Aron Lund writes: While Turkey is likely to lend assistance to the U.S.-led campaign, the parliamentary vote won’t trigger any military action by itself. Much of the reporting and commentary on the vote has overlooked that this is in fact the third year in a row that Turkey’s parliament has issued an authorization for military force.

The first of such resolutions was passed in October 2012, after several exchanges of fire across the Syrian-Turkish border. The one-year authorization took aim at the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, serving as a shot across the bow by lowering Turkey’s threshold for intervention.

However, no intervention ever came. The parliament therefore extended its one-year deadline in October 2013. Again, no intervention took place during the year, and the resolution is set to expire today. That’s why the Turkish parliament has issued a resolution now—not because of the fighting in Kobane or the U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State, although it may of course be used to join these battles. [Continue reading…]

In this useful analysis, Lund refers to the PKK as being “even now involved in violence against the [Turkish] army,” yet the evidence of this which he cites is a report on “a clash [which] erupted after a group of Turkish soldiers, deployed on a hill with four military vehicles, opened fire on a group of HPG [PKK] guerrillas.”

It looks like Lund should have written that the Turkish army is even now involved in violence against the PKK.