Turkey’s downing of a Russian jet over the Syrian border has thrust into the spotlight a Sunni Muslim minority group living in the borderlands between Syria and %Turkey.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the incident was “fully in lines with Turkey’s rules of engagement”.
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He separately also emphasised that Turkey exercised a right to defend “our brothers and sisters – Turkmen,” a gesture to the Sunni Muslim group in that area that numbers around 200,000 people, or about 1 per cent of Syria’s population. (Syrian Turkmen leaders, though, insist that the community’s population is far larger – perhaps as much as 3.5 million – with many members having been “Arabised” over the past century.)
The Turkish government has repeatedly expressed concern about the well-being of the Syrian Turkmen (also known as Turkomans), whom they consider ethnic kin.
The Turkmen trace their identity to the invasions of the Middle East by Turkic groups from Central Asia, beginning around the 10th century.
Their villages in Syria, according to one account, were established by the Ottoman empire in a bid to counter the influence of Arab tribesmen.