Abdullah Bozkurt/Stockholm
Turkey named its secret military war plans for the eastern Mediterranean after a key Ottoman naval battle victory against a Christian alliance fleet that solidified Turks’ domination of the Mediterranean.
According to a PowerPoint presentation prepared by the General Staff for an internal planning review, Turkey drew up a plan for a secret military operation named “TSK CERBE Harekât Planlama Direktifi” (TSK [Turkish Armed Forces] Cerbe Operation Planning Directive). The plan was dated January 7, 2014, which means it was likely updated amid increased tension between Turkey and the Greece/Cyprus bloc in the eastern Mediterranean.
Cerbe, Djerba in English, is the name of a southern Tunisian island near the border with Libya. It was where the Battle of Djerba was fought in May 1560 between Ottoman forces and Christian Alliance fleet, composed chiefly of Spanish, Papal, Genoese, Maltese and Neapolitan forces. Turks won the battle, which gave them domination of the Mediterranean Sea.
The name of Turkey’s comprehensive war game plan in the east Med is befitting of the of narrative promoted by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his associates, who have often framed Turkey’s problems with its Western allies as part of a renewed conflict between Christian Europe and Muslim Turkey.
A PowerPoint slide from the secret document lists Turkey’s military offensive plans against Greece and Armenia and in the eastern Mediterranean with corresponding dates indicating when they were drawn up:
In a parliament speech on June 9, 2021, Erdoğan branded NATO allies as anti-Muslim and accused Europe of sowing hatred and grudges against Turks. He said he would raise the issues at a NATO leaders summit in Brussels on June 13.
“Turkey will not refrain from raising its voice against anti-Islamic and anti-Turkish attacks in every platform and around the world,” Erdoğan said, adding, “We are following together the bitter consequences of the seeds of hatred and grudges sown around the world by those [Western powers and their allies] who resorted to every guise and tool to drag Turkey into political and social chaos.”
He underlined that Turkey would never take a step back, in apparent reference to his government’s position on the eastern Mediterranean, an issue that will certainly be brought to the agenda during the NATO leaders summit.
In June 2018 Erdogan claimed Turkey’s neighborhood faces “a post-modern Christian Crusade” while his mentor, then-Parliament Speaker İsmail Kahraman, said the same month that there was a Christian Crusaders’ wall before Turkey and vowed Turkey would overcome this barrier. All sorts of domestic problems were blamed on the West by Turkish leaders. When the Turkish lira plunged due to mismanagement and economic problems, Erdoğan’s chief economic advisor, Yiğit Bulut, came out and said in May 2018 that the decline in the value of the Turkish lira was part of a Christian crusade against Turkey.
The existence of Turkey’s war game plan for the east Med was discovered in a court case file in the Turkish capital, with investigating prosecutor Serdar Coşkun, a loyalist of the Turkish president, apparently forgetting to remove the classified documents before submitting them to the court. They were collected from General Staff headquarters during an investigation into a failed coup on July 15, 2016. The documents including the invasion plan for Greece and Armenia were found to have been exchanged among top commanders at the General Staff by means of a secure internal email communications system. Coşkun ordered the military to forward copies of all email messages for the previous two months including the encrypted ones, on August 1, 2016.
Ten days later, on August 11, 2016, the prosecutor assigned his trusted helper, a police officer named Yüksel Var, to collect emails from the General Staff’s internal servers and report back to him. A commission set up by military technicians under Var completed its work on February 14, 2017. In the end, the indictment filed by prosecutors Necip Cem İşçimen, Kemal Aksakal and İstiklal Akkaya in March 2017 with the Ankara 17th High Criminal Court included all the emails collected from the General Staff computers. No communication was found in the emails indicating any hint of the coup attempt, which many believe was a false flag operation orchestrated by Erdoğan and his intelligence and military chiefs to set up the opposition for persecution and a mass purge.
The Turkish prosecutor ordered that all copies of the emails be sent to his office:
Read more: https://nordicmonitor.com/2021/06/turkey-named-its-secret-war-plans-for-the-east-med-after-16th-century-ottomans-victory-against-christian-alliance/