Guest views are now limited to 12 pages. If you get an "Error" message, just sign in! If you need to create an account, click here.

Jump to content
  • CRYPTO REWARDS!

    Full endorsement on this opportunity - but it's limited, so get in while you can!

Obama's Syrian Tragedy in Motion: Kobani Explained


Recommended Posts

Long, but pretty much addresses the emergent questions as to what's really going on over there and if nothing else ...is a fairly concise framework with which to make sense out of why we are not doing what we said we were...

 

Another humanitarian catastrophe may be just hours away at Kobani. The latter is the Syrian Kurdish town on the border with Turkey that is now surrounded by ISIS tanks and is being pounded day after day by ISIS heavy artillery. Already this lethal phalanx, which fuses 21st century American technology and equipment with 12th century religious fanaticism, has rolled through dozens of Kurdish villages and towns in the region around Kobani, sending 180,000 refugees fleeing for their lives across the border.
 
Self-evidently the lightly armed Kurdish militias desperately holding out in Kobani are fighting the right enemy—-that is, the Islamic State. So why has Obama’s grand coalition not been able to relieve the siege?  Why haven’t American bombers and cruise missiles, for instance, been able to destroy the American tanks and artillery which a terrifying band of butchers has brought to bear on several hundred thousand innocent Syrian Kurds who have made this enclave their home for more than a century? Why has not NATO ally Turkey, with a 600,000 man military, 3,500 tanks and 1,000 modern aircraft and helicopters, done anything meaningful to help the imperiled Kurds?
 
why doesn’t Turkey put some infantry and spotters on the ground—-highly trained “boots” that are literally positioned a few kilometers away on its side of the border?
Well, Turkish President Erdogan just explained his government’s reluctance quite succinctly, as reported by Bloomberg on Saturday:

  • For us, ISIL and the (Kurdish) PKK are the same,” Erdogan said in televised remarks today in Istanbul

And that’s literally true because from Turkey’s vantage point the Kobani showdown is a case of terrorist-on-terrorist. The Kurdish fighters in Kobani are linked to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party or PKK. The latter has waged a separatist campaign of armed insurrection and terror inside and around Turkey for 30-years and has long been considered Turkey’s top security threat. In fact, Turkey has received untold amounts of US aid, equipment and intelligence over the years to help suppress this uprising. That’s the reason that PKK is officially classified as a “terrorist” group by the U.S. and the government in Ankara.

And, no, the Syrian and Turkish Kurds so classified as terrorists are not some black sheep cousins of the “good guy” Kurds in Erbil and northeastern Iraq that CNN parades every night as America’s heroic ally on the ground. They are all part of the greater Kurdish nation of some 30 million who inhabit southeastern Turkey, northeastern Syria and Iraq and western Iran. Taken together, these Kurdish enclaves comprise the single largest ethnic population in the Middle East that does not have its own state, and which has been a source of irredentist conflict and instability for decades.
 
As a matter of fact, Erdogan has been pursuing a rapprochement with the Turkish Kurds for the better part of the last decade and had actually made progress in quelling the violence and initiating a political solution. Yet Washington’s two latest campaigns of “regime change” could not have been more inimical to a peaceful resolution of the region’s long-festering Kurdish problem. And, of course, the historic roots of that problem were served up by the West 100 years ago when its strip pants diplomats carved out borders that gave practically every major ethnic group their own nation, except the Kurds.
 
In that context, the Bush/neocon destruction of Saddam’s dictatorship in Iraq paved the way for fragmentation of the Sykes-Picot borders and the de facto partition of Iraq, including a rump Kurdish state in the northeast. Then Washington’s foolish delusion that it was spending $25 billion to train and equip an “Iraqi army” added fuel to the fire.
 
The so-called Iraqi army was never a national military arm of the Iraqi state because the latter had already failed owing to the onslaught of the US “liberation” and occupation. Instead, it was a glorified Shiite militia whose members had no interest in dying to protect or hold Sunni lands in the west and north. So the “Iraqi army’s” American arms, abandoned wholesale and then captured by ISIS, literally created the necessity for the Syrian Kurds to mobilize and arm themselves in self defense. Presently, another rump Kurdish state rose along much of Turkey’s 560-mile Syrian border.
 
The original trigger for that development had actually been Anderson Cooper’s War to liberate the Syrian people from the brutish but secular regime that ruled them in Damascus. It too set off forces of fragmentation and partition that have now come home to roost in Kobani.
 
Thus, after the Arab spring uprising in 2011, the US ambassador to Syria pulled the equivalent of what we now call a “Yats” or an organized campaign to overthrow the government to which he was accredited; and in short order the R2P ladies aid society in the White House (Susan Rice and Samantha Powers) made the State Department’s maneuvering to undermine Syria’s constitutionally elected government official policy, proclaiming that Bashar Assad “has to go”.
 
In no time, the Kurdish enclaves in Syria essentially declared their independence, and reached a modus vivendi with Damascus. Namely, they would keep Assad’s main enemy—the majority Sunni Arabs—-out of the Kurdish enclaves on the central and eastern Syrian border with Turkey in return for being left alone and exempt from visitations by the Syrian air force.
 
Needless to say, that looked to the Turks like collaboration with Assad—whose removal from power ranks far higher on Ankara’s priority scale than making war on ISIS. On the other hand, Turkey’s proposal to staunch the flood of Kurdish and other Syrian refugees across its border by occupying a 20 mile “buffer zone” inside Syria is seen by the Kurds as a plot against them.
As Bloomberg explains,

  • Kurds say the plan is aimed at crushing their nascent autonomous administration, carved out during Syria’s three-year civil war as Assad’s government lost control of their part of the country. Turkey says the Syrian Kurds are collaborating with Assad and should have been fighting him.

Meanwhile, the modern-day George Washington of the Kurdish peoples, Abdullah Ocalan, who has languished in a Turkish prison on an island outside Istanbul since 1999, warns that if Turkey does not come to the aid of Kobani his negotiations with Erdogan might end and the three decade civil war which had resulted in 40,000 Turkish deaths might resume.  Yet as one expert in the region further explained to Bloomberg, coming to the aid of the Kurdish militia affiliated with the PKK would go beyond the pale for Ankara:
 
 

It’s “unthinkable” for Turkey to go beyond that and assist PKK-linked groups such as the Syrian Kurds, according to Nihat Ali Ozcan, an analyst at the Economic Policy Research Foundation in Ankara.
“No Turkish politician can explain to the public why the government is aiding the PKK and its affiliated groups after fighting against it for 30 years,” he said by phone.

In short, the region’s logical bulwark against ISIS—-the huge, modern, lethal Turkish military—is stymied by a tide of Kurdish irredentism that Washington’s “regime change” policy has elicited all around it and within Turkey’s own borders. In fact, it now has two rump Kurdistan’s on its borders and its huge internal Kurdish population bestirred and mobilized in a pan-Kurdish drama. Rather than progressing toward internal political settlement, the Kurdish political leadership in Ankara—-which has supported Erdogan in return for lavish economic development funds in Kurdish areas—is now openly critical:

“The people of Kobani feel deserted and furious,” Faysal Sariyildiz, another pro-Kurdish legislator, said yesterday.

The current activities of the Turkish military on the border check-by-jowl with the ISIS militants laying siege to Kobani say it all. On the one hand, they are managing the flow of Syrian Kurdish refugees desperately fleeing across the border. At the same time, they are systematically attempting to stop the inflow of native Turkish Kurd fighters streaming toward Kobani to join the defense of their kinsmen. Ankara clearly does not want Turkish Kurds to become battle-trained in urban warfare. So far, however, they have apparently not fired even a single round of artillery at the ISIS-manned American tanks that are within a kilometer of an epic slaughter in Kobani.
 
Vice-President Biden was right for once. Washington has no real allies in the region because they all have another agenda. Turkey is focused on its near enemy in the Kurdish regions and its far enemy in Damascus, not the ISIS butchers who have laid claim to the Sunni lands of Euphrates valley in parts of what used to be Iraq and Syria. The Qataris want Assad gone and a new government—even one controlled by ISISwhich will grant them a pipeline concession through Syria in order to tap the giant European market for their immense natural gas reserves.
 
Likewise, the Saudi’s want to destroy the Assad regime because it is allied with their Shiite enemy across the Persian Gulf in Iran and because they fear their own abused Shiite populations which are concentrated in their oilfield regions. Consequently, they see the fight against ISIS as essentially a pretext for escalating their war against Damascus, and are not even interested in bombing the non-ISIS jihadi like the Nusra Front that they see as allies in the campaign against Assad.
 
At the end of the day, Obama’s air campaign amounts to nothing more than a glorified international air force training exercise. Pilots and air crews from the UK, Denmark, Belgium, France, Australia, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Jordan etc.  will get to run a few live fire sorties at politically correct targets. So the Brits will bomb in Iraq but not Syria; the Saudi’s will bomb ISIS targets close to Assad-held territories, but NOT Nusra Front positions; and the Qataris will go along for the ride pretending to help, even as they preserve deniability that they ever dropped an actual bomb for that day down the road when they seek to make a pipeline deal with the Islamic State.

Never in recorded history has the US conducted a more feckless, pointless, and strategically irrational war.

Indeed, the real lesson is that by inserting itself into tribal and sectarian conflicts in these pockets of anarchy Washington only succeeds in generating more of the same. That is exactly what the siege of Kobani is all about.

So maybe Joe Biden could explain this to the big thinkers in the White House. If the Turks are unwilling to stop an easily preventable mass slaughter by ISIS on their own doorstep what kind of fractured and riven coalition has Washington actually assembled?

 

And how will this coalition of the disingenuous, the hypocritical and the politically opportunistic ever succeed in bringing peace and stability to the historic cauldron of tribal and religious conflict in Mesopotamia and the Levant that two decades of Washington’s wars and regime change interventions have only drastically intensified?

 

By all accounts and as so dramatically portrayed by the siege of Kobani, eliminating the threat of ISIS is not now, nor was it ever the target of  Washington's coalition. The American people have  been led into a disingenuous war leaving the world to wonder what if anything, will happen to engage accountability in redirecting the  focus on the ISIS target they were sold.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

My buddy says Turkey is about to blow up over this... far beyond that of days past.....

 

As Kurdish fighters continue to battle ISIL in the Syrian town of Kobani, close to the border with Turkey, both Kurdish leaders and the UN have warned of an imminent bloodbath at the hands of extremists.

 

Despite US-led airstrikes, ISIL forces appear on the verge of overrunning the town.Turkey has troops and tanks lined up along the border within a few hundred yards of the fighting, but has so far refused to intervene, despite pleas from the UN.

 

The Turkish government is demanding a buffer zone and no-fly zone be set up in Syria before they get involved. The US has refused, and critics say the buffer zone would be used as an excuse for Turkey to crush the Kurds in the region.

There is also anger among Turkish Kurds who are being blocked from crossing into Syria to fight ISIL.

 

One local man said: “If Turkey stays silent, it will be much worse, we know this. In every corner around Turkey, there will be war, people will die, shops will be burned down, cars will be set on fire, people will die. You can already see people’s reactions. People will start attacking soldiers, attacking police. A big massacre could happen.”

 

The fate of Kobani has led to violent street protests across the country which have left at least 37 dead.

The Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan has dismissed the demonstrations saying they will never force him to change his foreign policy.

 

“Both those layabouts, and the leaders who hold their strings in hand, should be aware that Turkey is not a country to be intimidated by street protests and change direction,” Erdogan told a rally.

 

In Dusseldorf, Germany, thousands of people gathered on Saturday to demand more support for the Kurds in Syria and Iraq and that more pressure be put on Turkey to help.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I don't honestly know as to the credibility of this journal, however this particular article  was written by a former senior security policy analyst in the office of the Secretary of Defense....
 
 

 
 
Source: Secret deal could doom 160,000 to ISIS
 

 

WASHINGTON, D.C. – A secret decision apparently has been made by the United States, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and even Iran to let the strategic Syrian Kurdish town of Kobani on the Turkish-Syrian border fall to ISIS fighters, jeopardizing the lives of some 160,000 Syrian Kurds, WND has been told by a well-placed Middle East expert.

In letting Kobani fall to ISIS, the source said, there was agreement “to deal with ISIS later.”

The apparent decision aims to diminish the influence of the Kurds in Syria and weaken the prospect of creating a sovereign Kurdistan, which is sought by the Kurds not only in Syria, but in Turkey, Iran and Iraq..

“It is a real set up behind the backs of everyone,” the well-placed source told WND.

Ankara has brought its tanks up to the Turkish-Syrian border in sight of Kobani but has not committed any troops to stop the ISIS siege of the Kurdish city.

Meanwhile, the Syrian Kurds have been appealing for arms and ammunition in addition to aerial bombing by the U.S.-led coalition of Arab countries on ISIS positions. Sources on the ground, however, say the bombing has become virtually meaningless, since ISIS fighters have blended into the population, requiring more fighters on the ground.

The Syrian Kurds have been fighting ISIS just as their counterparts in Iraq, the Kurdish peshmerga, have been doing to keep ISIS from taking over their territory, which comprises some of the largest oil reserves in Iraq and Syria.

The Turks have resisted assisting the Kurds since Ankara for years has been battling the Kurdish Workers Party, or PKK, which seeks to carve out a portion of the border countries to create Kurdistan.

For Turkey, the Syrian and Turkish Kurds occupy valuable oil resources sought by the energy-deficient Turks.

In addition, the Kurds have an alliance with the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad, whom the Turks want to see overthrown in favor of a Sunni-run government.

However, ISIS clearly is the only predominant Sunni group in a position to take over, since it already has grabbed much of northeastern Syria and western and central Iraq to form its caliphate, which it seeks to govern under strict Islamic law, or Shariah.

For Turkey, an ISIS takeover of Kobani would help split up the Iraqi Kurds from the Syrian Kurds, further diminishing the chance for a united Kurdistan.

At the same time, it would give ISIS a northern bridge between Iraq and Syria, which it hasn’t had until now.

Consequently, not only will the Turks refuse to commit combat troops, so will the U.S.

Because of the Kurds’ ties not only with Syrian President Assad but also with Iran, sources say the U.S. doesn’t want to leave the impression it is bolstering Assad and working with Iran by providing further assistance to the Syrian Kurds beyond aerial bombings.

There are questions concerning the extent to which the Iranians went along with the secret deal to let Kobani fall to ISIS.

As WND reported, there have been calls in recent days within Iran for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps to assist the Syrian Kurds, prompting demonstrations of support in a number of Iranian cities.

As a signal of Iran’s concern, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Marzieh Afkham warned of a humanitarian catastrophe in Kobani.

“Iran will soon send humanitarian aid for the residents and refugees in this area through the Syrian government,” Afkham said.

Shiite Iran is a major supporter of the government of Assad, a Shiite-Alawite.

Iran’s deputy foreign minister for Arab and African affairs, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, has made it clear that Iran doesn’t want Turkish troops inside Syria. Iran now is in discussions with Turkey to return some 200,000 Kurds who have fled Syria for refuge in Turkey.

At the same time, Amir-Abdollahian made clear Iran “will take any necessary action to help the Kurds in Kobani in line with its support for the Syrian government in its fight against terrorism.”

The WND source said Iran’s interest in wanting to help the Kurds is “just a front,” since Iran, like Turkey, has opposed an independent Kurdistan carved out of western Iran, which, like the Kurdish portions of Turkey, Iraq and Syria, have rich oil deposits.

Although Tehran wants to show support for the Kurds because of their backing of Assad, it nonetheless may be more concerned about the repeated historical efforts by the Kurds to establish their own Kurdish state. There are strong ethnic, linguistic and cultural ties between the Kurds and Iran. However, Tehran doesn’t want to see the Kurds taking over its western oil reserves.


 
Edited by Rayzur
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
 Share

  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.


×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

By using this site, you agree to our Terms of Use.