Turkey beats war drums as Kurds mobilize at Syria border

Muryat Yetkin @ Hurriyet Daily News today: "The Highly Inflammable Turkish-Syrian Border"

Summary paragraphs:

Together with the troop buildup on the Turkish side, the tone of statements from NATO has begun to change as well. NATO revealed on Tuesday that it is ready to support Turkey in the event that that becomes necessary. This was NATO’s first such statement since the Syrian crisis started.

If no accident or provocation takes place first, there are two main thresholds in sight regarding the tension along the Turkish-Syrian border. The first is Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit to Turkey, planned for next week. Erdoğan believes that without Putin’s support, al-Assad could not remain in power for one more day. The second one is the U.S. presidential elections early next month, in which Barack Obama will try to keep his position. Erdoğan believes that the U.S.’s position regarding Syria will change after the election, becoming tougher against al-Assad. But everything could change at any moment under the current circumstances.

Nothing about Kurds that I can see; he does report the use of the word Alawite  in Parliament as if it was a slur, though..

Coincidentally, a former armbassador of ours, who knows his way around business in Istanbul, has a piece in Hurriyet, too He's talking about how things are quite different as of late August than they were a few years ago between Turkey and the Kurdish Region of Iraq. Along the lines of the government not wanting to disturb Turkish business being done there with ExxonMobil, Chevron and Total  (them who were left out of the competition for the rest of Iraq's oil) and all related business, including possible pipelines.