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Syria: Turkey Continues AlQaeda Support
Seven groups of "secular" Syrian insurgents and bandits have united to form a new "Islamic Front". The groups are Ahrar al-Sham, Suqor al-Sham, Liwa al-Tawhid, Jaish al-Islam, Jabhat al-Kurdiya, Liwa al-Haq and Ansar al-Sham. Most of them were in one form or another part of the U.S. supported Free Syrian Army. The "secular" mask of that army is now officially off. This new front is likely the creation of lots of Saudi money.
Meanwhile Turkey has, without much noise, changed some of its foreign policy and is trying to again make nice with Baghdad and Tehran both of which are supporting the Syrian government. But that does not mean that Turkey ended its support for the Islamists. While it recently pretended to have seized some weapons and to have raided some AlQaeda retreats in Turkey it continues to support Islamists insurgents in Syria of all colors and stripes. Consider the details of a recent report on a border town that Al Qaeda in Iraq and Syria took away from a Free Syrian Army group that demanded shares from transports passing through its territory:
Activists said fighters of the al Qaeda affiliate – Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL – had stormed the headquarters of Suqur al-Islam, a moderate Islamist unit that controlled Atma, and set up roadblocks within the last 48 hours.
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"The ISIL deployed anti-aircraft guns at the main roundabout and took Atma quietly," said one of the activists, who did not want to be named.
"The Turks have not stopped supplies from crossing into the town and movement across the border fence is normal."
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Suqur al-Islam is a unit of the Free Syrian Army General Staff, headed by General Selim Idriss, the main opposition military figure, who is based in Turkey. But Suqur al-Islam and the General Staff have fallen out over sharing the weapons crossing through Atma, the activists said.
In the last few days, fighting erupted between Sukur al-Islam and other Free Syrian Army members after Sukur al-Islam seized seven trucks loaded with weapons sent by the General Staff that crossed through Atma.
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"Basically there was collusion between the General Staff and the ISIL."
The externally supported General Staff of the Free Syrian Army is obviously colluding with Al Qaeda and the Turks are still delivering truckloads of weapons to them.
It is quite urgent for the resistance front to respond to this continued support for AlQaeda from Turkey. So far Turkey has paid too small a price for the crimes it commits on Syria and Syrians. There must be ways to change that.
@Bevin (#9);
I disagree.
“Kurdish nationalism is Turkey’s nightmare”
It is not just Turkey’s nightmare, it is also Iran’s, Syria’s and Iraq’s; what is more it should be the nightmare for any wise Kurd be he/she an Iranian, Turkish, Iraqi or a Syrian citizen. Drawing borders based on ethnicity in this region is a sure recipe for disaster. It is a recipe for ethnic cleansing, perpetual ethnic war, wide spread civil war and failed states (in fact failed “statelets”) which is exactly what the imperialism would wish to have, for there is nothing that imperialism fears more than a strong nation.
In fact it won’t be just the Kurds. In case of Iran this is an exact recipe for a disaster far worse than Yugoslavia. First it will be Kurds, then comes the turn for Baluchies, then Azeries, and then who’s next? Gilaks? Mazandaranies? Khuzestan region has a considerable number of ethnic Arabs too… Then what? The definition of “language” (and language is the only thing in this region which would define ethnicity) can be very vague, I can divide proper Persian into many dialects and consider them all different languages and then call each population an ethnicity.
“while the Israelis would lose their current access to Kurdish lands “
Geographically speaking, Israelies have no access to either Kurdish regions or to Azerbaijan, but in reality they are manipulating both of those regions as they wish. So If the “axis of resistance” cannot prevent Israelies to manipulate these regions right now, they will be a hell of a lot more powerless to stop Israelies, if there is an “independent” (!!) Kurdish state in this region.
“It is not as if Iraq has much chance of hanging on to its Kurdish areas anyway.”
Yes that is true, but WHY? The reason is precisely because of the direct military interventions that USA has made in this region since 1991. Kurdish nationalists simply do not have the power to break the states in these region to create an independent state of their own. They can’t do it with one nation much less with destroying 4 nations to create a unified state of their own. Kurdish nationalists know that perfectly well and that is precisely why they do US/Israel’s bidding. They know very well that the only way to break these four nations is through war and they know that the only way to make and win such a war is to use the US military machine.
There can be no independent Kurdish state in this region unless through brute military force and occupation of US. That is the reality (wether we like it or not) and Kurdish nationalists know that very well.
And finally the question remains, to create a new “independent” US colony in this region for what? As I said this once before (some 4 months ago), this is not about “independence”, it is about “separatism”. And the problem of the people in this region will NOT be solved through separatism and balkanization of this region; they can only be solved through democratization (and though it is obvious, let me re-emphasize that by “democratization” I don’t mean liberal democracy). Separatism does not bring democratic rights, in fact in this particular case it will only lead to ethnic based (ie. racist) dictatorships under the diktats of USA and ethnic cleansing of all new “statelets” from ethnic “impurities” to create ethnically “pure” nations. The solution is not dividing the states in this region into “statelets”, the solution is democratizing the states in this region.
If we are interested in the welfare and dignity of the Kurds, it could only be achieved through making the states of their citizenship (ie. Iran, Turkey, Iraq and Syria) democratic, not by giving them a ‘land bogged statelet’ which is an undemocratic colony of USA.
Posted by: Pirouz_2 | Nov 23 2013 0:38 utc | 40
Pirouz_2
Thank you for your thoughtful contribution. I was, to an extent, playing Devil’s Advocate.
I am inclined to think that the best answer to the imperialist tactic of divide and rule- whose ideological base is that “ethnicities always fight each other” and will do until they are exhausted- is best dealt with by a refusal to conform to the, historically false, stereotype.
It is worth remembering that this excuse for intervention has, in one form or another, been behind every imperial enterprise in the past five centuries.
The truth is that, for hundreds of years, there was very little internecine strife between the various communities of the Ottoman caliphate. The caliphate was a collection of provinces, subject to taxation. The further they were from Istanbul the more autonomy they had. The Kurds generally ruled themselves. Or were ruled by Kurdish magnates.
And the same was true not only of the Ottoman but of other large states and empires in the region. It was something that made, for example, India such easy prey for the imperialists.
The myth that Arabs and Kurds are always at each others throats, like the myth that Shia and Sunni (Christian and Jewish) communities cannot co-exist but must be separated for their own good by imperial forces or their surrogates, is nonsense.
The exploitation, the invention of ethnicities and nationalisms, by imperialists has been a means of subduing people and bringing them into submission to the Empire-as-Policeman.
You are probably right about the Kurdish situation, something of which you have much more knowledge than I, but surely the case can be made that so long as Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey insist on imposing “national” identities on their populations (and generally what they are actually doing is to impose a local version of what Soviet critics called Great Russian chauvinism) they are making life very easy for the US, the zionists and others who grow fat by fishing in troubled waters.
If Syria and Iraq merely concede autonomy to the Kurds and postpone a proper constitutional discussion and convention to the return of peace, they stand a very good chance of being able to withdraw from one front to concentrate on the real enemy the imperialists and their auxiliaries. In practical terms, in Syria and Iraq this is already happening, because neither government has the power to impose itself on the Kurds. In Syria it seems that the Kurds know that they will have to defend themselves from the wahabi militias, and, by clear implication their co-sponsors in Israel and the US/NATO system.
That ought to spell trouble for Turkey and Bandar’s banditti.
There is another way of looking at your prediction of inter-ethnic strife until doomsday. That is that there are so many communities living together, so many ethnicities, religions, sects and cults, factions and clans-and they lived together with remarkably little internecine strife until the coming of the western Empires that it is not hard to predict that, when the imperialists are expelled, those modus vivendi will return.
Until Israel set to work dividing communities, for example, Jews had lived throughout the region for hundreds of years. Nor did the Druze need jobs in the Israeli Border Guards to live in past centuries. Nor did the Alawi in Syria or Assyrians in Iraq require western European colonial governments to save them.
Iran is something of an exception because, quite apart from its long history, it has been subjected to enormous pressures since the Second World War, by the Empire. The first phase was the imposition of the Shah and the development of the world’s worst tyranny in preserving his power as an American puppet. Then came what we have now, forty plus years of war, trade war, financial confiscations, terrorist attacks, state sponsored sabotage, assassinations and racist slurs.
Such things drive those victimised, in this case the people of Iran, together in self defence. So it is not improbable that the great majority of Iranians, whatever their ethnic or cultural sub community, like the French in 1792 are nationalists, impatient at separatists, behind whom they see imperialist puppet-masters.
Posted by: bevin | Nov 23 2013 4:39 utc | 61
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