The little-known group at the center of the Turkey-Russia crisis

Henri Barkey: Information about the Turkmen minority in Syria is very murky, and nobody really knows what their numbers are. The Turks have been using them as another boot fighting Assad. In the context of today's incident, the problem is that it's dicey for Turkey if the Turkmen killed the Russian pilots, as media reports are suggesting, because according to international law you're not supposed to fire at parachuters. I think the Russians will be much angrier at the killing of the pilots than the downing of plane. It will be a very emotional issue. It will be interesting to see how the Russians deal with it, whether Putin makes a big deal over the funerals, whether he'll play it up domestically. He may decide not to make a big fuss.

Henri Barkey: The Turks have always used the Turkmen not just in Syria but also in Iraq. After the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Turks played the Turkmen card and used them as leverage against the Kurds in Iraq. It backfired on them in two ways: 1) They discovered that the Turkmen were not really loyal to Turkey and were more loyal to their Shia identity; in the first elections after the 2003 invasion, the Turkmen party received an embarrassingly low number of votes. And 2) Turkmen militias were involved in plot to kill the governor of Kirkuk [in Iraq]. So it has always backfired for them.

If the Turks play this card again now, it will be slightly different because the Turkmen in Syria are Sunni, not Shia, so it's a somewhat different situation. But the point is that when you have groups like that, they don't necessarily obey your rules, and they create problems for you down the road.

The Turks have always used the Turkmen, especially against the Kurds. They talk about Turkmen rights as a way of denigrating Kurdish rights, even though the Kurds are more numerous. In fact, yesterday I believe the Turks filed a complaint with the UN Security Council saying that the Russians were committing atrocities and genocide against the Turkmen in these exact areas. So there was already tension between Turkey and Russia even before this.

Henri Barkey: Until recently, the Turks and the Russians had succeeded in compartmentalizing their differences over Syria. Because they're on opposite sides: Since the beginning of the Syrian civil war, the Turks have tried to do everything they could to overthrow Assad, and Russia has done everything they could to keep Assad in power. But it didn't affect the relationship between [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan and Putin until recently, with the major Russia intervention in Syria. Now we're seeing increasing escalations. We're seeing now a major change in Turkish-Russian relations.

This also undermines the efforts of [French President François] Hollande, who is coming to talk to Obama about creating a grand coalition to counter ISIS that would include Russia. Hollande was supposed to go to Moscow after. This undermines that. And of course, there's also the issue that a NATO member country shot down a Russian warplane, and all the potential ramifications that could have. We'll have to see.