ANKARA: As Turkey’s Operation Olive Branch entered its second week on Saturday, Ankara said military action against the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) militia and its political wing the Democratic Union Party (PYD) in Syria’s Afrin would continue until the threat is “neutralized.”
But despite Ankara’s claims that it has no wish to take territory from another country, and that control of Afrin will be handed over to the Syrian regime at the end of the operation, the offensive has inevitably complicated the already chaotic regional dynamics still further.
The official aim of Olive Branch is to establish stability along Turkey’s border with Syria and to remove not only the YPG/PYD — regarded by Ankara as an offshoot of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has waged an insurgency against the Turkish state for more than three decades — but also Daesh from the area.
Turkey’s military reported that 343 terrorists have so far surrendered, or been killed or captured, and that 333 targets have been destroyed. The operation’s scope now extends around 7.5 kilometers into Syria, with 11 villages captured.
Turkey has lost three soldiers so far, while one Syrian refugee was killed and 13 others wounded as two rockets launched from Afrin hit the Turkish border city of Kilis on Wednesday.
No casualties were reported after another rocket struck a marketplace in the border town of Reyhanli on Friday.
Overall, the operation has garnered the approval of the Turkish public and the support of the international community, with NATO recognizing Turkey’s “right to self-defense like all other countries.”
Washington, too, has released sympathetic statements recognizing “Turkey’s security concerns about the PKK, a US-designated foreign terrorist organization.”
Russia has supported the operation by allowing Turkey access to Afrin’s airspace, although it is not yet clear whether Russia’s will allow unlimited access or whether it will impose similar restrictions to those applied during Turkey’s cross-border Euphrates Shield Operation, which ran from August 2016 to March 2017.
Washington’s offer to Ankara this week to establish a 30 km safe zone in Syria, along with an increased number of meetings between US and Turkish officials, have been seen by many experts as a move by Western powers to re-establish ties with their longtime NATO ally. But the Turkish regime remains skeptical of US offers — a sign of the current distrust between the two countries.
However, the Syrian regime considers Turkey’s operation to be an invasion and an attack to Syrian sovereignty. In an interview with the BBC on Thursday, Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad said Syria will “act accordingly” to defend itself, explaining that could involve the use of its aerial defense systems.
Also on Thursday, the PYD/YPG-led administration of Afrin canton released a statement calling on Bashar Assad and his regime to protect the city.
Erol Bural, a former military officer and a terrorism expert at the 21st Century Turkey Institute, said the Turkish military, with the assistance of Free Syrian Army fighters, had encircled Afrin by opening multiple front lines.
“Barseya mountain, in the north of Azaz, is a primary target for Turkey because of its critical location overlooking Afrin’s urban center. The PKK/PYD used it as a major hideout for years, with fortifications against aerial and ground attacks,” Bural told Arab News.
Bural expects an effective siege on Afrin’s urban center once this mountain has been cleared of any terrorist threat, which will also prevent the YPG from targeting Turkey’s border towns with rockets and mortars.
“I don’t expect the Syrian regime to react positively to the YPG’s call, considering that Assad previously called the US-backed Kurdish fighters traitors, and considering the regime also wants the PYD presence cleaned out from this region,” he said.
At the end of the operation’s first week, the expansion of Olive Branch to Manbij, a city captured from Daesh in 2016 by the Kurdish militias, is still on the table. But the presence of American forces there complicates the situation.
“I think the main focus for now should be to wind up the military operation and hand complete control to local forces, while conducting diplomacy with regional actors,” Bural said.
According to Bural, the US is holding Manbij as its “trump card” against Turkey, in an attempt to weaken Russia’s influence on Ankara and to protect the “PKK statelet” America has established on the western flank of the River Euphrates.
“Now Turkey has two options: Either launch an operation on Manbij regardless of the US military presence, or conduct diplomatic maneuvers to convince the US to withdraw their soldiers,” he said.
According to Galip Dalay, research director at Al-Sharq Forum in Istanbul, “Operationally, the Afrin operation is progressing slowly but smoothly.”
Dalay thinks Operation Olive Branch is unlikely to progress at the same speed as Euphrates Shield, “at least in its early phases.”
“Nevertheless, Turkey hasn’t incurred many casualties,” he told Arab News.
On the diplomatic front, despite US concerns, the international community has so far been supportive of the operation, he said, adding that the objections it has faced thus far are “manageable.”
On the political front, though, Dalay said the goal of the operation “is still opaque.”
He explained: “It isn’t clear yet what will be acceptable to Turkey in Syria. If Turkey keeps the pressure on the YPG for too long, the YPG will invite the Assad regime to Afrin.
“Despite Turkey’s public discourse, Turkey doesn’t have much objection to such an outcome,” he continued. “Nevertheless, that would bode ill for Turkey, as well as the Syrian opposition’s image, as their actions will appear to play into the hands of the regime. This is one of the major dilemmas of this operation.”
One week on, Operation Olive Branch helps Turkey seize many initiatives
One week on, Operation Olive Branch helps Turkey seize many initiatives
Why the George V gold sovereign is still prized in the Middle East
- As gold prices break new records, a century-old British coin is drawing fresh attention across the Middle East
- Forged in empire, war and commerce, the gold sovereign’s legacy remains powerful — and increasingly valuable
LONDON: When the price of gold surpassed $5,000 an ounce for the first time on Jan. 26, collectors of old coins were likely weighing up the value of their collections — nowhere more so, perhaps, than in the Middle East and India, where one coin in particular has attained almost mythical status.
Between 1911 and 1932, tens of millions of the George V gold sovereign were minted, predominantly at the Royal Mint in London, which struck about 123 million of the coins, but also at “colonial branch mints” in Bombay, Ottawa, Pretoria, Melbourne, Perth and Sydney.
A genuine sovereign will weigh 0.2354 ounces, which by bullion weight alone made each one worth about £1,250 ($1,717) on Jan. 26. But experts say many other factors come into play when valuing a gold sovereign, including history, rarity, and whether or not it’s a fake.
For years, the George V gold sovereign has been prized throughout the Middle East, either as a collectible in its own right or adapted as a piece of jewellery, often mounted in a pendant frame and hung from a chain.
There are several reasons why the George V sovereign is so popular in the region, Chris Barker, research manager at the Royal Mint, the UK’s official maker of coins since about 1279, told Arab News.
“The British were flinging sovereigns around quite a lot in the region during the days of empire,” he said. “The sovereign was a circulating gold coin for a very long time and throughout the 19th century, it went all over the globe.
“Like the dollar is today, the pound was the predominant currency, and the gold sovereign was the grease in the wheels of international and colonial commerce in the 19th and early 20th centuries.”
With the start of the First World War, the sovereign ceased to be a circulating gold coin, but it continued to be produced, in London until 1917 and in most of the other branch mints until 1931.
“You’ve got a currency in the form of the sovereign that was in use for well over a century, to which people would flock in times of crisis. It’s stable, it’s trusted, it’s relied upon, and it’s got this international cache,” said Barker.
The popularity of the coin owes a great deal to the fact that during the reign of George V — from 1910 to 1936 — Britain was heavily involved in the region both politically and militarily.
“What you tended to see in the Middle East, the Levant and the Balkans was major inflation in local currencies during wartime, and people turned to gold sovereigns,” said Barker.
Battling the Ottoman Empire in Arabia, the Levant and Mesopotamia during the First World War, British troops, spies and diplomats frequently carried gold sovereigns that could be used as bribes or to buy support.
In 1916, when a large British Indian army was trapped at Kut Al-Amara, on the banks of the Tigris 160 km south of Baghdad, T.E. Lawrence (“of Arabia” fame), was dispatched from Cairo with several wooden chests packed with gold sovereigns.
The gold was intended as a ransom, to be paid in exchange for the relief of the siege and the liberation of the trapped troops.
The bribe, worth hundreds of millions of pounds in today’s terms, was rejected by the Ottoman commanders. By now starving and diseased, the heavily outnumbered garrison surrendered, and thousands died, either on the forced march to Aleppo or in captivity.
Gold sovereigns were also used to equip and pay the Arab tribes, which, at the request of the British, rose up against the Ottoman occupation of the Hejaz in 1916. Lawrence referred to the coins as “our horsemen of St. George.”
The coin continued to serve the British crown during the Second World War.
“Throughout the war, the British pumped large amounts of sovereigns into all of these theaters to help with the war effort,” said Barker.
“To take just one example, in 1943 alone, the British gave out 130,000 sovereigns to help pilgrims (from India) get to the holy city of Makkah for Hajj.”
India was seen as vital to the British war effort, and “it was about keeping things ticking over, keeping countries sweet.”
There’s a line on a document from the Foreign Office that describes the sovereign as being “an invaluable and at the same time economical means of transferring substantial sums in the Balkans and constituting the most efficient approach for post-occupation work throughout the Arab world and Persia.”
Other sovereigns will have found their way into Arabia thanks to a British policy of arming some of its troops and agents with the coins in the hope that they could bribe their way out of trouble.
Special forces soldiers and pilots operating in and above Iraq in 1991 and after the invasion of 2003 regularly carried gold coins as part of their “escape and evasion” kit.
During the 1991 Gulf War, the British Ministry of Defence bought 60,000 sovereigns at £60 each from the Bank of England for this purpose.
Legend has it that only 16,000 of the coins were returned to the MoD. To make up its losses, the ministry sold the returned coins in a special collectors’ presentation pack labeled “Behind enemy lines: Gulf War collection.”
Where the 44,000 missing coins went is anyone’s guess, although one way or another, many must have ended up in the hands of Iraqis.
In one documented case, Iraqi troops helped themselves to the gold sovereigns being carried by a British pilot and his navigator whose Tornado bomber was shot down on Jan. 17, 1991, during an air raid on Ar Rumaylah airfield in southeast Iraq.
Another incident emerged in 2000 with the publication of a memoir by Peter Ratcliffe, a former SAS soldier whose unit infiltrated Iraqi territory in 1991 in the hunt for Saddam Hussein’s Scud missiles.
Beating a hasty retreat after one action, he described how he had leapt on board one of the unit’s Land Rovers and, with bullets hitting the vehicle as it accelerated away into the desert night, dropped his M16 assault rifle with his “twenty gold sovereigns still hidden in the butt.”
He added: “I often wonder whether whoever found the weapon also discovered the secret hoard of gold.”
The 22-carat George V sovereign is iconic. The front — or “obverse” — side features the bare head of King George V. The reverse features an engraving of Britain’s patron saint, St. George, battling a dragon, by Italian artist Benedetto Pistrucci.
Born in Rome in 1783, Pistrucci came to Britain in 1815, shortly after the British defeated French Emperor Napoleon I at the Battle of Waterloo.
A gem engraver by trade, Pistrucci was chosen by the Royal Mint to engrave the image of St. George and the dragon to be used on the reverse side of a batch of new George III sovereigns in 1817.
His design would be used on the gold sovereigns struck to mark the reigns of all subsequent British monarchs, and his initials “BP” appear on all of them.
Tiny letters at the bottom of the depiction of St. George and the dragon reveal where each coin was made — “I” for India, “C” for Canada, “SA” for South Africa, and “S,” “M” and “P” for the three mints in Australia.
The absence of a letter means the coin was made at the Royal Mint in London.
Some of the coins are rarer than others. For some collectors, or “numismatists,” the ultimate goal is to collect a single coin from each of the seven mints. Others with deeper pockets aim to possess one coin from each mint for each year they were produced — a total of 52 sovereigns.
This could prove expensive. According to one specialist house, Allgold Coins, which specializes in coins from 1817 to the present day, the coin produced in London in 1917 — the last year the mint produced one, other than a one-off in 1927 — is one of the rarest and most sought after.
Exactly 1,014,740 of these sovereigns were minted, Allgold advises potential buyers, “which should not suggest it to be particularly rare, but it is certain that very few survive today.”
The reason is that after the First World War, “Britain was in considerable debt, mainly to the US, and it appears that these were paid in London-struck sovereigns which were then melted down.”
A genuine example of a 1917 coin could cost at least £15,000 and, as a result, “the 1917 is the most forged sovereign of any date or mint and even experienced collectors need to be very wary when purchasing.”
And, speaking of forgeries, there is another reason why George V gold sovereigns are so popular in the Middle East — and a reason to look a little more closely at that family heirloom.
After the Second World War, no more sovereigns were being produced, “but there was still demand and so people filled the vacuum,” said Barker.
“That led to many counterfeits being produced in the 1950s and 1960s in the Middle East and the Balkan areas.”
Forgeries can be incredibly hard to spot, not least because many were produced using exactly the same amount and weight of gold as the originals.
“Because there was such a premium on these coins, up to 60 percent above the gold price in the 1950s and 1960s, it became economically viable for counterfeiters to actually create 22-carat gold coins with the correct alloy.”
In 2004, Robert Matthew, a former Queen’s Assay Master at the Royal Mint, published an article in the magazine Numismatist revealing why in 1957 the British treasury decided to start minting sovereigns again — this time bearing the head of Queen Elizabeth II.
In November 1954, he wrote, a British assistant treasury solicitor “visited the Damascus moneychangers’ market. He found, openly quoted for sale, British-made, Swiss-made, Italian-made and Syrian-made gold sovereigns. Each had a different quoted price. The genuine British-made sovereigns being the most expensive and the Syrian-made fakes the least.”
There were, the British discovered, “two main centers used for making counterfeit sovereigns, Milan and Syria. The coins from Milan were mainly imported into Switzerland and then sent all around the world. Most were sent to Beirut for the Middle East market.”
Counterfeiting also took place in Beirut in the 1970s.
“The devastation of Beirut in the 1980s seems to have stopped production of these coins,” wrote Matthew.
“The large-scale manufacture of these counterfeits does not appear to have resumed after this time, however there are still a number of the older fakes in circulation contaminating the sovereign stock. This is especially true in the Middle East.”
