This weekend Turkey managed to secure the release of 49 ISIS hostages, mostly Turkish diplomatic workers.Little is known about what kind of deal was made and Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan won't release details.Today Secretary of State John Kerry said that Ankara had not committed to the coalition against ISISbecause Turkey first needed to deal with that hostage situation.Joining me now to talk more about Turkey's policies toward the Islamic State is Soner Cagaptay, who is with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.Welcome to the program.Good to be here.First - what do you think? With Turkish hostages free, do you think we'll see a robust Turkish government role against ISIS now?We'll see increased further Turkish commitment to the front against ISIS,but I think Turkey will probably want to stay in the backdrop, as it has done for a while now,with the Kurds and supporting U.S. operations through logistics and intelligence operations,but not taking part in actual combat and airstrikes.OK. Let's talk about Turkey and the Kurds - and boy, is this complicated.There are Kurds in Turkey who for years fought against the Turkish government.There are Kurds in Iraq, some of whom took refuge from Saddam Hussein in Turkeyand whose autonomous part of Iraq now does a lot of business with Turkey.And as we're now reminded, there are Kurds in Syria who are seeking refuge in Turkey in droves.Are they three different relationships?To a large extent, all of these relationships - the way you've described them - have been transformedbecause of the (unintelligible) and specifically because of what's going on in Syria.
