Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu has repeated calls for Western governments to intervene in Syria to prevent a looming humanitarian "disaster", invoking the tragedies of Bosnian massacres in the 1990s to warn of the price of inaction.
Davutoglu knows there is little taste in Western capitals for another military adventure in the Middle East, but Turkey's frustration is understandable. There are more than 100,000 Syrian refugees on Turkish territory, with hundreds streaming across the porous border every week. Turkey's support for the Syrian opposition and the rebel Free Syrian Army have brought it to the brink of war with Syria's Bashar al-Assad, and the two countries have been exchanging artillery fire over the past 10 days.
Turkey is being dragged ever deeper into the Syrian crisis, but without the support of its NATO partners it has good reasons to think twice about a unilateral intervention against Assad's regime.
Read more on why Turkey is reluctant to send its troops over the border, how the war could still be ignited, and what Turkey's military action would look like.
Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images.
See also:
Turkish-Syrian Relations: Overview
Options for Intervention in Syria
Why Iran Supports the Syrian Regime
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