Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is a risk-conscious politician who is always good for a surprise. With his unprecedented coup for a new Turkish-Libyan Mediterranean alliance, he has become a major player in Mediterranean policy. In the role of the patron of the legitimate government of the Libyan President Fajis al-Sarradsch, recognized by the United Nations, he wants to play an equally decisive role in the new “big game” for oil and gas resources in the eastern Mediterranean as in the struggle for political influence in a region that was part of the Ottoman Empire for centuries.
That is why Erdogan is to play an important role in addition to the great powers of the United States and Russia at the international Libya conference in Berlin on Sunday, to which Chancellor Angela Merkel invited. Erdogan achieved this strategic success with the least possible use of resources. After a couple of meetings with al-Sarradsch, the deal was perfect, in which the two countries declared a third of the Mediterranean Sea to be their exclusive economic zone (EWZ), claiming Greek islands like Rhodes and the waters south of Crete and northwest of Cyprus – with which Erdogan “copies” the Cypriot-Greek EWZ recognized according to international maritime law.
Erdogan kills many flies with one stone
Erdogan is concerned with staking out energy policy claims, because rich gas deposits are believed to be under the seabed. As the British Guardian revealed on Wednesday, Turkey has already sent 2,000 Syrian Islamists to Libya to support al-Sarraj. The mercenaries receive around $ 2,000 a month and Turkish citizenship after six months of war. With her posting, Erdogan kills more flies with one stone: he gets rid of the jihadist rebels from the Turkish-controlled Syrian province of Idlib, at least temporarily, meets the Kremlin’s demands and hardly risks the lives of Turkish soldiers.
Erdogan can also rely on the partnership with the billionaire Emirate of Qatar, with which he shares a common ideology. Both are the last remaining state supporters of the Arab Muslim Brotherhood and Palestinian Hamas. This closes the ideological circle with Libya, because President Sarradsch belongs to the same Islamist movement.
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