WarSclerotic

January 22, 2018 10:10 am

Turkey Expects Swift Campaign Against U.S.-Backed Kurds in Syria

Turkish soldiers stand on tanks in a village on the Turkish-Syrian border in Gaziantep province, Turkey / Reuters

By Mert Ozkan

HASSA, Turkey (Reuters) – Turkey shelled targets in northwest Syria on Monday and said it would swiftly crush the U.S.-backed Kurdish YPG fighters who control the Afrin region in an air and ground offensive that President Tayyip Erdogan said Russia had agreed to.

Amid growing international concern over the three-day-old military operation, President Tayyip Erdogan said there would be “no stepping back” from the campaign, which has opened up a new front in Syria’s complex civil war.

Turkish forces and their Syrian rebel allies began their push to clear YPG fighters from the northwestern enclave on Saturday, despite concern from the United States, which urged both sides on Monday to show restraint.

France called for an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council on Monday to discuss the fighting in Afrin and other parts of Syria, and Britain said it would look for ways to prevent any further escalation.

But Erdogan said Turkey was determined to press ahead. “There’s no stepping back from Afrin,” he said in a speech in Ankara. “We discussed this with our Russian friends, we have an agreement with them, and we also discussed it with other coalition forces and the United States.”

Moscow, a military ally of President Bashar al-Assad that operates a major air base in Syria, has not confirmed giving a green light to the campaign – which Syria has strongly objected to – but did not appear to be acting to prevent it.

The YPG’s Afrin spokesman, Birusk Hasaka, said there were clashes between Kurdish and Turkish-backed forces on the third day of the operation, and that Turkish shelling had hit civilian areas in Afrin’s northeast.

The U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), dominated by YPG fighters, said they might send reinforcements to Afrin, and called for international efforts to halt the attack.

U.S.-TURKEY TENSION

Ankara considers the YPG a terrorist group tied to Kurdish insurgents in Turkey, and has been infuriated by U.S. support for the YPG in the battle against Islamic State in Syria — one of the issues that have brought relations between the United States and its Muslim NATO ally close to breaking point.

Erdogan has also pledged to drive the SDF from the town of Manbij to the east, part of a much larger area of northern Syria controlled by the SDF, which led the U.S.-backed campaign to defeat Islamic State in its Syrian strongholds last year.

That raises the prospect of protracted conflict between Turkey and its allied Free Syrian Army factions against the U.S.-backed SDF.

Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Mehmet Simsek sought to play down the long-term risks.

“Our investors should be at ease, the impact will be limited, the operation will be brief and it will reduce the terror risk to Turkey in the period ahead,” Simsek, who oversees economic affairs, said in Ankara.

A senior Turkish official declined to give a timeframe but said the operation would “move fast”, adding that Turkey believed there was some local support for its action in both Afrin and Manbij.

YPG official Nouri Mahmoud said Turkish-backed forces had not taken any territory in Afrin. “Our forces have to this point repelled them and forced them to retreat,” he told Reuters.

A Turkish official said Turkish troops and Free Syrian Army fighters had begun to advance on Afrin’s eastern flank, taking control of Barshah hill, northwest of the town of Azaz.

TURKISH SHELLING

A Reuters cameraman near Hassa, across the border from Afrin, saw Turkish shelling on Monday morning. Dogan news agency said Turkish howitzers opened fire at 1 a.m. (2200 GMT), and that YPG targets were also being hit by Turkish warplanes and multiple rocket launchers.

Turkey sees the YPG presence on its southern border as a domestic security threat. Defeating it in Afrin would reduce Kurdish-controlled territory on its frontier and link up two regions controlled by insurgents opposed to Assad – Idlib province and an area where Turkey fought for seven months in 2016-17 to drive back Islamic State and the YPG.

The Turkish-backed FSA factions, which have come together under the banner of a newly branded “National Army”, also want to see an end to YPG rule in Afrin.

They accuse the YPG of displacing 150,000 Arab residents of towns including Tel Rifaat and Menigh to the east of Afrin, captured in 2016.

“This is a historic moment in our revolution,” Mohammad al-Hamadeen, a senior officer in the FSA forces, told fighters in Azaz on Sunday as they prepared to join the ground offensive.

“God willing, very soon we will return to our region that we were driven from two years ago.”

Throughout most of the multi-sided seven-year-old civil war in Syria, Turkey and the United States jointly backed Arab fighters seeking to overthrow Assad. Since 2014, Washington has angered Turkey by growing closer to the Kurdish militia, which it supported with air strikes, arms, training and special forces advisers on the ground to oppose Islamic State.

(Additional reporting by Daren Butler in Istanbul, Orhan Coskun, Tuvan Gumrukcu and Ece Toksabay in Ankara; Tom Perry, Ellen Francis and Lisa Barrington in Beirut; Writing by Dominic Evans; Editing by David Dolan, Gareth Jones, Peter Graff andEditing by Kevin Liffey)

Do we let it happen again , or is it already happen again ?

Published time: 20 Jan, 2018 15:51

https://www.rt.com/news/416508-moscow-restraint-turkey-afrin/

January 12, 2018 / 1:50 AM / 3 days ago

January 13, 2018

Teenage girl’s face slashed in Paris suburb, anti-Semitism suspected

AP/Vadim Ghirda/Illustrative)

An unknown assailant slashed the face of a 15-year-old girl wearing a Jewish school uniform in Sarcelles.

By: Adina Katz, World Israel News

In what French lawmaker Francois Pupponi called “a heinous anti-Semitic attack,” an unknown assailant slashed the face of a 15-year-old Jewish girl in the northern Paris suburb of Sarcelles.

As reported by the Jewish Telegraphic Service (JTA), the attack occurred as the victim was walking home from school on Wednesday, wearing the uniform of her private Jewish school. Her mother told French daily Le Parisien that the girl arrived home bleeding and “shocked.”

The victim said she did not see her attacker’s face, explaining that he ran away immediately after the assault.

“I have no doubt the perpetrators of this attack had anti-Semitic motives,” Pupponi wrote in a statement Friday, JTA reported.

“Faced with these acts, we need to abandon pretense and naiveté,” he added. “In Sarcelles, everybody knows who is a practicing Jew according to the way they dress. Delinquents know it too. When someone slashes a young girl’s face with a utility knife, when she is wearing clothes favored by many women from the Jewish community, then there is no room for doubt.”

The day before the assault on the girl, a kosher grocery market in Creteil, a Paris suburb, was vandalized and torched. The latest in a string of attacks against Jews in France, it included anti-Semitic graffiti and was carried out exactly three years after a deadly Islamic terror attack at the Hyper Cacher market in the French capital, which left four Jews dead.

Albert Elharrar, president of the Creteil Jewish community, said Jewish groups believe the shops were deliberately targeted at the time of commemorations for the 2015 attacks.

“There’s a link between the graffiti and the fire,” he told AFP. “It’s clear that they came for no other reason but to attack a kosher shop on the day of the commemorations.”

French Jews, who constitute the largest Jewish community outside of Israel and the United States, continue to leave France, mainly for Israel. Since 2006, 40,000 French Jews have left the Republic.

By Pamela Geller – on January 14, 2018

https://pamelageller.com/2018/01/police-hunt-offensive.html/

Freedom of Speech in the Age of Jihad

The UK is racing to ruin so fast it’s breathtaking. They banned me for opposing jihad terror, and now they seem intent on shutting down every voice who dares say a critical word about Islam. Sharia in the UK: it’s not rhetoric, it’s reality. Terrorism works. The Muslim rape gangs, operating in accord with Islamic texts and teachings about kaffir women, have won: they avoided prosecution for years because authorities feared to be “racist,” and now the police are tracking down people who point out that the perps are all Muslim.

As jihad roils the UK and the streets are awash in blood, the British government springs into action against those who might insult jihadis and sharia savages.

Astonishing. It’s why the UK is doomed, finished.

“Police Hunt Down Facebook Users Who Made ‘Offensive’ Comments About Muslim Grooming Gangs Online,” by Virginia Hale, Breitbart, January 13, 2018:

Northumbria Police have warned that “offensive” comments on the Internet will not be tolerated, tracking down users who made “potentially criminal” posts on social media about grooming gangs.

The force launched an investigation into comments left on its Facebook page in response to articles about the Operation Shelter scandal, in which young white British girls in were groomed, sexually abused and trafficked by mostly Muslim men of South Asian descent in Newcastle.

Officers made a review of every comment on the page after a member of the public complained that a number of posts referred to the race and religion of the 18 people convicted following the operation.

ChronicleLive reports that police recorded two cases of racially aggravated public order offences among responses to the news articles on Facebook, and have now tracked down six people responsible for posts “deemed to be offensive and potentially criminal”.

A spokesman from Northumbria Police said: “As a result of a complaint, we can confirm we looked into a number of comments posted on the force’s Facebook page.

“Following an investigation, which has now concluded, we spoke to two males as voluntary attenders and visited a further four people in their homes, and provided them with words of advice.

“All expressed their remorse and stated that the intention of their comments was not to cause concern or to be offensive and have acknowledged the words of advice provided.”

The spokesman added: “We would also like to take this opportunity to remind people using social media that they should do so responsibly and ensure they do not post anything which could be considered offensive.”…

H/T http://barenakedislam.com/