|
Kurds Lose Out As Neo-Ottoman Turks Steal Syria’s Jarablus
Early this morning Turkey invaded Syria. A contingent of 1,500 Turkish sponsored "Syrian rebels", aka Islamist from all over the world, were accompanied by some Turkish special forces and twenty tanks to capture the city Jarablus at the Turkish-Syrian border. The move followed a night of artillery warm-ups and bombing raids. Shortly after noon the "Syrian revolution" flag and the Turkish banner(!) were raised over the city.
There was no resistance to the move. The Islamic State, which had been informed of the attack, had evacuated all fighters and their families out of Jarablus. (The families went to Raqqa but the fighters went where?) No shots were fired. As one commentator remarked: They even left mints on the pillows. The toleration of ISIS by Turkey, which includes some not so secret support, will likely continue.
bigger
The claimed aim of the Turkish move is to close the Turkish border to ISIS. That claim is obviously nonsense. The border can be closed on the Turkish side. To move the crossing point a few kilometers south does not change anything. The second, more plausible claimed aim, is to prevent the movement of the Kurdish YPG forces, under the U.S. assigned label SDF, towards west-Syria. Such a move would create a Kurdish statelet all along the Turkish border and endanger Turkey itself while it is fighting a Kurdish insurgency on its own ground.
The Kurds had announced the move west and recently taken the city of Manbij away from the Islamic State. This with the help of heavy U.S. bombardment. As part of their future plans a new SDF-Jarablus Military Council was announced yesterday. But the head of that entity was assassinated just three hours after the introductory press conference. The Kurds blamed the Turks for the killing. Today the Turkish government announced that it will not only take Jarablus but also Manbij and throw the Kurds back east behind the Euphrates river.
The U.S. had so far supported the Kurdish move towards west-Syria with special forces and air support. But it reacted to the Turkish move against its alliance with the Kurds as it always did over the last 30 years. It immediately betrayed the Kurds as a bigger interests arouse. Turkey is a NATO ally that threatens to move to a closer alliance with Russia and Iran. The U.S. can not condone that. The Kurds will therefore again have to suffer for their gullibility and ambition.
U.S. vice president Biden arrived in Ankara today for a penitential pilgrimage. The Turkish government accuses the U.S. to have been involved in the recent coup attempt against it. There may well be some truth to that. In a public snub Biden was received at the airport of the Turkish capital by the deputy mayor of the city. For now the Turkish president Erdogan will continue his way no matter what the U.S. says or does.
The real plan behind the Turkish invasions is way beyond ISIS or the Kurdish issue. As Turkish papers were eager to point out, the invasion happened to the day 500 years after the battle of Marj Dabiq north of Aleppo:
The battle was part of the Ottoman–Mamluk War (1516–17) between the Ottoman Empire and the Mamluk Sultanate, which ended in an Ottoman victory and conquest of much of the Middle East, …
The choosing of this date points to Erdogan's real ambition: To recreate an Ottoman empire which would include at least north Syria and north Iraq.
There has been little protest by the Syrian government against the Turkish move on Jarablus. It lamented a lack of coordination in fighting terrorism. Not that it could have done much else. After five years of war there is no capacity left to oppose its big northern neighbor. No protest at all came from Syria's allies Russia and Iran. Blunt words were reserved for U.S. behavior on the Syria issue and its support for al-Qaeda. There clearly is some kind of agreement between Russia, Iran, Syria and Turkey to accommodate the Turkish invasion.
Any sympathy for the Kurds, which might have led to some countermove, has vanished after Kurdish YPG fighters recently attacked Syrian government forces in the north-eastern city of Hasakah. That attack, completely useless and unnecessary in the big picture, cost them- as predicted – their dream of a viable nation state. The Kurdish gamblers, like they always tend to do, became overambitious and now lost all they had gained. They will have to retreat eastward, surrounded by enemies and without any friends left in today's world. What can the anarcho-marxists of the YPG do now? Ally with and bleed for wahhabi Saudi Arabia? For how long?
The "Syrian rebels" Turkey used to march towards Jarablus were pulled from the ongoing attack on the Aleppo city front. The Syrian government forces will be somewhat relieved to have less enemies to kill (vid) in their defense of the 1.2-1.5 million of their people in the city. But that relief will only be for a short time. As the emphasis of the Marj Dabiq battle shows, Erdogan's ambition are much bigger than some rural strip of land along the Syrian Turkish border. He wants to rule over Aleppo in Syria as well as over Mosul in Iraq. The war on Syria in the west, run by Turkey, the U.S. and various Gulf states, will continue. In this bigger context the Turkish move to Jarablus is a mere skirmish on the side.
So now everything is clear, a fog of war and lies has rescinded and naked truth was revealed and it is apparently not a picture author wanted to see.
First, what the hell was the Iran deal all about since Iran had no nukes to give up? It was as recently revealed that it was all about privatization of Iranian people’s national treasure namely oil reserves for frozen Shah money (ransom money) and the rest payable upon introduction of western oil giants into Iran. Recent deal with Turkey and Iraq (and Russia???) about eradication of PKK was a supplement to it that seals fate of Syria as a unified country, namely Syria has been effectively partitioned. I must say that gullibility of such a move facing imperial evil is astonishing even by low standards rotten brains of Iranian clerics, Sultan of Ankara, or on some other days sane Putin.
Second, As anyone who reads Syrian War Update and other sources knows Russia in last months since the phony ceasefire, de facto, under unrelated geopolitical pressure, switched the political sides and joined the US coalition [w/ Israel] via abandoning the Assad regime, politically if not entirely militarily, blackmailing desperate Assad to go along with anything including things that will soon lead to his demise as all Syria leader now enjoying 55% of popularity and having won two elections since 2011.
Do Russian care? No a bit, they are interested in their own short sided goals in Syria while watching their global interests, and believe me they will be fu..cked again like in was in Ukraine and Eastern Europe, ridiculously whipped up for war which made Russians pay, now so far monetarily not with their blood yet. And in the same way it goes for apparent disastrous ceasefire supposedly to prevent Turkish invasion. It did not.
Sadly today Russia, by acquiescing to naked aggression of Turkey in Syria, no UN resolution, or open condemnations of that blalant illegal act, lost significant moral capital of her engagement in Syria what was her primary strength in this conflict as pointed out by excellent last year Putin’s UN speech, the only vice left for international law and order, and stooped to a level of just another political toy in the US imperial hands.
What happening on the ground in Syria [loss of military strategic initiative since this phony ceasefire] and in wider geopolitical real cannot be characrized in any other way as another Putin political and propaganda defeat. And no illusion of a Turkish pivot to the East as a “brilliant” move to draw Turkey out of US imperial hands, even peddled by this respectable blog, can change that. What a BS. The coup was not American otherwise Erdogan would have been dead, it was his own political consolidation ploy to show he will not be dislodged and that he is ready to be a US killer again and will kill anyone he pleases friend and foes ‘du jour’ as good attack dog would do. If Puttin believes that he can make a deal with US or Turkey not from the position of overwhelming power he is an idiot. I am sorry.
Such worries have been expressed six months ago:
An excerpt from: https://syrianwarupdate.wordpress.com/2016/02/17/clear-the-fog-vlad/
“Vlad, they will not lift the sanction and forget about sailing on your yacht in Tuscany anytime soon, you are better than that, just keep, steady, do not let Russian superior political, military, legal and moral position to be tarnished by some half backed political maneuvers.
Do not even fake making deal with those medieval gangsters, it won’t work, western propaganda won’t ease, that’s the fact. Turkey won’t be controlled by the US, since she is doing US bidding unless corrected by Russian forces on the ground and in the air. Politics of appeasement won’t work, as history teaches us, only steady gravitas and determination will do the job.
Vlad, you pumped natural gas to Kiev fascist regime for free in winter 2014/2015 for humanitarian reasons and transit to your western friends who spitted in your face while they were slaughtering your kin in Donbass. And to add insult to injury they never paid for it and now defaulted of your eurobonds with no consequences.
You do not have to be too friendly to US western stooges, who want you and your friend Assad dead.”
And one more thing, It is such a appalling attitude to Kurds even that MoA expresses lately. No, Kurds, PYD, YPG is not a problem in Syria never were, per old agreement with Turkey Assad granted them controlled autonomy and in 2012 expanded the autonomy broadly [practically for a first time allowing them to rule themselves and explicitly put them in charge of defending themselves from ANF and later ISIL], by withdrawing from Hasakah province massive SAA personnel and equipment to fight elsewhere while leaving practically a bit of a SAA protection force for Arab population on their requests.
There was no fighting there between Kurds and SAA from 2011 until now as I recall. It was that way before the YPG/PYD leadership was corrupted/bribed by the US, mostly with weapons, when they were the only force to effectively resist assaults of US terrorist proxies [ISIL+old moderates] while SAA was disintegrating and Assad survival was in question.
Kurds did not revolt against legitimate government of Syria, they did not become traitors of the Syria secular state, in anytime during the war until their quite recent incoherent utterances about ridiculous Rojava or something, they did their job of protection Kurds ethnic people for ISIL savages.
At worse Kurds are victims of their corrupted leadership and vicious geopolitics once again, fake, switching alliances and fake declarations of support and that includes gestures from Russians and even Iranians. The fact is that Syrian Kurds did not break any international or internal state laws, and blaming them for the situation they have been forced into [not trying to realize some ridiculous dreams] while ignoring true conniving culprit i.e. global geopolitics of lies and deceit and dealings with imperial evil, is preposterous at minimum and what’s worse devoid of any merit.
But I guess to understand that complexity one needs to read something like that posted in January of this year:
Excerpt from: https://syrianwarupdate.wordpress.com/2016/01/22/political-mosaic-of-syrian-war-part-i-kurds-and-assad-regime/
As they successfully did with KRG and Peshmerga, a Barzani Clan Militia in Iraq, the US became interested in taking over YPG and Syrian Kurdish leadership of PYD, in an attempt to corrupt/control them as well in order to calm down of some of Turkish well-founded fears about highly trained YPG under command of PYD sister party of PKK at Turkish borders.
Facing with annihilation just 18 months ago, YPG temporary and seemingly accepted the US air support in fighting ISIL, and tolerate some US boots on the ground, in Kurdish areas but this marriage of convenience cannot last and is politically so fragile that could be broken on a moment notice. And as soon as ISIL is substantially weaken or defeated, US Special Forces, illegally operating on Syrian soil, will quickly be forced out under any pretext of Syrian national sovereignty or something else.
Again, US wet dream of doing the same with Syrian Kurds as with they did with Iraqi Kurds is bound to fail, first of all because the situation in Syrian is diametrically different.
Back then, in 1990-ties US provided the only possible protection against still strong Saddam Hussein army for the Iraqi-Kurdish forces under CIA control while now in Syria, Assad is much weaker and already conceded strong Kurdish autonomy and local self-rule, facing the fact of infeasibility of enforcement of his political reign over Kurds for many years after the war.
However, Assad demanded Syrian territorial integrity, and Damascus veto in the Syrian defense and international relations being respected by Kurds. Both sides are considering Turkey as being common enemy and a threat to their particular interests and both would do anything possible to find a compromise, with Turkey on a losing side. They have no illusions that, for global geopolitical reasons, the US ultimately will support Turkey and hence the PYD political/military embrace of US is treated as temporary and tactical measure.
Posted by: Kalen | Aug 24 2016 22:38 utc | 40
|
