{"id":54205,"date":"2015-02-23T12:17:28","date_gmt":"2015-02-23T12:17:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=54205"},"modified":"2015-05-05T21:26:03","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T20:26:03","slug":"shah-suleyman-the-truly-byzantine-origins-of-turkeys-operation-to-rescue-a-long-dead-body-from-the-islamic-caliphate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/02\/shah-suleyman-the-truly-byzantine-origins-of-turkeys-operation-to-rescue-a-long-dead-body-from-the-islamic-caliphate\/","title":{"rendered":"Shah Suleyman: The Truly Byzantine Origins of Turkey’s Operation to Rescue a Long-Dead Body from the ‘Islamic Caliphate’"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Robert<\/a>

Robert Fisk<\/p><\/div>\n

22 Feb 2015 – <\/em>The 13th-century fall of an obscure king into the river Euphrates, the pride of the Ottoman empire and modern Turkey and a humiliating French retreat after the 1914-18 war provide the truly Byzantine origins of Turkey\u2019s little military operation<\/a> to remove a long-dead body from the \u201cIslamic Caliphate\u201d this weekend. All that \u2013 and the fear that Isis forces might destroy a shrine in civil-war Syria that has been jealously guarded by Turkey since 1921.<\/p>\n

To begin this wondrous tale at the start. Shah Suleyman was the king who drowned in the Euphrates River in 1236. He was the father of Ertugrul, who lived by the Sea of Marmara and whose own son, Osman, founded the Ottoman empire. Thus Suleyman\u2019s tomb, at a nondescript village called Jaber-Kalesi, became a foundation stone in the history of the empire which lasted for 700 years and ended after Ottoman Turkey made the fatal mistake of supporting Germany in the First World War.<\/p>\n

Forward now to the post-war world of League of Nations mandates in which France was awarded Lebanon, Syria and a hunk of Turkey called Cilicia. But Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of the \u201cmodern\u201d Turkish state, drove the French out of Cilicia in a guerrilla campaign not unlike that waged by Isis in Syria. And Ataturk, while agreeing to let France rule Syria and Lebanon under the 1921 Treaty of Ankara, insisted on maintaining the Turkish flag over Jaber-Kalesi \u2013 in French-controlled Syria. Hence the Turks held on to the very last bit of Ottoman land in the Arab world \u2013 no more than two football pitches in size.<\/p>\n

More than 90 years later, along comes Isis, whose Wahhabi principles enjoin it to destroy the shrines of worldly rulers. Just a year ago, it gave the Turkish army three days to clear out of Suleyman\u2019s old tomb before it destroyed it. The Turks stayed put. Why?<\/p>\n

Well, this was around the time Syrian oil engineers reported the appearance of Turkish mechanics in the Isis-controlled oilfields. A quid pro quo, perhaps? Give us your oil experts and you can keep your old king? Or did something go wrong? Well Ataturk\u2019s army has now driven into \u201cIsis-stan\u201d, dug up the old boy\u2019s remains for reburial and trashed the shrine to prevent the puritans of the \u201cIslamic Caliphate\u201d doing the same.<\/p>\n

A deal, of course. In return for more Turkish oil engineers?<\/p>\n

__________________________<\/p>\n

Robert Fisk, based in Beirut, is a multiple award-winning journalist on the Middle East and a <\/em>correspondent for <\/em>The Independent, a UK newspaper.\u00a0 He is the author of many books on the region, including <\/em>The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 independent.co.uk<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To begin this wondrous tale at the start. Shah Suleyman was the king who drowned in the Euphrates River in 1236. He was the father of Ertugrul, who lived by the Sea of Marmara and whose own son, Osman, founded the Ottoman empire, which lasted for 700 years and ended after Ottoman Turkey made the fatal mistake of supporting Germany in the First World War.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[148],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-54205","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54205","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54205"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54205\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}