Turkey is looking to finalize its purchase of Chinese anti-missile systems within a matter of months, according to statements made Thursday by the head of Ankara’s under secretariat for defense industries:

“The immediate goal for us is in about six months to come to a reasonable level in our contract negotiations and to understand whether it’s possible to implement this program,” Murad Bayar, head of under secretariat for defense industries, told reporters in Istanbul.

The deal would require Turkey to integrate the Chinese assets into its existing defense infrastructure, the result being – per Western defense officials – the equivalent of inserting a “virus” into NATO’s command and control system.

The controversy over the purchase comes as some nations are already said to be decreasing their intelligence cooperation with Ankara, after it was reported that the government of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan had deliberately burned ten Iranians working with Israel’s Mossad to uncover Iran’s nuclear program.

Last week Washington Institute fellow Soner Cagaptay described how Ankara is more broadly pivoting away and “has started to seek other allies, including Beijing.” Nonetheless Turkey today asked NATO to extend the deployment of Patriot missiles along its border with Syria for another year. NATO is likely to accede to the request to maintain the batteries, which were deployed to contain spillover from the crisis in Syria.

Egyptian outlet Al-Ahram today, echoing the consensus of analysts stretching back years, noted that Ankara has been partly responsible for the crisis in Syria:

Syria is not “dying”, as Gul said, but is rather being killed off by an unholy coalition of outside governments and the armed groups that they have been sponsoring. The Turkish government may be changing its tune now, but it still has to be held responsible for the consequences of the decision it took to confront the Syrian government even if it was not aware at the start what those consequences would be.

Turkey had been one of the Bashar al-Assad regime’s most significant international backers during the 2000s and then – after falling out with the regime – backing the relatively more extremist elements of the Syrian opposition.

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