RayKalm
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Is Turkey preparing for an intervention in Syria? – Telegraph Blogs
The short answer is yes. Although it wont happen tomorrow or without assistance especially from the United States, which is evidently first going to allow Kofi Annan to try his luck getting Iran to broker a peace deal. But Abdullah Bozkurt, a columnist at Turkeys Today Zaman newspaper, outlines the legal case for intervention that wouldnt require UN Security Council authorisation (read: the say-so of Russia and China). This strikes me as the most likely set of events to unfold:
What will happen if the UN cannot get its act together, and Russia and China end up using their veto powers for the third time? Ankara will probably invoke the 1998 Adana agreement with Syria to justify the military interference while calling on NATO members for the application of the Article 5 of the NATO Charter, which says that an attack on any member shall be considered to be an attack on all. The article was invoked by the US for the first time in October 2001, when NATO determined that the terrorist attacks on the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City were indeed eligible under the terms of the North Atlantic Treaty. Since the Assad regime allows the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and its affiliates to launch attacks on Turkish soil and harbors some 1,500 to 2,000 hard-core PKK militants in areas close to the Turkish border, Turkey can very well utilize the NATO security cover for assistance