Davutoglu: Failure to support democracy led to ISIL

ISTANBUL

The rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant is caused by the world's failure to support democracy in the Middle East, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu has said.

Davutoglu told the World Economic Forum in Istanbul on Monday: "ISIL now exists because we did not properly support the democratic transition processes in 2012, not because ISIL is so strong or the Syrian and Iraqi people are aligned to ISIL-like radical acts."

Referring to the 2011 Arab Spring, Davutoglu said democracy guaranteed sustainable stability in a country, linked to the ability of government to integrate with its people.

"We welcomed the Arab Spring when it first began to flourish as we thought the EU and the U.S. would support and finance the Middle East just as they did for the wind of democracy in the Balkans," he said.

Tunisia's uprising, which resulted in the ousting of dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, triggered a series of similar uprisings across the region. These uprisings ultimately led to the overthrow of longstanding strongmen in Egypt, Libya and Yemen, and to civil war in Syria.

Davutoglu said countries like Poland and Romania now enjoy democracy due to finance from the EU but, he added, "no state came up to finance democracy in the Middle East."

He claimed the reason Syria faces a terrorist threat instead of democracy is because the world abandoned Syria.

"We left the people of Syria alone," Davutoglu said. "That's why the Christian, Muslim, Sunni, Nusayri, Kurdish, Arab and Turkmen-origin Syrian youth were replaced by unpredictable outsiders, fluently English-speaking foreign fighters."

Davutoglu also condemned attempts to link ISIL to Islam. "Islamic communities that have a deep-rooted culture of politics have the capacity, like any other nation and religion, to both keep democracy alive and improve it,” he added. “Neither Islam nor the world of Islam can be correlated with entities like ISIL."