A new Turkish ground attack on Syria is "possible at any time", a top aide to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Saturday, despite a rapprochement between Damascus and Ankara brokered by Moscow.
The Kremlin is trying to end more than a decade of hostility between the neighbors, which began when Turkish-backed rebels tried to topple President Bashar al-Assad at the start of the Syrian civil war.
Erdogan's foreign policy adviser, Ibrahim Kalin, said the Russian press for peace did not mean Turkey was giving up the option of launching a new campaign, which Ankara has been warning that could happen for months.
Turkey has military bases in northern Syria and also supports some local militias fighting the Assad government.
Erdogan, who called Assad a "terrorist" in 2017, has in a policy shift floated the idea of meeting the Syrian leader ahead of Turkey's general election, expected in May.
Kalin said the two sides will hold a "series of meetings" in preparation for a possible presidential summit. He said a proposed meeting between the foreign ministers, expected to take place in Moscow, could take place in mid-February.
Offensive espionage activities
Meanwhile, according to a secret announcement received by Nordic Monitor, the aggressive, illegal espionage activities of Turkish agents on German soil targeting critics and opponents of the Erdogan government has not stopped.
The announcement reveals how Turkish spies operate in Germany under diplomatic cover and conduct illegal operations on foreign soil to collect information and pass it on to the Foreign Ministry in Ankara.
The intelligence agency specifically named Mustafa Yeşil, a leading critic of the Erdogan government, as a target of the spying activity. Yeşil, a dual citizen of Britain and Turkey, was the president of the Journalists and Writers Foundation (GYV) until the Erdogan government indicted him in 2016 and seized his assets. He had to flee Turkey to avoid imprisonment on trumped-up charges, following an unprecedented crackdown on free, independent and critical media in the country.
Yeşil was supposed to travel to Germany and later fly to the USA, according to the intelligence services. The fact that the Turkish government was able to obtain the private itinerary of a prominent critic suggests that its intelligence service has an extensive network of spies and informants in diaspora communities, especially in Europe.
Like Yeşil, many Turkish abroad from various opposition groups have been the target of surveillance, harassment and death threats by Turkish intelligence. Some were kidnapped by the Turkish spy agency MIT from foreign countries, in flagrant violation of international law and the laws of the host countries.
In recent years, German authorities have taken some measures to crack down on Turkey's illegal espionage activities, but the Erdogan government apparently remains undeterred.
In 2015 Germany's federal attorney general charged Muhammet Taha Gergerlioğlu, a close adviser to Erdogan and an MIT agent, with espionage because he and two of his associates gathered information about people of Turkish origin living in Germany who were critical of the Turkish government . Gergerlioğlu was later released as part of a political negotiation between Turkey and Germany.
In 2017, a German police investigative report linked Ankara to a gang in Germany accused of going after opponents of the Turkish government. According to the investigation, former parliamentarian and longtime friend of Erdogan, Metin Külünk, provided money to the gang, Osmanen Germania, to buy weapons, organize protests and target critics of the Erdogan government, German media reported.
Police investigations also showed that Osmanen Germania was in contact with the Cologne-based Union of International Democrats (UID, formerly UETD), an organization that acts as a foreign interest group on behalf of the Erdogan government abroad.
