Strategic Security Work And Intelligence - Case Study of Turkey

Running head: STRATEGIC SECURITY WORK AND INTELLIGENCE
STRATEGIC SECURITY WORK AND INTELLIGENCE
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1STRATEGIC SECURITY WORK AND INTELLIGENCE
Table of Contents
Introduction:.......................................................................................................................2
Interests of Turkey:............................................................................................................3
Turkey and Russia relation:...............................................................................................5
Need for Security measures and actions in any Country:.................................................6
Security measures that are needed in Turkey:..................................................................7
Undertaken Security Measures in Turkey:........................................................................8
Domestic Measures:......................................................................................................9
International Measures:...............................................................................................10
Strategies for better security environment:......................................................................11
Inside the country:........................................................................................................12
Outside the country:.....................................................................................................13
Conclusion:......................................................................................................................15
References:......................................................................................................................17

2STRATEGIC SECURITY WORK AND INTELLIGENCE
Introduction:
Across the middle-east countries, there are heightening tensions regarding the
increased risk of terror attacks and tourists have also been warned against visiting in
such sensitive times. The UK FCO or the Foreign and Commonwealth Office has also
provided similar advice to the travelers and told them to be vigilant amidst the fears that
the Western people might be targeted in terrorist attacks. In fact, the tourism industry
has been affected the most with the political turmoil. In late 2019, Turkey had launched
an offensive of major stature against Kurdish-held positions in the area of north Syria;
this prompted FCO to reinstate a number of some severe warnings against all the
people travelling to some particular parts of the country. It has also been declared by
FCO that Istanbul, the largest city of Turkey and Ankara, the capital of Turkey are
mostly safe from any security issues but travelers and people must take precautions in
order to avoid chances of being caught in some kind of terrorist attack or civil unrest.
These types of attacks generally targeted towards the tourists from western countries
but the local and native people are also harmed in the way. Keeping aside the issue of
Terrorism, Turkey is also a region which is a target of burglaries and other such similar
crimes in accordance to the FCO.
Turkey is a country that is predominantly a Sunni Muslim Country and in fact it is
the only country with Muslim-majority in NATO. In the current years, some Islamist
terror group including that of ISIS has merged on the border of Turkey with Syria and
Iraq. As a matter of fact, large number of fighters from foreign lands has crossed the
border of Turkey in the hope of joining these terror groups (Bilgin & Ince, 2015).

3STRATEGIC SECURITY WORK AND INTELLIGENCE
Meanwhile there are refugees who have fled from the conflict areas of Syria and Iraq to
Turkey and the numbers have reached up to 3 million in the year 2018. The extremist
groups within Turkey have subscribed to Islamist ideologies, Kurdish separatist and far-
left. According to some critics, it is because of the venerable issues with this country’s
Kurds and also the PKK, that Ankara has targeted PKK more than the terror of ISIS
itself. Moreover, PKK have also claimed the responsibility for some high-profile terrorist
attack including the one that occurred on 13th of March, 2016 in the form of a car bomb
attack; this attack killed around 37 people and more than 125 people were wounded.
The increasing activeness of the terror groups in Turkey makes it significant for the
government to have strategic security intelligence and framework since the safety of
innocent lives are at risk.
Interests of Turkey:
When the Soviet Union collapsed, it has opened opportunities to be a part of the
New Game in the region of Great Caspian for major countries like Turkey, Iran, US, EU
and Russia. Turkey has certain “strategic geopolitical location” that has created an
advantage to establish itself as one of the main energy routes in the area of East-West
Energy due to its close ties in the ethno-linguistic area. It is this strategy of Turkey that
has allowed the country to re-emerge as a regional geopolitical force. Once Ankara
realizes the strategy of energy of this country, it will be able to use this energy factor as
its political leverage. Hence, in this context the competition of Turkey with Russia can
be viewed in a form of readiness to use its military forces and promoted alternative
pipelines as some limiting factors.

4STRATEGIC SECURITY WORK AND INTELLIGENCE
However, the geopolitical ambitions of Turkey face several limiting factors like the
dependency of Turkey on the political support by US for the promotion of the planned
pipelines and also for the potential energy alliance with Russia. Without the support of
US in order to gain the lobbying for the significant products, can turn out to be very
problematic for Turkey and pose a great challenge for its desire to turn into a major
energy hub. Since Russia is also a major competitor that stands in the way of Turkey’s
desire, and Turkey might think about forming an alliance with the country in order to
strengthen its position in this arena, yet this idea is something that is warned against by
many scholars. This is because their “geo-economic alliance” can potentially make
threats to the energy security of the members of EU as they would get the option of
obstructing the gas supplies to Europe (Khachatryan, 2015). In order to solve the West
Energy’s problem, the NATO and US have calculated to achieve a tactical geopolitical
benefit over the countries of Russia, China and also Iran; in accordance with this, the
US strongly entered the route of Turkey having a primary aim that would diminish the
power of Russia and also prevent the possible rise of the influence of Iran and China in
the global and regional arena. There is a prevailing competition for the energy
accomplishment, but it cannot be denied that this same pipeline development has
augmented certain settlement incentives of peace within regional differences. This
competition that prevails as a part of the economics of the market between these
countries proves that there is a relationship that directly correlates security, geopolitics
and energy politics.

5STRATEGIC SECURITY WORK AND INTELLIGENCE
Turkey and Russia relation:
The relationship prevailing between Turkey and Russia has experienced certain
rough point in the past few years; these two countries have a long history of interactions
that are competitive in nature and things have led to such a circumstance that mutual
understanding and trust between these two countries is very hard to attain. However,
both the Presidents of these two countries share similar process of conducting
themselves and both of them have their trust issues towards the Western Policies. Yet
they remain reluctant while making pledges and maintain a friendly relationship through
cooperation. Both the leaders are ambitious as well as opportunistic such that they can
sway from taking an oath for deliberate partnership to involving into a quarrel and the
results can lock both of the countries into a conflict of high risk (Baev & Kirişci, 2017).
The start of the decade for both the countries was unhappy; on one hand Erdoğan was
unhappy with Russia’s annexation of Crimea and thus decided not to join the regime of
the Western sanctions but did not violate it; on the other hand, Turkey was disappointed
over the way EU managed its process of accession and entertained the idea of SCO.
Moreover there was an incident where Russia intervened in Syria and it clashed with
the policy of Turkey that aimed to remove the Syrian president from his office. After the
interval of two months, a Russian Su-24M bomber was drowned by F-16 fighter of
Turkey and it evoked an unprecedented conflict. Moscow was seen to impose economic
sanctions on the country of Turkey and although Ankara gained support from NATO,
nonetheless, Erdoğan gave his apology in the year 2016; Putin, being an opportunist
accepted it and instantly criticized the coup attempt by the military elements of Turkey in
spite of the hesitation by EU and US.