Gabriele Adinolfi: Erdogan’s blackmail

The pressure from the Turkish border of immigrants to Greece is clearly an act of war.

It is certainly an act of hostility towards Athens, but it is part of a much broader strategy.

Turkey, as Russia and Iran have also done, has recently gained space and power in the areas of the Near East and this since the Americans, privileging the Pacific scenarios, have reduced their presence there without the Europeans, divided and quarrelsome, they gained ground, which they even lost.

Ankara, with its neo-Ottoman strategy, aims to stand as the protector of the sword of Muhammad. Thus in Syria and Libya it supports the jihadist militias and proposes itself as the reference power of the Muslim Brotherhood, above all to destabilize Egypt.

For this reason the alliance with Russia ran aground in Syria with the battle of Idlib and also as regards Libya where he landed troops in support of the fundamentalist candidate Serraj while Moscow, and this time also the EU, preferred the nationalist Haftar.

The Turkish strategy also looks to the Balkans and this has placed it in conditions of friction with Russia over the intrusions into Serbia.

Erdogan intends to use the terrorist and migratory wave threats to blackmail Europe and to keep Islamist outbreaks alive in its big cities.

This is a serious threat even if challenging Russia, Iran, Europe and Egypt simultaneously may be excessive.

But Turkey is not alone. He enjoys British support, strengthened recently with the election of Boris Johnson, whose great-grandmother was a Caucasian slave in the Ottoman Empire, who in the aftermath of Brexit proposed to Erdogan to further improve relations between the two nations.

Since British services were among the first animators of religious fundamentalism and the British are at the origin of the birth of the Muslim Brotherhood, and as their interests are opposed to those of us Europeans, Ankara enjoys the support of London. Both on the ground (weapons to jihadists have often come from England as well as copious funding), and on the much more important one than the political and diplomatic umbrella.

This has projected the Turks to extend the influences to Moldova and Ukraine in perfect alignment with the British who play the strategy of tension in the east to prevent any Russian-German saladatura.

Immigrant pressure in Greece is part of this whole game and is not an isolated fact.