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Turkey’s Islamic Supremacist Foreign Policy

April 29, 2016

Turkey’s Islamic Supremacist Foreign Policy, Gatestone Institute, Uzay Bulut, April 29, 2016

♦ “We have never been involved in an attack against Turkey … we were never involved in such an action… Davutoglu wants to pave the way for an offensive on Syria and Rojava and cover up Turkey’s relations with the ISIS which is known to the whole world by now.” — YPG (Kurdish) General Command.

♦ “Thousands of settlers from Anatolia were shipped in by the Turkish government to occupy former Greek villages and to change Cypriot demography — in the same manner the occupying Ottoman Empire once did in the 16th century.” — Victor Davis Hanson, historian.

♦ Turkey, for more than 40 years, has been illegally occupying the northern part of the Republic of Cyprus, historically a Greek and Christian nation, which it invaded with a bloody military campaign in 1974.

♦ What Turkey would call a crime if committed by a non-Turkish or a non-Sunni state, Turkey sees as legitimate if Turkey itself commits it.

Between March 29 and April 2, 2016, Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, paid a visit to Washington D.C. to participate in the 4th Nuclear Security Summit hosted by U.S. President Barack Obama.

In an interview with CNN broadcast March 31, Erdogan said, “We will not allow an act such as giving northern Syria to a terrorist organization… We will never forgive such a wrong. We are determined about that.”

Asked which terror organization he was referring to, Erdogan said: “The YPG [Kurdish People’s Protection Units], the PYD [Democratic Union Party] … and if Daesh [ISIS] has an intention of that sort then it would also never be allowed.”

Erdogan was thereby once again attempting to equate Islamic State (ISIS), which has tortured, raped, sold or slaughtered so many innocent people in Syria and Iraq, with the Kurdish PYD, and its YPG militia, whose members have been fighting with their lives to defeat genocidal jihadist groups such as al-Nusra and ISIS.

The question is not why Erdogan or his government have such an intense hatred for Kurds. Turkey’s genocidal policies against the Kurds are not a secret. Turkey’s most recent deadly attacks are ongoing in Kurdish districts even now. The more important question is why Erdogan thinks that Turkey is the one to decide to whom the predominantly Kurdish north of Syria will belong — or who will not rule that part of Syria.

On February 17, Turkey’s capital, Ankara, was shaken by a car bomb that killed 28 people and wounded 61 others.

Turkey’s Prime Minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, immediately announced that the perpetrator was a Syrian national with links to the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG).

“A direct link between the attack and the YPG has been established,” Davutoglu said. “The YPG attack was carried out with logistical support from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) inside Turkey. Just as al-Qaeda or Daesh do not have seats at the table, the YPG, which is a terrorist organization, cannot have one.” He then once again refused to permit Kurdish YPG participation in U.N.-brokered Syria peace talks in Geneva.

Saleh Muslim, the head of Syria’s Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), replied via Agence France-Presse: “We deny any involvement in this attack. These accusations are clearly related to Turkish attempts to intervene in Syria.”

The General Command of the YPG also denied any involvement in the attack:

“Under challenging conditions, we are protecting our people from barbaric gangs such as ISIS and Al-Nusra. Countless states and media outlets have repeatedly reported about the support Turkey has been providing to these terrorist groups. Apart from the terrorist groups attacking us, we as YPG have engaged in no military activity against the neighboring states or other forces.

“We would like to repeat our message to the people of Turkey and the world: We have no links to this incident… We have never been involved in an attack against Turkey. The Turkish state cannot possibly prove our engagement in any kind of attack on their side because we were never involved in such an action. Turkish Prime Minister Davutoglu’s remarks ‘Ankara attack was conducted by YPG’ is a lie and far away from the truth. With this statement, Davutoglu wants to pave the way for an offensive on Syria and Rojava and cover up Turkey’s relations with the ISIS which is known to the whole world by now.”

The Middle East is going through mass murders, kidnappings, rapes, the sexual slavery of women and other crimes. And Turkey’s aggressive and supremacist foreign policy, which does not respect the sovereignty of its neighbors, has played a large role in this situation.

Syria and Iraq, Turkey’s southern neighbors, are now the breeding ground of genocidal jihadist groups, foremost the Islamic State (ISIS). Many reporters, experts and eyewitnesses have revealed that Turkey has contributed to the rise of jihadist terrorists in the region — by letting ISIS members get in and out of Turkey and even by providing funds, logistics, and arms for ISIS.

Inside its own boundaries, Turkey has been engaged in an all-out war against its own Kurdish citizens since last August. Turkey has been murdering them indiscriminately and destroying their homes and neighborhoods.

Turkey’s hatred of Kurds is so intense that it also targets Kurdish defense forces in Syria.

On February 13, Davutoglu confirmed shelling the Kurdish YPG group in Syria, after the YPG advanced on the rebel-held town of Azaz in Syria. “We will retaliate against every step [by the YPG],” Davutoglu said. “The YPG will immediately withdraw from Azaz and the surrounding area and will not go close to it again.”

The rebels in Azaz and elsewhere in Syria are mostly Islamist jihadists. According to the scholar Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi, Azaz was mostly controlled in early 2015 by the group Liwa Asifat al-Shamal (“Northern Storm Brigade”), affiliated with the Islamic Front. Syria’s al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra (“Al-Nusra Front”) also had a presence there.

“Azaz is a symbol for Turkey,” said Fabrice Balanche of the Washington Institute For Near East Policy. “Prime Minister Davutoglu fears that if the Kurds capture Azaz, they could start a big offensive from Kobane to the west and from Afrin to the east,” he told BBC.

As widely reported, the crisis in the region reached a peak when a Turkish Air Force F-16 fighter jet shot down a Russian Air Force Su-24 bomber along the Turkey-Syria border on November 24, killing the pilot, Lieutenant-Colonel Oleg Peshkov. The Turkish government tried to excuse the attack by claiming that the jet was downed after it had violated Turkish airspace for 17 seconds.

The Russia Defense Ministry, however, denied the aircraft ever left Syrian airspace, and released a video they claimed shows that the Su-24 was not in Turkish airspace when it was shot down.

Meanwhile, Turkey’s neighbor to its West, Greece, has long been a victim of Turkey’s violations of its sovereign airspace. According to data recorded by the Greek military, in 2014 alone, Turkish aircraft violated Greek airspace 2,244 times. On just one day, February 15, Turkish warplanes violated Greek airspace 22 times, according to Athens News Agency.

After Syria, Greece and Russia, Turkey’s next target was its other southern neighbor, Iraq. In December, Iraq’s President, Fuad Masum, said, “The presence of the Turkish Army Forces in Mosul Province without our permission violates international rules. I want Turkish officials to get its force out of Iraq’s territory immediately.”

Iraq’s Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi also condemned Turkey’s action: “We have not asked Turkey for any force and no one had informed us about the arrival of the force.”

Two neighbors of Turkey, Cyprus and Armenia, have also been victims of Turkish aggression — for an even longer time.

Turkey, for more than 40 years, has been illegally occupying the northern part of the Republic of Cyprus, which it invaded with a bloody military campaign in 1974. According to historian Victor Davis Hanson:

“Thousands of settlers from Anatolia were shipped in by the Turkish government to occupy former Greek villages and to change Cypriot demography — in the same manner the occupying Ottoman Empire once did in the 16th century. … The island remains conquered not because the Greeks have given up, but because their resistance is futile against a NATO power of some 70 million people. Greeks know that Turkey worries little about what world thinks of its occupation.”

Turkey has also been blockading yet another neighbor since 1993: “Turkey and Azerbaijan have effectively been exercising an illegal unilateral economic blockade against Armenia, which has hurt the latter economically,” wrote Armen V. Sahakyan, the executive director of the Eurasian Research and Analysis Institute. “Turkey and Azerbaijan are in clear violation of the Principle of Good Neighborliness, as well as all of the General Assembly resolutions condemning unilateral coercive measures.”

Turkey has been assaulting its neighbors in what appears as outbursts of Turkish Islamic supremacy. What Turkey would call a crime if committed by a non-Turkish or a non-Sunni state, Turkey sees as legitimate if Turkey itself commits it.

When Turkey invaded Cyprus, historically a Greek and Christian nation, it is not called an invasion. Turkey still refers to the 1974 military campaign as a “peace operation.” Senior politicians and military officials from Turkey also participate in the official ceremonies called “the Peace and Freedom Festival,” organized in occupied northern Cyprus on July 20 every year, to celebrate what they “achieved” more than 40 years ago — namely, an ethnic cleansing and colonization campaign that they conducted through many crimes, including mass murders, wholesale and repeated rapes, torture and inhuman treatment, plundering Cypriot cultural heritage and destroying churches, among others.

1569The crumbling buildings of the Varosha district of Famagusta, Cyprus, photographed in 2009. The area lies within Turkish-controlled northern Cyprus. The inhabitants fled during the 1974 Turkish invasion and the district has been abandoned since then. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

If anyone blockaded another state, especially a Sunni state, Turkey would most certainly condemn it. But when Turkey itself blockades a Christian nation, it is always “justified” — most often as a response to some “unacceptable wrongdoing” by the other side.

If a non-Turkish, or non-Sunni state, treated a Turkish or Sunni minority brutally, Turkey would passionately condemn it. But Turkey sees no harm in slaughtering its own Kurdish citizens, and devastating their towns. Turkey claims this is a just way of “fighting against terrorism.”

Turkey can shoot down a Russian plane in the blink of an eye, because supposedly no one can violate Turkish airspace even for a few seconds — or even if no such violation takes place. But Turkey can violate the Greek sovereign airspace countless times as a national sport or hobby whenever it feels like it?

If Western authorities criticize Turkey for its policies, Turkey accuses them of “intervening in Turkey’s internal affairs.”

For instance, when a group of journalists close to the movement of the Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen were detained in a mass arrest operation on December 14, 2014 in Turkey, the European Commission, in a joint statement, criticized the police raids and arrests of the media representatives.

EU foreign affairs chief Federica Mogherini and the commissioner heading EU enlargement talks also said the arrests went “against European values.”

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan responded in a public speech:

“When we take a step, someone in the European Union immediately comes up and makes a statement. According to what do you make this statement? What do you know?

“Those who have made this country wait at the gate of the European Union for 50 years, do you ever know what this [our] step is? The elements that threaten our national security — be they members of the press, or this or that — will get the required response. It is impossible for us to make them sovereign in this country.

“And when we take such a step, we do not think about ‘what will the European Union say?’ or ‘will the EU accept us [as a member]?’ We do not have such concerns. We will pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps. Please keep your intellect to yourselves.”

Erdogan also said that the detentions were not an “issue” of press freedom and claimed that the Fethullah Gulen movement was backed by Israel, which Erdogan referred to as “the country in the south that he [Gulen] loves.”

So, the European Union, of which Turkey is allegedly “striving” to be a member, cannot even issue a critical statement concerning Turkey’s policies because that would “intervene in Turkish steps for national security,” but Turkey can send jihadist fighters, arms or funds into Syria or Iraq and destroy lives and civilizations there?

Turkey seems to believe it always has to be strong and a leading force in the region. But if Kurds — an indigenous, stateless and persecuted people — are to gain a single right anywhere in the world, does Turkey find that unacceptable?

The entire history of Turkey as well as its current policies demonstrate that Turkey believes Kurds are inferior to Turks. Turkey does not even recognize the Kurds’ right to be educated in Kurdish, evidently in an attempt to separate them from their identity.

“The policy of Republican Turkey since its establishment in 1923,” wrote the author Amir Hassanpour, “is a typical case of what has been called ‘linguicide’ or ‘linguistic genocide.’ Forcing the Kurds to abandon their language and become native speakers of Turkish is the primary goal of the language policy.”

Freedom and sovereignty are for Turks only. Kurds are just to be murdered or to be Turkey’s servants. This has been the state policy of Turkey ever since it was founded in 1923.

“The master in this country is the Turk,” said Mahmut Esat Bozkurt, Turkey’s first Minister of Justice, in 1930. “Those who are not genuine Turks can have only one right in the Turkish fatherland, and that is to be a servant, to be a slave. We are in the most free country of the world. They call this Turkey.”

 

Categories: Cyprus, Erdogan, Erdogan and Islamic jihad, Foreign policy, Freedom, Islam and terrorism, Islamic State, Israel, Kurdish fighters, Kurds, Turkey and human rights, Turkey and Islamic State
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Kurds raise an army to defend new federal region

April 21, 2016

Kurds raise an army to defend new federal region, Israel National News, Staff, April 21, 2016

Kurds in SyriaKurdish fighters in Syria Reuters

In a leafy field in Syria, fighters in beige fatigues negotiate an obstacle course as they are trained to defend a Kurdish federal region across the country’s north.

Clutching rifles under a bright spring sun, the men are among thousands undergoing obligatory nine-month training to join the Autonomous Protection Forces.

The APF, its commander-in-chief Renas Roza says, will be responsible for defending the federal region declared last month at a Kurdish-led conference.

“This is the nucleus of a new army that will take up the defense of the federal region in northern Syria,” Roza tells AFP in his headquarters at Amuda near the border with Turkey.

The clean-shaven commander sits under a large poster bearing the APF logo – a long, curved sword crossed over a rifle below a red five-point star.

Roza says thousands of Kurdish, Arab and Syriac Christian men between the ages of 18 and 30 have completed the compulsory training.

For the first two months, conscripts are taught military structure and tactics, and then have lessons on human rights and interaction with civilians.

Three stages of training are led by the powerful People’s Protection Units (YPG), the military arm of the leading Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD).

Fadi Abdo Lahdo, a Syriac fighter training in the Bawr camp near Rmeilan, says his trainers are from the YPG’s commando force.

Dealing with civilians

“We’re learning how to cross over both cement barriers and natural barriers,” says the fair-haired fighter, squinting in the sunlight.

Other training sessions are administered by civic institutions.

“I served five months and I still have four months before I finish my service,” says Rinas Ahmad, an 18-year-old conscript with gelled hair.

“We were trained on military life and on how to deal with civilians so we don’t become like the Syrian (government) army,” Ahmad says.

Syria’s Kurds have both exploited and benefited from the chaos of the five-year-war to expand their control across northern parts of thecountry.

When the regime’s armed forces withdrew from Kurdish-majority areas in 2012, Kurds filled the void with a system of three “autonomous administrations.”

The three cantons, known from west to east as Afrin, Kobane and Jazire, already feature their own independent police forces, driving licenses and schools.

In March, a Kurdish-led summit in Rmeilan announced that it would establish a “federal region” uniting the cantons.

It elected a 31-member assembly tasked with laying the groundwork for the federal region by September.

The announcement was swiftly shot down by both the mainstream opposition and the regime, which categorically reject a federal system for Syria.

Rounding up recruits

In anti-government demonstrations across the country, some protesters burned the Kurdish flag to show their opposition to federalism.

Syria’s Kurds have continued their preparations nevertheless.

Training camps currently operate in the Afrin and Jazire cantons and will open soon in Kobane, Roza says.

The APF is also rounding up anyone who has yet to complete his nine-month service.

“We check people’s papers as they pass through checkpoints. If they have not done the training, we take them there,” an APF spokesman says.

An Arab APF trainee, who spoke on condition of anonymity, says he was detained at a Kurdish-run checkpoint as he drove to work.

Non-Kurdish residents living under the PYD-run cantons were already complaining about a six-month period of compulsory military service run by the YPG, but the new training period is three months longer.

As the federal region’s future army, APF units have begun deploying to areas recently captured from the Islamic State (ISIS) jihadist group.

Although they are not yet involved in front-line fighting, they are increasingly cooperating with the YPG and the Kurdish-Arab Syrian Democratic Forces.

The APF moves in to secure towns that the YPG or the SDF have seized from ISIS – such as Shadadi in Hasakeh province, which the SDF captured in February.

Kurdish forces have led the fight against ISIS since the jihadist group emerged in Syria in 2013, scoring several major victories in the recapture of key border towns, like Kobane, last year.

Categories: Kurdish Federal Region, Kurdish fighters, Syria war
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Russian-Turkish clash building up over Syria

February 14, 2016

Russian-Turkish clash building up over Syria, DEBKAfile, February 14, 2016

Turkish-self-propelled_howitzers_13.2.16

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan clearly took a calculated risk when he ordered a two-our cross-border artillery bombardment Saturday, Feb. 13 of Syrian army forces positioned around the northern Syrian town of Azaz and the Kurdish YPG militia units which two days earlier took control of the former Syrian military air base of Minagh some six kilometers from the Turkish border.

Kurdish troops backed by the Russian air force seized that base last week from rebel militias as part of the operation for cutting the rebel groups under siege in Aleppo from their supply routes. The Turkish bombardment was therefore an indirect attack on the Russian forces backing pro-Assad forces against the rebels in the Syria war.

Erdogan knows that Moscow hasn’t finished settling accounts with Turkey for the shooting down of a Russian Su-24 on Nov. 24 and is spoiling for more punishment. After that incident, the Russians deployed top-of-line S-400 ground-to-air missile batteries and advanced Sukhoi Su-35 warplanes to their base in Latakia near the Turkish border. Ankara therefore limited its strike to a two-hour artillery bombardment from Turkish soil, reasoning that a Turkish warplane anywhere near the Syrian border would be shot down instantly.

Emboldened by the delay in the Russian response, the Turks took another step: Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu threatened the Kurdish YPG militia with more attacks if they failed to withdraw from the Menagh air base.

Although the Turkish prime minister had called on “allies and supporters” to back the operation against the Russian-backed  Syrian Kurds, Washington took the opposite line by urging Turkey, a fellow member of NATO, to desist from any further attacks.

Washington’s concern is obvious. An outright clash between Turkey and Russia would entitle Ankara to invoke the NATO charter and demand allied protection for a member state under attack.

The Obama administration would have had to spurn this appeal for three reasons:

1. To avoid getting mixed up in a military clash between two countries, just as the US kept its powder dry in the Russian-Ukraine confrontation after Moscow’s annexation of the Crimean Peninsula in February 2014.

2. To avoid upsetting the secret Obama-Putin deal on the allocation of spheres of influence in Syria: the Americans have taken the regions east of the Euphrates River, and the Russians, the west.

The Kurdish YPG militia forces near Aleppo and the city itself come under the Russian area of influence.

3. Regional tensions were tightened another notch Saturday by Russian comments: Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said that his country and the West have “slid into a new Cold War period,” and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said a third World War is actually underway -“I call this struggle a third World War by other means.,” he said.

Washington will avoid any action that risks further stoking this high state of international tension, but will act instead to de-escalate the cross-border Turkish-Russian confrontation over Syria.

All eyes are now on Moscow, Much depends on Russia’s response to the artillery bombardment of its Syrian and Kurdish allies. It is up to Putin to decide when and how to strike back – if at all.

Categories: Assad, Erdogan, Foreign policy, Iranian proxies, Kurdish fighters, NATO, Obama - Middle East, Russia - Syrian war, Russia - Turkey, Turkey
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A new US-Russian-Turkish military buildup over Syria: In unison or at odds?

January 25, 2016

A new US-Russian-Turkish military buildup over Syria: In unison or at odds? DEBKAfile, January 25, 2016

TurkishAirBase480

The US and Russia are in the process of a military buildup in the Kurdish areas of northern Syria. It is ranged along a narrow strip of land 85 km long, stretching from Hassakeh in the east up to the Kurdish town of Qamishli on the Syrian-Turkish border. Facing them from across that border is a parallel buildup of Turkish strength. This highly-charged convergence of three foreign armies athwart a tense borderland is reported here by DEBKAfile’s military sources. It is too soon to determine whether the three armies are operating in sync or at odds, especially in view of the bitter relations between Moscow and Ankara.

US Forces 

American Special Operations troops and Air Force attack helicopters landed first at Remelan airport. They are the first US troops to operate from a ground base in Syria, accommodated in living quarters built for them in advance by a US engineering corps unit. The airport runway has been widened for US warplanes.

American Special Operations troops and Air Force attack helicopters landed first at Remelan airport. They are the first US troops to operate from a ground base in Syria, accommodated in living quarters built for them in advance by a US engineering corps unit. The airport runway has been widened for US warplanes.

Russian Forces

Next came two Russian military missions on Jan. 16.  One group, led by a general and consisting of air force and Special Operations officers, is preparing to take over a small abandoned base in Syrian army-controlled territory just 80 km from the new US facility at Remelan, and adapt it for Russian use.

The other group, which consists of intelligence officers – some from Russia’s FSB federal security service, the FSB – indicates that Moscow has decided it is high time for professionals to protect the classified information moving around the Russian Task Force in Syria and safeguard it from reaching the wrong hands. .

The abandoned base is less than 3.5 km from the Turkish border, and would act as a Russian barrier between US forces in northern Syria and the Turkish border contingents.

Turkish Forces

This Russian deployment set off alarm bells in Ankara, and so the Turkish army responded with the third troop buildup, arraying tanks and mobile artillery on the border across from Qamishli.

Over the weekend, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan stated, “We have said this from the beginning: we won’t tolerate such formations (in northern Syria) along the area stretching from the Iraqi border up to the Mediterranean.”

At the same time, US Vice President Joe Biden said Saturday, Jan. 23, that  the U.S. and Turkey are prepared for a military solution against ISIS in Syria should the Syrian government and rebel-opposition forces fail to reach a peace agreement during its upcoming meeting in Geneva.

However, Ankara views its war on terror as focused on both Kurdish separatists and ISIS, which is subjecting Turkey to multi-casualty attacks.

DEBKAfile’s military and intelligence sources note that Turkey’s military options are very limited. Its leaders know they dare not put a foot wrong because the Russian force in Syria is just waiting for an opportunity to avenge the downing of a Russian Su-24 warplane by the Turkish air force on November 24.

Another group of actors stirring the pot in northern Syria is the Kurds, particularly the YPG militia, the only fighting force in Syria capable of defeating ISIS, which has been reinforced by the Iraqi autonomous Kurdish region’s Peshmerga, as well as the outlawed Turkish PKK Kurdish organization.

At this stage, it is impossible to determine how this triple buildup will play out tomorrow – how far the US and Russia are in concert, at what point they may decide to vie for footholds in the Kurdish region of northern Syria and how far the Turks are clued into the joint US-Russian strategy for bludgeoning ISIS.

Categories: Erdogan, Foreign policy, Islamic State, Kurdish fighters, Kurds, Obama and Iran, Obama and Islamic State, Obama and Syria, Obama and Turkey, Putin, Russia - Syrian war, Turkey
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A Strategy to Defeat Islamic Theo-fascism

January 7, 2016

A Strategy to Defeat Islamic Theo-fascism, American Thinker, G. Murphy Donovan, January 7, 2016

Surely, whatever passed for American foreign or military policy in the past three decades is not working. Just as clearly, in case anyone keeps score these days, the dark side of Islam is ascendant at home and abroad. What follows here is a catalogue of policy initiatives that might halt the spread of Islamic fascism and encourage religious reform in the Ummah.

Some observers believe that the Muslim problem is a matter of life and death. Be assured that the need for Islamic reform is much more important than either. The choices for Islam are the same as they are for Palestine Arabs; behave or be humbled. Europe may still have a Quisling North and a Vichy South; but Russia, China, and even America, at heart, are still grounded by national survival instincts – and Samuel Colt.

Call a spade a spade

The threat is Islam, both kinetic and passive aggressive factions. If “moderate” Islam is real, then that community needs to step up and assume responsibility for barbaric terror lunatics and immigrants/refugees alike. Neither America nor Europe has solutions to the Islamic dystopia; civic incompetence, strategic illiteracy, migrants, poverty, religious schisms, or galloping irredentism. The UN and NATO have no remedies either. Islamism is an Ummah, Arab League, OIC problem to solve. Absent moral or civic conscience, unreformed Islam deserves no better consideration than any other criminal cult.

Western Intelligence agencies must stop cooking the books too. The West is at war and the enemy is clearly the adherents of a pernicious ideology. A global war against imperial Islam might be declared, just as angry Islam has declared war on civilization.  A modus vivendi might be negotiated only after the Ummah erects a universal barrier between church and state globally. Islam, as we know it, is incompatible with democracy, civility, peace, stability, and adult beverages.

Oxymoronic “Islamic” states need to be relegated to the dustbin of history. If the Muslim world cannot or will not mend itself, Islamism, like the secular fascism of the 20th Century, must be defeated, humbled in detail. Sooner is better.

Answer the Ayatollahs

Recent allied concessions to Tehran may prove to be a bridge too far. If the Persian priests do not abide by their nuclear commitments, two red lines might be drawn around Israel. Firstly, the ayatollahs should be put on notice, publicly, that any attack against Israel would be considered an attack against America — and met with massive Yankee retaliation. Secondly, any future cooperation with NATO or America should be predicated on an immediate cessation of clerical hate speech and so-called fatwas, those arbitrary death sentences.

Clerical threats to “wipe Israel off the face of the earth” and “death to America” injunctions are designed to stimulate jihad and terror globally. The only difference between a Shia ayatollah and a Sunni imam in this regard these days seems to be the torque in their head threads.

Ostracize the Puppeteers

Strategic peril does not emanate from Sunni tacticians like Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar, or Abu Bakr al-Baghadadi. Nor does the real threat begin with or end with al Qaeda, the Taliban, Hezb’allah, Hamas, or the Islamic State. Lethal threat comes, instead, on four winds: toxic culture, religious politics, fanatic fighters, and furtive finance, all of which originate with Muslim state sponsors. The most prominent of these are Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan.

Put aside for a moment the Saudi team that brought down the Twin Towers in New York. Consider instead, the House of Saud as the most egregious exporter of Salifism (aka Wahabbism) doctrine, clerics, imams, and mosques from which ultra-irredentist ideologies are spread. The Saudis are at once the custodians of Islam’s sacredshrines and at the same time the world’s most decadent, corrupt, and duplicitous hypocrites. Imam Baghdadi is correct about two things: the venality of elites in Washington and Riyadh. The House of Saud, an absolutist tribal monarchy, does not have the moral standing to administer “holy” sites of any description — Mecca, Medina, or Disneyland.

The cozy relationship between Europe, the European Union, and Arabia can be summarized with a few words; oil, money, arms sales, and base rights. This near-sighted blend of Mideast obscenities has reached its sell-by date. The “white man’s burden” should have expired when Edward Said vacated New York for paradise.

Jettison Turkey and Pakistan

What Saudi Arabia is to toxic ideology in North Africa, Turkey and Pakistan are to perfidy in the Levant and South Asia. Turkey and Pakistan are Islam’s most obvious and persistent grifters. Turkey supports the Islamic State and other Sunni terror groups with a black market oil racket. Pakistan supports the Taliban, al Qaeda, and ISIS with sanctuary and tolerance of the world’s largest opium garden. Oil and drug monies from Arabia, Turkey, and South Asia are financing the global jihad. Turkey also facilitates the migration of Muslims west to Europe while sending Islamist fighters and weapons south to Syria and Iraq.

With the advent of Erdogan and his Islamist AKP, Turkey has morphed into NATO’s Achilles Heel, potentially a fatal flaw.  Turkey needs to be drummed out of NATO until secular comity returns to Ankara. Pakistan needs to be restrained, too, with sanctions until it ceases to provide refuge for terrorists. Pakistani troops harassing India could be more prudently redeployed to exterminate jihadists.

Sanctions against Russia and Israel are a study in moral and political fatuity whilst Arabs and Muslims are appeased midst a cultural sewer of geo-political crime and human rights abuses. If NATO’s eastern flank needs to be anchored in trust and dependability, Russia, Kurdistan, or both, would make better allies than Turkey. Ignoring Turkish perfidy to protect ephemeral base rights confuses tactical necessity with strategic sufficiency.

Recognize Kurdistan

Aside from Israel, Kurdistan might be the most enlightened culture in the Mideast. The Kurds are also the largest ethnic group in the world not recognized as a state. While largely Muslim, the Kurds, unlike most of the Ummah, appreciate the virtues of religious diversity and women’s rights. Indeed, Kurdish women fight alongside their men against Turkish chauvinism and Sunni misogyny with equal aplomb. For too long, the Kurds have been patronized by Brussels and Washington.

While Kurdish fighters engage ISIS and attempt to control the Turkish oil black market, Ankara uses American manufactured NATO F-16s to bomb Kurds in Turkey and Syria. Turkish ground forces now occupy parts of Iraq too. In eastern Turkey, Ergdogan’s NATO legions use ISIS as an excuse for bookend genocide, a cleansing of Kurds that might rival the Armenian Christian genocide (1915-1917).

195876_5_Kurdish angel of death

All the while, American strategic amateurs argue for a “no-fly” zone in contested areas south of Turkey. Creating a no-fly zone is the kind of operational vacuity we have come to expect from American politicians and generals. Such a stratagem would foil Kurdish efforts to flank ISIS and allow the Erdogan jihad, arms, and oil rackets to flourish. A no-fly zone is a dangerous ploy designed to provoke Russia, not protect Muslim “moderates.”

Putin, Lavrov, and the Russians have it right this time; Turkish and Erdogan family subterfuges are lethal liabilities, not assets.

Washington and European allies have been redrawing the map in Eastern Europe, North Africa, South Asia, and the Mideast since the end of WWII. The time has come to put Kurdistan on the map too. Kurdistan is a unique and exemplary case of reformed or enlightened Islam; indeed, a nation that could serve as a model for the Muslim world.  If base rights are a consideration, Kurdistan would be an infinitely more dependable ally than Turkey or any corrupt tribal autocracy in Arabia. America has a little in common with desert dictators — and fewer genuine friends there either. Indeed, at the moment America is allied with the worst of Islam.

Create New Alliances

NATO, like the European Union, has become a parody of itself. Absent a threat like the Soviet Union or the Warsaw Pact, Brussels has taken to justifying itself by meddling in East Europe and resuscitating a Cold War with the Kremlin. Indeed, having divided Yugoslavia, NATO now expands to the new Russian border with reckless abandon; in fact, fanning anti-Russian flames now with neo-Nazi cohorts in former Yugoslavia, Georgia, and Ukraine.

NATO support for the Muslims of one-time Yugoslavia is of a piece with support for Islamic troublemakers in Chechnya and China too. Throughout, we are led to believe that jihad Uighurs and caliphate Chechens are freedom fighters. Beslan, Boston, Paris, and now San Bernardino put the lie to any notion that Islamists are “victims” (or heroes). Indeed, the Boston Marathon bombing might have been prevented had Washington a better relationship with Moscow.

Truth is, America has more in common with Russia and China these days than we do with any number of traditional European Quislings. Indeed, it seems that Europe and America can’t take yes for an answer.

The Cold War ideological or philosophical argument has been won. Moscow and Beijing have succumbed to market capitalism. Islamism, in stark contrast, is now a menace to Russian, Chinese, and American secular polities alike. The logic of a cooperative or unified approach to a common enemy seems self-evident. America, China, and Russia, at least on issues like toxic Islam, is a match made in Mecca.

The late great contest with Marxist Russia and China was indeed a revolution without guns. Now the parties to that epic Cold War struggle may have to join forces to suppress a theo-fascist movement that, like its Nazi predecessor, will not be defeated without guns. The West is at war again, albeit in slow motion. Withal, questions of war are not rhetorical. Saying that you are not at war does not make it so. Once declared, by one party or the other, the only relevant question about war is who wins and who loses. Losers do not make the future.

If America and Europe were as committed to Judeo/Christian secular values as Islamists are committed to a sick religious culture, then the war against pernicious Islam would have been won decades ago. Or as Jack Kennedy once put it: “Domestic policy can only defeat us; foreign policy can kill us.”

Trump Footnote

Donald Trump made several policy suggestions on the Islamism issue, one on immigration, the other on Mideast oil. On the former, he suggests a hiatus on Muslim immigration until America develops a plan or reliable programs to vet migrants. On Arab oil, he suggests, given the lives and treasure spent liberating Kuwait and Iraqi oil fields, America should have held those resources in trust and use oil revenues to finance the war against jihad, however long that takes. The problem with both Trump ideas is that they come perilously close to common sense, an American instinct in short supply these days.

 

Categories: Donald Trump, Foreign policy, Iran, Iran - Middle East, Iran and Israel, Iran scam, Islam, Islamic immigration, Islamic jihad, Islamic nations, Islamic reformation, Islamic State, Israel, Kurdish fighters, Kurdistan, Middle East, NATO, Obama - Middle East, Obama and Iran, Obama and Islam, Obama and Islamic State, Obama and Islamic terrorism, Obama and Israel, Obama's affinity for Iran, Obama's America, Pakistan, Palestinians, Russia, Saudi Arabia
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US senior commander says US will not provide arms ‘as of now’ to YPG units

November 5, 2015

US senior commander says US will not provide arms ‘as of now’ to YPG units, Hurrinet Daily News, November 5, 2015

(Certainly not! The Kurds are the best, if not the only, local forces serious about fighting the Islamic State, et al. Besides, our delightful democratic ally, Turkey — a bastion of human rights and freedom — doesn’t want us to. — DM)

truck with gunAFP photo

“Obviously the Turks have concerns. You know, they’re our partners and allies. We’re going to address those concerns. We’re going to work with them to achieve our common goal, which is to defeat ISIL,” Warren said.

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A senior U.S. commander based in Baghdad, Iraq, for the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) said his country, as of now, was not providing arms to the People’s Protection Units (YPG). 

“As of now, we are not providing weapons or ammunition to the YPG. The weapons that we’ve provided thus far, with the ammunition that we’ve provided in our one airdrop executed, was for the Syrian-Arab coalition,” Colonel Steve Warren, a Baghdad-based spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition against ISIL, told reporters via teleconference from Baghdad.

“As of now, future resupplies will also go to Arab-vetted Syrian opposition members,” he added, after a reporter said a senior defense official had recently said the YPG would not be getting any ammunition or weapons. “So, you know, as of now, that’s where our policy stands.”

Turkey regards Syrian Kurdish YPG units in the same category as the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), with which the state has been in an armed fight for over 30 years, with a death toll of over 40,000 from both the camps. The state had launched a peace process to solve the Kurdish problem in the country in the early 2010s, which was later halted by the state during the run to Turkey’s general elections on June 7.

Responding a question on whether or not the U.S. would talk to Turkey about the issue, Warren said they were in “very close contact” with Turkey.

“Obviously the Turks have concerns. You know, they’re our partners and allies. We’re going to address those concerns. We’re going to work with them to achieve our common goal, which is to defeat ISIL,” Warren said.

Categories: Department of Defense, Kurdish fighters, Turkey
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Column One: Obama strikes again

July 31, 2015

Column One: Obama strikes again, Jerusalem Post, Caroline Glick, July 30, 2015

ShowImage (5)US President Barack Obama (L) and Vice President Joe Biden. (photo credit:OFFICIAL WHITE HOUSE PHOTO BY PETE SOUZA)

Most of the antiquities that ISIS plunders in Iraq and Syria make their way to the world market through Turkey. So, too, most of the oil that ISIS produces in Syria and Iraq is smuggled out through Turkey. According to the US Treasury, ISIS has made $1 million-$4m. a day from oil revenue.

Instead of maintaining its current practice of balancing its support for Turkey with its support for the Kurds, under the agreement, the West ditches its support for the Kurds and transfers its support to Turkey exclusively.

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While Israel and much of oficial Washington remain focused on the deal President Barack Obama just cut with the ayatollahs that gives them $150 billion and a guaranteed nuclear arsenal within a decade, Obama has already moved on – to Syria.

Obama’s first hope was to reach a deal with his Iranian friends that would leave the Assad regime in place. But the Iranians blew him off.

They know they don’t need a deal with Obama to secure their interests. Obama will continue to help them to maintain their power base in Syria though Hezbollah and the remains of the Assad regime without a deal.

Iran’s cold shoulder didn’t stop Obama. He moved on to his Sunni friend Turkish President Recep Erdogan.

Like the Iranians, since the war broke out, Erdogan has played a central role in transforming what started out as a local uprising into a regional conflict between Sunni and Shiite jihadists.

With Obama’s full support, by late 2012 Erdogan had built an opposition dominated by his totalitarian allies in the Muslim Brotherhood.

By mid-2013, Erdogan’s Muslim Brotherhood- led coalition was eclipsed by al-Qaida spinoffs. They also enjoyed Turkish support.

And when last summer ISIS supplanted al-Qaida as the dominant Sunni jihadist force in Syria, it did so with Erdogan’s full backing. For the past 18 months, Turkey has been ISIS’s logistical, political and economic base.

According to Brett McGurk, the State Department’s point man on ISIS, about 25,000 foreign fighters have joined ISIS in Syria and Iraq. All of them transited through Turkey.

Most of the antiquities that ISIS plunders in Iraq and Syria make their way to the world market through Turkey. So, too, most of the oil that ISIS produces in Syria and Iraq is smuggled out through Turkey. According to the US Treasury, ISIS has made $1 million-$4m. a day from oil revenue.

In May, US commandos in Syria assassinated Abu Sayyaf, ISIS’s chief money manager, and arrested his wife and seized numerous computers and flash drives from his home. According to a report in The Guardian published last week, the drives provided hard evidence of official Turkish economic collusion with ISIS.

Due to Turkish support, ISIS has become a self-financing terrorist group. With its revenue stream it is able to maintain a welfare state regime, attracting recruits from abroad and securing the loyalty of local Sunni militias and former Ba’athist forces.

Some Western officials believed that after finding hard evidence of Turkish regime support for ISIS, NATO would finally change its relationship with Turkey. To a degree they were correct.

Last week, Obama cut a deal with Erdogan that changes the West’s relationship with Erdogan.

Instead of maintaining its current practice of balancing its support for Turkey with its support for the Kurds, under the agreement, the West ditches its support for the Kurds and transfers its support to Turkey exclusively.

The Kurdish peshmerga militias operating today in Iraq and Syria are the only military outfits making sustained progress in the war against ISIS. Since last October, the Kurds in Syria have liberated ISIS-controlled and -threatened areas along the Turkish border.

The YPG, the peshmerga militia in Syria, won its first major victory in January, when after a protracted, bloody battle, with US air support, it freed the Kurdish border town of Kobani from ISIS’s assault.

In June, the YPG scored a strategic victory against ISIS by taking control of Tal Abyad. Tal Abyad controls the road connecting ISIS’s capital of Raqqa with Turkey. By capturing Tal Abyad, the Kurds cut Raqqa’s supply lines.

Last month, Time magazine reported that the Turks reacted with hysteria to Tal Abyad’s capture.

Not only did the operation endanger Raqqa, it gave the Kurds territorial contiguity in Syria.

The YPG’s victories enhanced the Kurds’ standing among Western nations. Indeed, some British and American officials were quoted openly discussing the possibility of removing the PKK, the YPG’s Iraqi counterpart, from their official lists of terrorist organizations.

The YPG’s victories similarly enhanced the Kurds’ standing inside Turkey itself. In the June elections to the Turkish parliament, the Kurdish HDP party won 12 percent of the vote nationally, and so blocked Erdogan’s AKP party from winning a parliamentary majority.

Without that majority Erdogan’s plan of reforming the constitution to transform Turkey into a presidential republic and secure his dictatorship for the long run has been jeopardized.

As far as Erdogan was concerned, by the middle of July the Kurdish threat to his power had reached unacceptable levels.

Then two weeks ago the deck was miraculously reshuffled.

On July 20, young Kurdish activists convened in Suduc, a Kurdish town on the Turkish side of the border, 6 kilometers from Kobani. A suicide bomber walked up to them, and detonated, massacring 32 people.

Turkish officials claim that the bomber was a Turkish Kurd, and a member of ISIS. But the Kurds didn’t buy that line. Last week, HDP lawmakers accused the regime of complicity with the bomber. And two days after the attack, militants from the PKK killed two Turkish policemen in a neighboring village, claiming that they collaborated with ISIS.

At that point, Erdogan sprang into action.

After refusing for months to work with NATO forces in their anti-ISIS operations, Erdogan announced he was entering the fray. He would begin targeting “terrorists” and allow the US air force to use two Turkish air bases for its anti-ISIS operations. In exchange, the US agreed to set up a “safe zone” in Syria along the Turkish border.

Turkish officials were quick to explain that in targeting “terrorists,” the Turks would not distinguish between Kurdish terrorists and ISIS terrorists just because the former are fighting ISIS. Both, they insisted, are legitimate targets.

Erdogan closed his deal in a telephone call with Obama. And he immediately went into action.

Turkish forces began bombing terrorist targets and rounding up terrorist suspects. Although a few of the Turkish bombing runs have been directly against ISIS, the vast majority have targeted Kurdish forces in Iraq and Syria.

Moreover, for every suspected ISIS terrorist arrested by Turkish security forces, at least eight Kurds have been taken into custody.

Then, too, Erdogan has called on AKP lawmakers to begin criminalizing their counterparts from the HDP. Kurdish lawmakers, he urged them, must be stripped of their parliamentary immunity to enable their arrests.

As Erdogan apparently sees things, by going to war against the Kurds, he will be able to reestablish the AKP’s parliamentary majority. Within a few weeks, if the AKP fails to form a governing coalition – and it will – then new elections will be held. The nationalists, who abandoned the AKP in June, will return to the party to reward Erdogan for fighting the Kurds.

As for that “safe area” in northern Syria, as the Kurds see it, Erdogan will use it to destroy Kurdish autonomy. He will flood the zone with Syrian Arab refugees who fled to Turkey, to dilute the Kurdish majority. And he will secure coalition support for the Sunni Arab militias – including those still affiliated with al-Qaida – which will be permitted by NATO to operate openly in the safe area.

Already the Kurds are reporting that the US has stopped providing air support for their forces fighting ISIS in the border town of Jarablus. Those forces were bombed this week by Turkish F-16s.

For their part, despite Erdogan’s pledge to fight ISIS, his forces seem remarkable uninterested in rolling back ISIS achievements. The Turks have no plan for removing ISIS from its strongholds in Raqqa or Haskiyah.

The Obama administration is presenting the deal with Turkey as yet another great achievement.

In an interview with Charlie Rose on Tuesday, McGurk explained that the deal was a long time in the making. It began with a phone conversation between Obama and Erdogan last October and it ended with their phone call last week.

In October, Obama convinced Erdogan not to oppose US air support for the Kurds in Kobani and to enable the US to resupply YPG fighters in Kobani through Turkey. In the second, Obama agreed not to oppose Erdogan’s offensive against the Kurds.

Two years ago, in August 2013, the world held its breath awaiting US action in Syria. That month, after prolonged equivocation amidst mountains of evidence, the Obama administration was forced to acknowledge that Iran’s Syrian puppet Bashar Assad had crossed Obama’s self-declared redline and used chemical weapons against regime opponents, including civilians.

US forces assembled for battle. Everything looked ready to go, until just hours before US jets were scheduled to begin bombing regime targets, Obama canceled the operation. In so doing, he lost all deterrent power against Iran. He also lost all strategic credibility among America’s regional allies.

To save face, Obama agreed to a Russian proposal to have international monitors remove Syria’s chemical weapons from the country.

Last summer, the administration proudly announced that the mission had been completed.

UN chemical weapons monitors had removed Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal from the country, they proclaimed. It didn’t matter to either Obama or Secretary of State John Kerry that by that point Assad had resumed chemical assaults with chlorine-based bombs. Chlorine bombs weren’t chemical weapons, the Americans idiotically proclaimed.

Then last week, the lie fell apart. The Wall Street Journal reported that according to US intelligence agencies, Assad not surrendered his chemical arsenal.

Rather, he hid much of his chemical weaponry from the UN inspectors. He had even managed to retain the capacity to make chemical weapons – like chlorine-based bombs – after agreeing to part with his chemical arsenal.

Assad was able to cheat, because just as the administration’s nuclear deal with the Iranians gives Iran control over which nuclear sites will be open to UN inspectors, and which will be off limits, so the chemical deal gave Assad control over what the inspectors would and would not be allowed to see. So, they saw only what he showed them.

Obama has gone full circle in concluding his deal with Erdogan. Since entering office, Obama has sought to cut deals with both the Sunni jihadists of the Muslim Brotherhood ilk and the Shi’ite jihadists of the Iranian ilk.

His chemical deal with Assad and his nuclear deal with the ayatollahs accomplished the latter goal, and did so at the expense of America’s Sunni Arab allies and Israel.

His deal last week with Erdogan accomplishes the former goal, to the benefit of ISIS, and on the backs of America’s Kurdish allies.

So that takes care of the Middle East. With 17 months left to go till Obama leave office, the time has apparently come for the British to begin to worry.

Categories: Assad, Erdogan, Foreign policy, Hezbollah, IAEA, Iran - Syria war, Iran nuke inspections, Iran scam, Iranian nukes, Iranian proxies, Islamic State, Israel, Kerry, Kurdish fighters, Kurdish refugees, Kurds, Middle East, Obama, Obama's America, P5+1, Peshmerga, Rogue nations, Shiite, Sunni, Syria - chemical weapons, Terrorists, Turkey
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To gratify Tehran and Moscow, new US-Turkish anti-ISIS war campaign in Syria skirts Assad’s forces

July 26, 2015

To gratify Tehran and Moscow, new US-Turkish anti-ISIS war campaign in Syria skirts Assad’s forces, DEBKAfile, July 25, 2015

Tanks_face_IS_at_Syria_25.7.15

Not exactly by chance, the security zone bisects Kurdish territory and holds back Kurdish forces in their assaults on ISIS.

DEBKAfile’s military sources report that a glance at the map betrays an all-out US-Turkish effort not put up backs in Tehran by interfering with Syrian, Hizballah and pro-Iranian militia operations in critical northern Syrian war zones such as Aleppo or give the Syrian rebels a helping hand in the Idlib province.

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After the second successive night of Turkish cross-border bombing attacks on the Islamic State in northern Syria, Ankara and Washington agreed Saturday, July 25, to name the “security zone” covered by a “partial no fly zone” they had declared in northern Syria the “Islamic State free zone.” Click HERE for full-size map!

This name represents a significant US-Turkish concession to Iran of immunity for its allies, Syrian President Bashar Assad and Hizballah, in order to gain Tehran’s cooperation in the campaign Turkey launched against ISIS Friday. Integral to the deal is also a promise to abstain from using the campaign to grant anti-Assad rebel groups any advantages.

This immunity did not extend to the Kurdish Workers Movement (PKK), which were targeted in the course of Turkish air and ground action in and over the new “security zone.” Those warplanes also flew missions Friday night over the PKK bases and logistical facilities in the Qandil Mountains of northern Iraq. The PKK responded Saturday with an announcement that their armistice with Ankara was over. Turkey may consequently expect a recurrence of Kurdish terrorist violence in its cities,DEBKAfile notes.

High-placed sources in Ankara disclosed details of the US-Turkish deal with Iran. US warplanes will have the use of Turkish air bases, and not just the big Incirlik facility, for staging air strikes against ISIS, so long as Syrian targets are avoided. Washington agreed to Ankara using its air and ground operations against ISIS in Syria to drive into the new “security zone” and push toward the east to continue those attacks – eve if they run up against Kurdish forces which are also fighting ISIS.

The security zone’s area covered by a no-fly zone is 90 km wide and 40km deep, running between Mere, a small town 25  km north o Aleppo in the west, to the northwestern town of Jarabulus, which is situated on the west bank of the Euphrates.

Not exactly by chance, the security zone bisects Kurdish territory and holds back Kurdish forces in their assaults on ISIS.

DEBKAfile’s military sources report that a glance at the map betrays an all-out US-Turkish effort not put up backs in Tehran by interfering with Syrian, Hizballah and pro-Iranian militia operations in critical northern Syrian war zones such as Aleppo or give the Syrian rebels a helping hand in the Idlib province.

The combined US-Turkish action moreover greatly supports the Assad-Hizballah war against ISIS gains in Syria and enhances Iranian and Russian influence in Damascus.

US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter, in Irbil Friday, July 24, assured leaders of the semiautonomous Kurdish Republic of Iraq. “We are trying to build a force through the territory of Iraq, and someday in Syria, that can do what the peshmerga have achieved.”

At the same time, in Syria, the Kurds and their national aspirations look like losing out dramatically in the fallout from the complex US-Turkish partnership for beating ISIS back.

Categories: Assad, Combat troops, Department of Defense, Foreign policy, Hezbollah, Iran scam, Iranian proxies, Islamic State, Israel, Kurdish fighters, Kurds, No fly zone, Obama, Obama's America, P5+1, Syria war, Turkey, U.S. allies, U.S. Military
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Turkey Uses ISIS as Excuse to Attack Kurds

July 26, 2015

Turkey Uses ISIS as Excuse to Attack Kurds, Gatestone Institute, Uzay Bulut, July 26, 2015

(Please see also, Will Anyone Help the Kurds? — DM)

  • It appears as if the Turkish government is using ISIS as a pretext to attack the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party).
  • Turkey just announced that its air base at Incirlik will soon be open to coalition forces, presumably to fight ISIS. But the moment Turkey started bombing, it targeted Kurdish positions in Iraq, in addition to targeting ISIS positions in Syria.
  • In Turkey, millions of indigenous Kurds are continually terrorized and murdered, but ISIS terrorists can freely travel and use official border crossings to go to Syria and return to Turkey; they are even treated at Turkish hospitals.
  • If this is how the states that rule over Kurds treat them, why is there even any question as to whether the Kurds should have their own self-government?

Turkey’s government seems to be waging a new war against the Kurds, now struggling to get an internationally recognized political status in Syrian Kurdistan.

On July 24, Turkish media sources reported that Turkish jet fighters bombed Kurdish PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) bases in Qandil, in Iraqi Kurdistan, as well as the Islamic State (ISIS) in Syria.

Turkey is evidently unsettled by the rapprochement the PKK seems to be establishing with the U.S. and Europe. Possibly alarmed by the PKK’s victories against ISIS, as well as its strengthening international standing, Ankara, in addition to targeting ISIS positions in Syria, has been bombing the PKK positions in the Qandil mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan, where the PKK headquarters are located.

There is no ISIS in Qandil.

As expected, many Turkish media outlets were more enthusiastic about the Turkish air force’s bombing the Kurdish militia than about bombing ISIS. “The camps of the PKK,” they excitedly reported, “have been covered with fire.”

It appears as if Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) is using ISIS as a pretext to attack the PKK. Ankara just announced that its air base at Incirlik will soon be open to coalition forces, presumably to fight ISIS, but the moment Turkey started bombing, it targeted Kurdish positions. Those attacks not only open a new era of death and destruction, but also bring an end to all possibilities of resolving Turkey’s Kurdish issue non-violently.

Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu announced that

“a second wave operation against Daesh [ISIS] in Syria was started. Just after that, a very comprehensive operation was carried out against the camps of the terrorist organization PKK in northern Iraq. I am glad that the targets were hit with great success. We have given instructions to start a third wave operation in Syria and a second wave operation in Iraq.”

The “great success” of the Turkish military has brought much damage and injury to even Kurdish civilians — including children. The Kurdish newspaper Rudaw reported that two Kurdish villagers in Duhok’s Berwari region were carried to hospital in the aftermath of a Turkish artillery bombardment in the Amediye region. One of the victims was 12 years old. The second victim lost a leg in an airstrike. Four members of the PKK were killed and several others were injured.

Shortly after military operations against the PKK started, access to the websites of pro-Kurdish newspapers and news agencies was denied “by decree of court.” These websites — including Fırat News Agency (ANF), Dicle News Agency (DIHA), Hawar News Agency (ANHA), Ozgur Gundem newspaper, Yuksekova News, Rudaw and BasNews — are still blocked in Turkey.

ISIS, meanwhile, has not so far made any statement regarding Turkey’s so-called bombings of ISIS in any of its media outlets.

Had Turkish military attacked the PKK alone, and not in addition to attacking ISIS, it would probably have received widespread international condemnation. So to add “legitimacy” to its attacks against the Kurdish PKK — whose affiliate Democratic Union Party (PYD) in Syria and its armed wing, the Kurdish People’s Defense Units (YPG) have been resisting ISIS and other Islamist terrorist groups since 2013 — Turkey declared that it will also attack ISIS. This would give it cover for its attacks against Kurdish fighters.

In 2014, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan described the plan he wanted to carry out in Syria and Iraq: “The problem in Syria should be taken into account. Iraq too should be considered similarly. Moreover, there needs to be a solution that will also deal with the Syrian wing [PYD] of the separatist terrorist organization [PKK].”

The AKP government, dissatisfied with the results of last month’s parliamentary elections, also seems to want to hold new elections, to push the mainly Kurdish HDP Party below the required 10% threshold, and thus force them out of parliament. Perhaps the government thinks that bombing the PKK will generate Turkish nationalist enthusiasm that will work in the AKP’s favor to help it regain a majority in early elections.

Apparently, Turkey does not need Kurdish deputies in its parliament. Apparently, the state prefers to slaughter or arrest the Kurds — as it has done for decades. Why hold talks and reach a democratic resolution when you have the power to murder people wholesale?[1]

Sadly, Turkey has preferred not to form a “Turkish-Kurdish alliance” to destroy ISIS. First, Turkey has opened its borders to ISIS, enabling the growth of the terrorist group. And now, at the first opportunity, it is bombing the Kurds again. According to this strategy, “peace” will be possible only when Kurds submit to Turkish supremacism and abandon their goal of being an equal nation.

In the meantime, Mevlut Cavusoglu, Turkish minister of foreign affairs, said that the Incirlik air base in Turkey has not yet been opened for use by the U.S. and other coalition forces, but that it will be opened in the upcoming period.

Kurdish forces, therefore, are the only forces that are truly resisting the Islamic State.

They have been repressed by Baghdad and murdered by Turkey and Iran.

If this is how the states that rule over Kurds treat them, why is there even any question as to whether the Kurds should have their own self-government?

As a result of the ISIS attacks in the region, the Kurdish PKK — as well as its Syrian Kurdish affiliate, Democratic Union Party (PYD) and its armed wing, Kurdish People’s Defense Units (YPG) — have emerged as the America’s most effective battlefield partners against ISIS. Ever since ISIS became a major force in Syria, the U.S. has apparently relied heavily on YPG to stop ISIS from advancing. According to Henri Barkey, a former State Department specialist on Turkey, “The U.S. has become the YPG’s air force and the YPG has become the U.S.’s ground force in Syria.”

* * *

Attacks on the Kurds were already under way last week. On July 20, a bomb attack in the Kurdish town of Suruc (Pirsus) in Turkey killed 32 people during a meeting of young humanitarian activists, who were discussing the reconstruction of the neighboring Kurdish town of Kobane.

1171The scene of the suicide bombing in Suruc, Turkey. An ISIS suicide bomber murdered 32 people and wounded more than 100 others in a July 20 attack on Kurdish humanitarian activists. (Image source: VOA video screenshot)

The blast took place while the activists were making a statement to the press in the garden of a cultural center. At least 100 others, mostly university students, were wounded. (Graphic video of the explosion)

The suicide bomber was identified through DNA testing, according to reports in the Turkish news media. Seyh Abdurrahman Alagoz was reportedly a 20-year-old Turkish university student, recently returned from Syria, and believed to have had ties to ISIS.

Alagoz targeted a meeting 300 secular activists, members of the Federation of Socialist Youth Associations (SGDF), who gathered at a cultural center in the province of Urfa, opposite the Kurdish town of Kobane in Syrian Kurdistan. As part of an effort to rebuild Kobane, they were preparing to provide aid, give toys to the children there and build a hospital, school, nursery, children’s park, library and a memorial forest for those who had lost their lives in Kobane.

“Work on the building of hospitals and schools needs to be done,” Oguz Yuzgec, the co-president of the federation, said before the explosion. “One of the things we will do is to build a children’s park in Kobane. We will name it after Emre Aslan, who died fighting in Kobane. We are collecting toys. We will participate in the construction of the nursery that the canton of Kobane is planning to build. We have the responsibility of helping the nursery function. We need everybody who knows how to draw and can teach children.”

Mazlum Demirtas, a survivor of the attack, said: “The main one responsible for this incident is the state of Turkey, the AKP fascism, the AKP dictatorship. … It attacked us with its gunmen and gangs. Since yesterday, parents have been collecting the dismembered body parts of their children. They are trying to identify the dismembered bodies. This is called fascism, inhumanity and barbarity.”

Pinar Gayip, another survivor of the attack, said in a telephone interview on the pro-government Haberturk TV that, “Instead of helping the wounded, the murderer-police of the murderer-AKP threw tear gas at the vehicles with which we carried the wounded.” She was taken off the air.

All across Turkish Kurdistan, there were protests condemning the massacre and the government’s alleged involvement in it. Police in Istanbul used plastic bullets and water cannonsagainst people who gathered to remember those murdered in Suruc.

The Turkish authorities briefly blocked access to Twitter last Wednesday to prevent the people from viewing photos of the bombing in Suruc. Officials admitted that Turkey had asked Twitter to remove 107 URLs (web addresses) with images related to the bombing; before the ban, Twitter had already removed 50.

Selahattin Demirtas, the co-chair of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Party (HDP), said that state surveillance activities were intensive in Suruc, and that the intelligence service was recording the identity of everyone traveling to and from Suruc.

As Demirtas’s own convoy had recently not been permitted to enter Suruc, he emphasized the extent of state surveillance in the town, and said that nobody could argue that someone could have managed to infiltrate the crowd and carry out the suicide attack without state support.

“Today, we have witnessed in Suruc yet again what an army of barbarity and rape, an army that has lost human dignity, can do,” Demirtas said. “Those who have been silent in the face of ISIS, who have not dared even raise their voice to it, as well as the officials in Ankara who threaten even the HDP every day but caress the head of ISIS, are the accomplices of this barbarity.”

In the meantime, Mehmet Gormez, the head of the Turkish Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet), announced on its Twitter account that the perpetrators of the Suruc attack do not have religion.

However, three days before the massacre in Suruc, about 100 Islamists — alleged to be ISIS sympathizers — had performed mass Islamic Eid prayers in Istanbul. They demanded Islamic sharia law instead of democracy. ISIS sympathizers had performed the same Eid prayers at the same place the year before, as well.

Over the border in Syrian Kurdistan, shortly after the blast in Suruc, a suicide bomber detonated a car bomb at a checkpoint in Kobane. Two Kurdish fighters were killed in the explosion, according to Rami Abdel Rahman, director of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Last month, a deadly blast hit the Kurdish province of Diyarbakir in Turkey, during an election rally of the pro-Kurdish HDP that was attended by tens of thousands of people. Just before the HDP co-chair Selahattin Demirtas was going to speak, two bombs exploded at different places. Four people were killed, and more than 100 people are estimated to have been wounded. One of the wounded, Lisa Calan, 28, a Kurdish art director from Diyarbakir, lost both legs in the explosion.

As the wounded were being carried to hospitals, police used tear gas against people trying to run from the area in panic

The bomber was reported to be a member of ISIS.

* * *

In Turkey, millions of indigenous Kurds are continually terrorized and murdered, while ISIS terrorists can freely travel and use official border crossings to go to Syria and return to Turkey; they are even treated at Turkish hospitals. Emrah Cakan, for instance, a Turkish-born ISIS commander wounded in Syria, got medical treatment at the university hospital in Turkey’s Denizli province in March.

The Denizli governor’s office issued a written statement on 5 March:

“The treatment of Emrah C. at the Denizli hospital was started upon his own application. The procedural acts concerning his injury were conducted by our border city during his entry to our country and they still continue. And his treatment procedures continue as a part of his right to benefit from health services just like all our other citizens have.”

The “compassion” and hospitality that many Turkish institutions have for ISIS members is not even hidden. The silence of the West is mystifying and disappointing.

The U.S. government cooperates with oppressive regimes — including the terrorist regime of Iran, under which Kurds are forced to live — to the detriment of the Kurds, to the detriment other persecuted peoples, and to the detriment of the future of the West.

Many Middle Eastern regimes are ruled by Islamist, often genocidal governments — so there is not much to expect from them in terms of human rights and liberties.

The Kurds need real support, real arms and real recognition. Otherwise, there does not seem to be much difference between the dictatorial, genocidal Middle Eastern regimes and the West, which used to represent democracy and freedom.
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[1] The so-called “peace process” was reportedly started in 2012 and through it, Kurds and the Turkish government were to resolve the Kurdish issue through negotiations.)

Categories: Airstrikes, Combat troops, Islamic State, Kurdish fighters, Kurdish refugees, Kurds, Turkey, U.S. Military
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Shoshana Bryen: The Kurds: A Guide for U.S. Policymakers

June 7, 2015

Shoshana Bryen: The Kurds: A Guide for U.S. Policymakers, securefreedom via You Tube, June 5, 2015

Shoshana Bryen, Senior Director, Jewish Policy Center; Former Senior Director for Security Policy, Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA):

 

Categories: Air strikes, Arab nations, Assad, Caliphate, Department of Defense, Foreign policy, Hezbollah, Iran, Iran - Iraq war, Iran - Syria war, Iran in Yemen, Iran scam, Iranian proxies, Iraq war, Islamic State, Islamism, Kurdish fighters, Kurds, Middle East, Obama, P5+1, Peshmerga, Sanctions, Syria war, Turkey
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