armenia signed a ceasefire agreement brokered by Russia on November 10, which stopped six weeks of clashes in the mountain enclave, and the ceasefire would allow Azerbaijan to keep the territories it had occupied from Armenian forces.

But Rubin said that few Azerbaijanis want to return to this region, because most of the jobs and infrastructure are located around the Azerbaijani capital Baku, and instead, the Syrian mercenaries will be sent with their families to Karabakh.

While Erdogan and his Azerbaijani counterpart Ilham Aliyev "may celebrate ridding the region of Christians, replacing them with mercenaries would be a time bomb for the southern Caucasus," Rubin said.

T/S

ANHA