[Hurriyet Daily News] The first breaking point in Turkey’s policy against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) was the raid on the Turkish Consulate General in Mosul, Iraq on June 11, 2014.Up until then Ankara underestimated the ISIL threat, perhaps mixing this newly emerged (January 2013) Salafi-Jihadi group with earlier ones, including the al-Qaeda affiliate al-Nusra. When the Justice and Development Party (AK Parti) government in summer 2011 decided that there was no way they could convince the Bashar al-Assad regime in Damascus to come into terms with the Arab Spring-inspired rebels, it started to take a radical position to help the latter (mostly Muslim Brotherhood-based Islamist groups at the time), despite warnings from the opposition parties in Turkey about interfering in the politics of a neighboring country.
With the collapse of the Muslim Brotherhood regime in Egypt in a military coup in 2013, the Brotherhood-based spine of the Syria opposition was broken and quickly disintegrated, ultimately joining smaller but more armed and effective jihadi groups. Until the end of 2014 the jihadi groups took advantage of this situation, as well as Turkey’s lax border security policy and its training of “rebel forces” possibly infiltrated by more radical elements than Ankara realized. This all caused a huge “foreign fighters” problem.