|
Syria – Another Turkish Invasion Is Imminent
After two years of relative quietness the situation in Syria is again escalating.
This follows a terror attack in Istanbul two weeks ago allegedly committed by a woman who had traveled there from the Kurdish controlled city of Kobani in northeast Syria. Turkey accused the U.S., which is occupying northeast Syria, of complicity in the attack.
A week after the Istanbul incident Turkey started to bomb Kurdish positions in east Syria. It has now threatened to (again) invade it.
bigger
I have not written about the conflict for quite a while and there are many new readers. So here is a list of names and abbreviations relevant to the story:
- PKK – Kurdistan Workers Party – fighting, often with terrorist methods, for a larger Kurdistan country to be formed from Kurdish areas in Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey
- YPG – People's Defense Units – Kurdish-Syrian part of the PKK, currently silently allied with the U.S. occupation force in eastern Syria
- YPJ – Female units of the YPG
- SDF – Syrian Democratic Forces – 'former' YPG currently openly allied with the U.S. occupation force in eastern Syria
- Mazlum – 'former' YPG head, current SDF head in Syria collaborating with the U.S.
- Rojava – self-administrating area in northeast Syria under SDF / U.S. control
- Barzani – head of government in the Kurdish ruled province in north Iraq – hostile to PKK/YPG, friend with U.S.
- SAA – Syrian Arab Army – Syria's regular military
- HTS – Hayat Tahir al-Sham – Al-Qaeda derivative, Turkish proxy which rules parts of northwest Syria
Stealing from the Turkish commentator Agitpapa here is, slightly edited, the latest news from the area.
agitpapa @agitpapa – 9:09 UTC · 26 Nov 2022
It's the PKK's anniversary tomorrow and there are rumors that Turkey wants to kick off its land war against the Kurds in Rojava on that date.
Three days of Turkish airstrikes allegedly greenlit by Russia and the US – although the Turks claim they were all from inside Turkish airspace – have devastated the civilian and military infrastructure of Rojava. Power generation was knocked out, leaving 65K villages in the dark. Oil wells, the LNG bottling plant, and grain silos were destroyed and top SDF bases in Hasaka were bombed, including Mazlum's HQ.
The US only registered a weak protest against its main occupation base being bombed by a NATO member. Airstrikes also hit SAA and Russian positions in Tal Tamer, killing SAA soldiers. SDF sources claim the Russians evacuated shortly before the airstrike.
The Turks bombed over 40 targets in both US- and Russian-controlled areas, in N Syria as well as Jazeera, tracing a wide map of the many-sided blackmail and treachery that seems to be culminating now with the total cleansing of the Kurdish population:
The Ukraine blackmail of the Turks vs Russia, extracting Russian acquiescence in exchange for their economic/political support for Russia against the West, the treachery of the SDF, allying itself with the imperialist global hegemon against the Syrian people and Russia, and the treachery of the US, stabbing its colonial Kurdish army in the back yet again.
The pro-PKK former SDF spox Mustafa Bali made it very clear how he sees the betrayal of his people. He's from the PKK and knows that NATO has never meant anything but death for his people.
Source – bigger
Yes, the Yanks briefly helped the Kurds defeat ISIS, which they themselves created, but it turned out that it was only to turn the YPG/YPJ into their colonial army.
For Syrian Kurds, the great enemy is still Assad and his ally Russia but the PKK knows better.
As the PKK resists the Turkish invasion in the Iraqi Zap river area, Barzani stabs it in the back while NATO and the EU heap praises on Barzani and try to pressure the SDF into submitting to him. Even Mazlum couldn't betray the PKK that much but still remains in the service of the Yanks.
Today the Russians gave the YPG one last chance:
Balanche @FabriceBalanche – 10:43 UTC · 26 Nov 2022
At the meeting held in Qamishli, Russia asked the YPG to withdraw all its military presence from the Turkish border to the M4 road (and leave the entire region to the government). Otherwise, Russia warned the #YPG that Turkey's military operation was inevitable. The YPG has rejected it.
If the Westerners don't stop Turkey, it's the end of the Kurdish autonomy in northeastern Syria. But can Europe and the United States oppose to Turkey in the context of the Ukrainian crisis?
In my view the 'westerner's' still need the wannabe Sultan Erdogan and can not a risk a further drift of Turkey towards Russia. If Erdogan wants to invade northeast Syria he can now do so. The Kurdish leaders, in their never ending obstinacy, will again sacrifice their people.
Nothing is going to fundamentally change, unless the US is willing to abandon the Kurds, which it is not at present, as far as I understand it.
Posted by: laguerre | Nov 26 2022 16:17 utc | 5
The US has already stabbed the Kurds in the back many times since the end of WWII. The following is a cut and paste and edit from a 2019 INTERCEPT article attacking President Donald Trump for betraying the Kurds in Syria. Now they can, and should, review that article to include President Joe Biden’s betrayal. But the point here is about the long history between the Kurds as a people and the United States.
1). The 1920 Treaty of Sèvres completely dismembered the Ottoman Empire, including most of what’s now Turkey, and allocated a section for a possible Kurdistan. But the Turks fought back, making enough trouble that the U.S. supported a new treaty in 1923, the Treaty of Lausanne. The Treaty of Lausanne allowed the British and French to carve off present-day Iraq and Syria, respectively, for themselves. But it made no provision for the Kurds.
2). After World War II, the U.S. gradually assumed the British role as main colonial power in the Mideast. We armed Iraqi Kurds during the rule of Abdel Karim Kassem, who governed Iraq from 1958 to 1963, because Kassem was failing to follow orders.
We then supported a 1963 military coup — which included a small supporting role by a young Saddam Hussein — that removed Kassem from power. We immediately cut off our aid to the Kurds and, in fact, provided the new Iraqi government with napalm to use against them.
3). By the 1970s, the Iraqi government had drifted into the orbit of the Soviet Union. The Nixon administration, led by Henry Kissinger, hatched a plan with Iran (then our ally, ruled by the Shah) to arm Iraqi Kurds.
The plan wasn’t for the Kurds in Iraq to win, since that might encourage the Kurds in Iran to rise up themselves. It was just to bleed the Iraqi government. But as a congressional report later put it, “This policy was not imparted to our clients, who were encouraged to continue fighting. Even in the context of covert action ours was a cynical enterprise.”
Then the U.S. signed off on agreements between the Shah and Saddam that included severing aid to the Kurds. The Iraqi military moved north and slaughtered thousands, as the U.S. ignored heart-rending pleas from our erstwhile Kurdish allies. When questioned, a blasé Kissinger explained that “covert action should not be confused with missionary work.”
4). During the 1980s, the Iraqi government moved on to actual genocide against the Kurds, including the use of chemical weapons. The Reagan administration was well aware of Saddam’s use of nerve gas, but because they liked the damage Saddam was doing to Iran, it opposed congressional efforts to impose sanctions on Iraq. The U.S. media also faithfully played its role. When a Washington Post reporter tried to get the paper to publish a photograph of a Kurd killed by chemical weapons, his editor responded, “Who will care?”
5). As the U.S. bombed Iraq during the Gulf War in 1991, George H.W. Bush famously called on “the Iraqi military and Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands, to force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside.” Both Iraqi Shias in southern Iraq and Iraqi Kurds in northern Iraq heard this and tried to do exactly that. [But] the U.S. military stood down as Iraq massacred the rebels across the country.
6). During the Clinton administration in the 1990s, the Iraqi Kurds, were considered the good Kurds, because they were persecuted by Iraq, our enemy, they were worthy of U.S. sympathy. But the Kurds a few miles north in Turkey started getting uppity too, and since they were annoying our ally, they were the bad Kurds. The U.S. sent Turkey huge amounts of weaponry, which it used — with U.S. knowledge — to murder tens of thousands of Kurds and destroy thousands of villages.
7). Before the Iraq War in 2003, pundits such as Christopher Hitchens and Bill Chritol said we had to do it [go to war with Iraq] to help the Kurds. Daniel Ellsberg had this exchange with neoconservative William Kristol on C-SPAN just as the war started:
Ellsberg: The Kurds have every reason to believe they will be betrayed again by the United States, as so often in the past. The spectacle of our inviting Turks into this war … could not have been reassuring to the Kurds …
Kristol: I’m against betraying the Kurds. Surely your point isn’t that because we betrayed them in the past, we should betray them this time?
Ellsberg: Not that we should, just that we will.
Kristol: We will not. We will not.
In 2007, the U.S. allowed Turkey to carry out a heavy bombing campaign against Iraqi Kurds inside Iraq. By this point, Kristol’s magazine the Weekly Standard was declaring that this betrayal was exactly what America should be doing.
https://Eight Times the U.S. Has Betrayed the Kurds (theintercept.com)
8). RT. Nov. 22, 2022: US endorses Turkish operation in Syria.
The White House conceded that the process could negatively impact America’s Kurdish partners.
Posted by: Ed Nelson | Nov 26 2022 21:16 utc | 67
|
