This remark by the Turkish prime minister Erdogan is either dangerously stupid or a declaration of war against all Shia:
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, a strong critic of Bashar al-Assad's regime in Syria, drew a parallel between the bloody campaign against civilians by the Syrian government and the Battle of Karbala during a speech on Friday.
“What happened in Karbala 1,332 years ago is what is happening in Syria today,” Erdoğan said at an international conference titled “Arab Spring and Peace in the Middle East: Muslim and Christian Perspectives.”
On one side of the highly uneven battle were a small group of supporters and relatives of Muhammad's grandson Husain ibn Ali, and on the other was a large military detachment from the forces of Yazid I, the Umayyad caliph, whom Husain had refused to recognise as caliph. Husain and all his supporters were killed, including Husain's six months old infant son, and the women and children were taken as prisoners.
"Shia" is the short form of the historic phrase Shīʻatu ʻAlī (شيعة علي), meaning "followers", "faction", or "party" of Muhammad's son-in-law Ali, whom the Shia believe to be Muhammad's successor.
On first sight Erdogan's remark will be taken as a threat of another Karbala in the sense that the followers of Ali, the Shia and by extension the Alawites in Syria, will get killed by the caliph and his followers.
This is a very sectarian and terribly dangerous thing do say.
In March 2011 Erdogan also mentioned the Battle of Karbala in a different context but, after that led to a controversy, he suggested that he only used it do warn against all Muslim strive:
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said his recent call to prevent a repetition of a “Karbala” tragedy was meant to underline his concerns about bloodshed in Libya, underlining that the remarks had nothing to do with Sunni-Shiite divide as some interpreted his words to mean.
“I drew similar lines during my previous parliamentary group speech between Karbala and the recent violence in Libya.
But the issue in Erdogan's controversial Karbala remark back then was not Libya. When he then made the public remark it was on the topic of Bahrain where a Sunni dictatorship was, with little protest from Turkey, suppressing a Shia majority. He only later set that remark into the context of Libya and general strife between Muslims.
Erdogan is not stupid and he clearly knows that the use of Karbala as a warning against
general strife under Muslim can be easily misunderstood. He certainly knows that it has a controversial and sectarian undertone. Despite that he keeps using it.
It thereby seems that Erdogan is using Karbala as a dog whistle politics item, as a codeword to suggest to his partisan and sectarian Sunni followers something very specific, killing the followers of Ali, while keeping a plausible deniability in more general terms.
To do so on a Friday, the Muslim day of a congregational prayer, is reinforcing the sectarian impact and makes it thereby more dangerous. This is certainly something someone who is presumably wishing for peace should and would NOT do.
On Wednesday evening an explosion occurred at the site of a Turkish military depot and killed 21 soldiers. In the official version a group of soldiers was counting a stock of handgrenades which somehow blew off. The story is fishy. Handgrenades in storage do not have their fuse inserted. When the fuse is inserted there is still a security ring to pull. When that ring is pulled there are still several seconds to throw the grenade away. The explosion happened in darkness at 9pm. Was this a squad of soldiers really just counting a stock of handgrenades at 9pm? Were they preparing them for transfer to the insurgents in Syria? What did really happen here?