70% of the population of Turkey are Sunni
ORAC I think you've got it wrong - they're not "competing Sunni & Shia power bases" - the article says that Turkey is ANOTHER Sunni power
"Recep Tayyip Erdoğan seems determined to reinvent the secular Muslim country he inherited as a sort of Sunni Iranian ‘Mini-Me’: draconian, Islamist and with vaunting regional ambitions. For Western powers and their allies, the urgent question is how to deal with the mutation of a Nato ally into a ‘neo-Ottoman’ threat."
Turkey is just moving to be a big local player -102 years after they were gutted after WW1