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This program was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
Introduction: Analyzing the shootdown of a Russian Su-24 aircraft by a Turkish F‑16, this program details disturbing information that the attack was not only a deliberate ambush, but that the air forces of that NATO country have been providing air cover for the al-Qaeda and ISIS-linked combatants fighting inside Syria. (“Air cover” refers to combat aircraft neutralizing enemy air threats to ground forces. This should not be confused with “air support,” which refers to combat aircraft acting in support of ground forces against their opponents–serving, in effect, as “airborne artillery.”)
Interviewed by Andrew Cockburn, Pierre Sprey (who helped develop the F‑16) opined: ” . . . Looking at the detailed Russian timeline of what happened—as well as the much less detailed Turkish radar maps—I’d say the evidence looks pretty strong that the Turks were setting up an ambush. They certainly weren’t doing anything that would point to a routine air patrol along the border. . . .”
A very important article from Harper’s sets forth key points of analysis of the attack:
- The area attacked by the Su-24s was a major crossing point for trucks, oil tankers in particular (this was an area where Turkmen militias supported by Turkey and sympathetic to the Nusra Front (AQI in Syria) and ISIS operate. Chechens are also active in this area. ” . . . It’s also a place where there’s quite a bit of truck traffic, a fair amount of it probably oil tankers. It’s the only crossing for many, many miles around. This is a pretty sparsely populated, well forested and hilly area occupied by Turkmen—Turkish speaking Syrian tribesmen who are sympathetic to al-Nusra and the Islamic State, who harbor Chechen terrorists and who we know have been supported by the Turks. . . .”
- Turkey has used this area to slip terrorists into Syria or to allow them to infiltrate.
- The Su-24’s were assigned a target in this area. They launched a first attack, then followed a race track-like U‑turn and launched a second attack. Shortly after this attack, one of the jets was shot down. ” . . . They then made a U‑turn, so to speak, to follow a racetrack pattern back toward where they had been loitering to get ready for a second attack. They in fact executed the second attack about seven or eight minutes later. One of the two Su-24s hit its target right at about ten twenty-four and was almost immediately shot down as he was pulling off the target. . . .”
- Two Turkish F‑16s were launched well before the Su-24s were assigned their target. They arrived at a mountainous area 25 miles above the border and began to “loiter” at about the time that the Russian pilots were being assigned their targets. The F‑16s loitered over that mountainous area for about an hour and fifteen minutes. ” . . . Interestingly, they arrived in that area to loiter just about the time that the Russian pilots were being assigned their targets, and the F‑16s loitered over that mountainous area for about an hour and fifteen minutes. . . .”
- The F‑16s were not loitering at high altitude (20–30 thousand feet–to conserve fuel, which is would be normal in a routine patrol. They were loitering quite low (7,500 to eight thousand feet) below the coverage of Syrian and Russian radars. This is a very inefficient altitude at which to loiter, because the planes consume huge amounts of fuel at that altitude. ” . . . Here’s the crucial thing. They were not loitering up at high altitude—say twenty to thirty thousand feet—to conserve fuel, which is where you would normally be loitering if you were simply doing a routine border patrol. They were loitering quite low, at about seven thousand five hundred to eight thousand feet, which, first of all, is below the coverage of the Syrian and Russian radars that were down around Latakia, and which is a very fuel-inefficient altitude to loiter. You suck up a lot of gas down at those low altitudes. . . .”
- This means they were refueled on the way to their mission by American-made tanker aircraft possessed by the Turkish air force! (They were two hundred and fifty miles away.) The planes would have needed to have their fuel “topped off” to operate at that altitude and for that period of time. ” . . . That tells you right away, if they hung out there for seventy-five minutes, they must’ve been tanked on the way in to that mission, because they were quite far from their home base—two hundred and fifty miles—so they must’ve topped up on fuel to have enough to even last for an hour and a quarter at this inefficient low altitude. The Turkish Air Force does have a number of American tankers that they own, so they certainly could’ve and almost beyond a shadow of a doubt did tank these F‑16s before this whole engagement. . . .”
- Just as the doomed Russian fighter finishes its “race-track” pattern, the F‑16s break out of their “loiter” patterns and fly in a line south, probably under Turkish ground control, heading for an intercept point. (They were not “hunting” for the Su-24s in a curved path.) The intercept point is close to the target bombed by the Su-24s. ” . . . At that point, the two F‑16s break out of their loiter patterns to fly in a straight line south, quite certainly under Turkish ground control because they clearly are not hunting for the Su-24s and following a curved path, they’re heading straight for an intercept point that apparently ground control has provided them—a point that’s very close to the target that the Su-24s have just bombed. That’s clearly the point they’re coming back to bomb again. . . .”
- The F‑16s arrive (precisely timed) to a missile-firing position. One of the F‑16s locks onto the Su-24 and fires a missile, flying up to a perfect attack altitude, and then dives down to be below Syrian radar coverage. ” . . . The F‑16s arrive quite nicely and precisely timed to a missile-shooting position very near the border and three to four miles from the second Su-24—who has just finished bombing his second target—at about ten twenty-four. One of the F‑16s locks onto him, launches a missile—an infrared missile according to the Russians—and immediately dives down to get back under the Syrian radar coverage. . . .”
- The attacking plane makes a “hard driving right turn” to get below radar coverage and heads away from the attack area. The F‑16s would have had to be refueled again on their way back to their base. ” . . . The F‑16 makes a hard diving right turn and is back down under eight thousand feet in no time at all and heading north away from the scene of the engagement. In that turn he actually is penetrating Syrian airspace before he heads north to go home to Diyarbakir, probably at that point out of fuel and hooking up with a tanker again in order to make it home. . . .”
- The Turks claim that the Russian plane was in their air space. It is not clear that that was the case, but IF that was the case, the incursion would have been over a finger of land for just a few seconds. The attack took place on the second attack run of the Su-24, not during the alleged border incursion! ” . . . Here’s the very interesting thing. This border-violating incursion was on the first run to the target at around quarter after ten a.m. On the second run to the target the Russian planes were clearly further to the south. This is according to the plots and maps released in the Russian briefing, which are very, very detailed with exact time marks every minute. The seventeen-second crossing of the border alleged by the Turks happened at about a quarter after ten, but the Turks waited. They didn’t come in and attack the airplane that had crossed the border at that point. They simply sat and waited until the plane flew a long re-attack pattern and came back on a second run seven or eight minutes later, and that’s when they attacked and shot him down. . . .”
- In accordance with the protocols established between NATO and the Russians, the Russians had submitted detailed information about the pending mission well beforehand. This would have made the Turkish attack relatively easy to engineer.
- The Turks claim to have broadcast ten warnings to the Russian fighter, however the F‑16s never issued any warnings, as required by protocol, nor did they fly on a parallel course, within visual contact of the Russian plane.Russian planes have no UHF radio frequency reception. ” . . . The Turks do say they transmitted their warnings from a ground-control station. They also claim they transmitted those radio calls on both the civilian international emergency “guard” UHF-band frequency and on the military VHF-band frequency previously agreed to by NATO and the Russians. The Americans were quick to confirm that their monitoring equipment picked up the Turkish ground-station radio warning calls, but they’ve been careful not to say what frequency they heard. Now it so happens that Su-24s have no radios onboard for receiving UHF-frequency signals, a fact which is well known to American, NATO, and Turkish intelligence. . . .”
- The Turkish ground station may well have broadcast the warnings on UHF, knowing that the Russians would not have received them. ” . . . . The ground-control station in Turkey probably did issue warnings, but they may have been warnings that were intended not to be received. . . .”
- The Russian S‑400 anti-aircraft missiles installed at the Latakia base can fire two hundred miles into Turkey, threatening any aircraft that might launch a similar attack in the future. This could lead to World War III. ” . . . . The Russians are installing it at their base just south of Latakia, within fifty miles of the border. So conceivably they could shoot two hundred miles into Turkey. They may or may not be able to prevent a hidden Turkish fighter from firing at another Russian attack in the border area, but they certainly have the possibility of catching him or his friends on the way home. This is a real sword poised over the heads of the Turks now that the Russians have the capability to shoot deep into Turkey and can do so any time they want. . . .”
After analyzing the attack itself, the broadcast reviews information about the area targeted by the Russian jets.
Listeners are emphatically encouraged to use previous programs and descriptions to flesh out their understanding. We recommend: FTR #‘s 737, 862, 863, 878, 879, 880.
Program Highlights Include:
- Review of the fact that a Syrian jet was shot down while combatting an offensive by the Islamist forces backed by Turkey.
- Review of the fact that the combatants for which Turkish aircraft have been providing air cover are: Turkmen associated with the Grey Wolves and the Pan-Turkist movement; al-Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front fighters and ISIS units.
- The area targeted by the Russian jets also harbors Chechen fighters.
- Review of the role of central role of Chechens in the ISIS order of battle.
- Review of ISIS-linked Chechens operating in Ukraine under Pravy Sektor administrative command.
- Review of UNA-UNSA Ukrainian fascists fighting in Chechnya.
- Review of how the UNA-UNSO morphed into Pravy Sektor, selecting Yuriy Shukhevych to head its combatant wing. (Yuriy Shukhevych is the son of Roman Shukhevych, the head of the UPA that fought alongside Nazi Germany in World War II.
- Review of the Pan-Turkist linked Crimean Tatars alliance with Pravy Sektor to blockade Crimean road traffic and sabotage the Crimean power supply.
- Review of Grey Wolf/Pan-Turkist elements active in Asia, supporting the Uighurs against China.
- Review of Grey Wolf activity in Syria.
1a. Here’s an analysis of the jet shootdown timeline in Harpers that’s based on the data provided by Russia and Turkish radar maps. It will be interesting to hear if the Turkish government responds to the analysis because it comes to the conclusion that the shootdown was an ambush:
“Mountain Ambush” by Andrew Cockburn; Harper’s; 12/4/2015.
“Looking at the detailed Russian timeline of what happened,” says defense analyst Pierre Sprey, “I’d say the evidence looks pretty strong that the Turks were setting up an ambush.”
By Andrew Cockburn
On November 24, a Turkish F‑16 fighter jet shot down a Russian Su-24 bomber near the border of Turkey and Syria. In the immediate aftermath, officials from the two countries offered contradictory versions of what transpired: Russian president Vladimir Putin claimed that the plane was flying over Syrian territory when it was downed; Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan countered that it was inside Turkey’s border and had been warned ten times to alter its course. Hours later, President Obama threw his support behind Erdogan. “Turkey,” he said, “has a right to defend its territory and its airspace.”
I asked Pierre Sprey, a longtime defense analyst and member of the team that developed the F‑16, to examine what we know about the downing and determine what actually occurred that morning.
The Russians have claimed the November 24 downing of their bomber was a deliberate pre-planned ambush by the Turks. Is there any merit in that argument?
Looking at the detailed Russian timeline of what happened—as well as the much less detailed Turkish radar maps—I’d say the evidence looks pretty strong that the Turks were setting up an ambush. They certainly weren’t doing anything that would point to a routine air patrol along the border. Their actions in no way represented a routine, all day long type of patrol.
How can we tell that?
Well, let’s set up the situation and it’ll be a little easier to understand. The Russian pilots were assigned a target very close to the Turkish border, about ten miles in from the Mediterranean coast and about five miles south of an important border crossing at a little place called Yayladagi. That’s a border crossing that the Turks have used to slip jihadists into Syria, or to allow them to slip in. It’s also a place where there’s quite a bit of truck traffic, a fair amount of it probably oil tankers. It’s the only crossing for many, many miles around. This is a pretty sparsely populated, well forested and hilly area occupied by Turkmen—Turkish speaking Syrian tribesmen who are sympathetic to al-Nusra and the Islamic State, who harbor Chechen terrorists and who we know have been supported by the Turks.
The target area the Russians were interested in was about five miles south, along the road leading to this crossing. That was the target area that they assigned to these two Su-24s on the day of the shoot-down. The crews were assigned the mission at about nine-fifteen in the morning, Moscow time. They took off about a half hour later, headed for an area about thirty miles inland from the Mediterranean coast—in other words well east of this target area—to loiter until they got further instructions on hitting a target in the target area. At this point they’re just cruising and loitering at eighteen thousand, nineteen thousand feet, trying to conserve gas while they’re waiting to be assigned a specific target.
The flight to their holding area was very short, because they were flying out of a Russian base south of Latakia. It was like a ten-minute flight. They were only about thirty miles away or so. After they reached their loiter area—at roughly a quarter to ten—they were well in view of Turkish radar coverage because they were up high and not far from the border, roughly sixteen miles south.
They got assigned their target, which was the road south of this important border crossing, and executed a first strike, each of them attacking separate targets at about a quarter after ten. They then made a U‑turn, so to speak, to follow a racetrack pattern back toward where they had been loitering to get ready for a second attack. They in fact executed the second attack about seven or eight minutes later. One of the two Su-24s hit its target right at about ten twenty-four and was almost immediately shot down as he was pulling off the target.
What about the Turkish air force, what were they doing meanwhile?
The Turks had launched two F‑16s quite a bit earlier than the time we’re talking about, from Diyarbakir, a major base for the Turkish Air Force about two hundred and fifty miles away, to loiter just in from the Mediterranean over a mountainous area that was about twenty-five miles north of this border crossing. Interestingly, they arrived in that area to loiter just about the time that the Russian pilots were being assigned their targets, and the F‑16s loitered over that mountainous area for about an hour and fifteen minutes.
Here’s the crucial thing. They were not loitering up at high altitude—say twenty to thirty thousand feet—to conserve fuel, which is where you would normally be loitering if you were simply doing a routine border patrol. They were loitering quite low, at about seven thousand five hundred to eight thousand feet, which, first of all, is below the coverage of the Syrian and Russian radars that were down around Latakia, and which is a very fuel-inefficient altitude to loiter. You suck up a lot of gas down at those low altitudes.
That tells you right away, if they hung out there for seventy-five minutes, they must’ve been tanked on the way in to that mission, because they were quite far from their home base—two hundred and fifty miles—so they must’ve topped up on fuel to have enough to even last for an hour and a quarter at this inefficient low altitude. The Turkish Air Force does have a number of American tankers that they own, so they certainly could’ve and almost beyond a shadow of a doubt did tank these F‑16s before this whole engagement.
They’re hanging out at low altitude over this mountainous area north of the border, and it’s now about a quarter after ten. The Russian fighters, the Su-24s, are just finishing their racetrack pattern after their first strike and are about to re-attack from this holding position well east of the target. At that point, the two F‑16s break out of their loiter patterns to fly in a straight line south, quite certainly under Turkish ground control because they clearly are not hunting for the Su-24s and following a curved path, they’re heading straight for an intercept point that apparently ground control has provided them—a point that’s very close to the target that the Su-24s have just bombed. That’s clearly the point they’re coming back to bomb again.
The F‑16s arrive quite nicely and precisely timed to a missile-shooting position very near the border and three to four miles from the second Su-24—who has just finished bombing his second target—at about ten twenty-four. One of the F‑16s locks onto him, launches a missile—an infrared missile according to the Russians—and immediately dives down to get back under the Syrian radar coverage. The F‑16 makes a hard diving right turn and is back down under eight thousand feet in no time at all and heading north away from the scene of the engagement. In that turn he actually is penetrating Syrian airspace before he heads north to go home to Diyarbakir, probably at that point out of fuel and hooking up with a tanker again in order to make it home.
Would he have been in Syrian airspace when they fired the missile?
Not necessarily. It’s hard to tell at this point. All this action is pretty close to the border, and there’s no reason to believe either the Turks or the Russians about distances of half a mile or a mile north or south of the border, but there’s no question that the Turkish F‑16 penetrated Syrian airspace in executing his diving turn to get out of the area. He was heading due south to attack the east-west track of the Su-24 that had just finished bombing the target. That Su-24 augured in almost immediately, about a mile and a half south of the border.
The bone of contention here is not the target area. The target area is roughly four or five miles south of that famous border crossing we were just talking about. The bone of contention is a narrow finger of Turkish land about five miles long, sticking straight down into Syria, about a mile and a half at its widest at the northern end and tapering down to a half mile at the southern tip. That finger is a good six miles east of the target area. So when heading west on their way to attack their targets, the Su-24s necessarily had to pass very close to the southern tip of the finger. In other words, the whole controversy about whether this shoot-down was legitimate or not is whether the Su-24s on the way to the target happened to cross that finger for a few seconds.
Remember again the setup. You’ve got a target that’s like ten miles in from the Mediterranean to the east. Another six miles or so east of there is this finger of land. It’s well east of the target area. The loiter area that the Sukhois were coming from is another sixteen miles to the east of that. They’re flying from their loiter area, which is well south of the border. They’re flying past the finger, maybe they crossed it, maybe they were just below it, and heading for the target.
But if the Russians were in Turkish airspace, as the Turks claim, wouldn’t it be reasonable for the Turks to intercept them?
There’s a little detail that’s very telling. The alleged border-crossing took place on the first bombing run from the loiter area to the target, and according to the Turks the Russians were roughly half a mile north of the tip of the finger and so they were in Turkish airspace for about seventeen seconds—a tiny, short, brief time—on their way to hitting the first target. The Russians, of course, say they were south of the finger by about a mile. God knows who’s right. I’m sure if we had access to the radar records we could tell very promptly who’s lying and who’s not, but nobody is going to give us access to the exact radar plot.
Here’s the very interesting thing. This border-violating incursion was on the first run to the target at around quarter after ten a.m. On the second run to the target the Russian planes were clearly further to the south. This is according to the plots and maps released in the Russian briefing, which are very, very detailed with exact time marks every minute. The seventeen-second crossing of the border alleged by the Turks happened at about a quarter after ten, but the Turks waited. They didn’t come in and attack the airplane that had crossed the border at that point. They simply sat and waited until the plane flew a long re-attack pattern and came back on a second run seven or eight minutes later, and that’s when they attacked and shot him down.
Between the fuel-guzzling low altitude of the holding pattern of the F‑16s, which miraculously coincided with the flight times of the Russian airplanes, and the fact that they didn’t even chase the airplane immediately upon its alleged border incursion, all that smells very much like a pretty pre-planned operation. The Turks allowed the Russian plane to hit a target and make a long seven or eight minute re-attack pass and then came in from their hidden low altitude position. They came up a little higher to gain a good firing altitude, came whistling south, hit the Su-24, dove under the radar coverage at the same time that they entered Syrian airspace and headed north out of radar coverage to head back to Diyarbakir.
Such an ambush wouldn’t have been hard to pull off, because the Russians, in their detailed account of this, state very clearly that they had coordinated with NATO, with the Americans, announcing this attack well in advance, and had followed the protocol of listening on the NATO-agreed frequency for any warnings or alerts from NATO or from the Turks. There was plenty of time for the Americans to inform the Turks that this mission was taking place. They might’ve even been informed by the Russians the day before it was going to take place. All the prerequisites for a setup were there.
The Turks made a big deal about the ten warnings they said they issued to the Russian planes. What do we make of that?
Again, that’s one of those things where it’s hard to tell and hard to know which side to believe. The Russians in their briefing, in their detailed briefing, are very clear and very adamant that the F‑16s themselves, the attacking F‑16s never transmitted any warning. Nor are the Turks or the Americans claiming that the F‑16s warned the Russian fighters. But of course the international protocols for defending against incursions of your airspace require the attacking fighters themselves to inform the target—visually or by radio—whether it’s an airliner or a fighter or whatever, that they are now violating airspace and need to turn away.
The Turks do say they transmitted their warnings from a ground-control station. They also claim they transmitted those radio calls on both the civilian international emergency “guard” UHF-band frequency and on the military VHF-band frequency previously agreed to by NATO and the Russians. The Americans were quick to confirm that their monitoring equipment picked up the Turkish ground-station radio warning calls, but they’ve been careful not to say what frequency they heard. Now it so happens that Su-24s have no radios onboard for receiving UHF-frequency signals, a fact which is well known to American, NATO, and Turkish intelligence.
There’s a lot of outs to this that could be the fault of either sider. It’s quite likely true that the Turks radioed warnings, but those warnings may have been deliberately transmitted only on the international civilian frequency so that the Su-24s would never hear them. Or it may be that the Su-24’s military frequency radios were on the fritz, which is easy to believe given the well-known unreliability of Russian electronics.
I do believe that the F‑16s never issued any warnings, because it would be astonishing if they did. Here they went to all the trouble of tanking up and flying at a very low altitude, stretching their fuel endurance just to stay out of radar coverage of the Russians and the Syrians, and then why would they suddenly announce that they were there by warning the fighters when they had so obviously set up a situation where they were hiding? The ground-control station in Turkey probably did issue warnings, but they may have been warnings that were intended not to be received. . . .
Would the United States have had radar coverage from its Airborne Warning and Control System or from their facilities at Incirlik? Would they be able to watch what was going on?
It’s very likely that they had a good track on that area, probably just as good as the Turks had. The Turks of course have a fairly extensive border network of radars, and the Russians and the Syrians have well mapped those radars and know exactly where the coverage is, which is why the Russians can be so precise as to say that the Su-24s entered Turkish radar coverage at 9:52, because they know pretty exactly where that radar coverage is.
The Americans could very possibly have access to those radar results. I have no idea whether they had an AWACS in the air at the time, but if they did it would’ve been easy to cover that area, too. For sure the Americans had complete radio monitoring coverage of the area, certainly heard all the radio transmission involved.
Now the Russians say that they activated air defense missiles, the famous S‑400 I guess, to make sure this doesn’t happen again. Does that indeed preclude the Turks interfering with the Russians carrying out strikes in that area?
The answer is no, but it’s a hell of a threat. The longest range version of the S‑400 is good for two hundred and fifty miles. The Russians are installing it at their base just south of Latakia, within fifty miles of the border. So conceivably they could shoot two hundred miles into Turkey. They may or may not be able to prevent a hidden Turkish fighter from firing at another Russian attack in the border area, but they certainly have the possibility of catching him or his friends on the way home. This is a real sword poised over the heads of the Turks now that the Russians have the capability to shoot deep into Turkey and can do so any time they want.
“Facts Back Russia on Turkish Attack” by Gareth Porter; Consortium News; 11/30/2015.
. . . . The motive for the strike was directly related to the Turkish role in supporting the anti-Assad forces in the vicinity of the border. In fact, the Erdogan government made no effort to hide its aim in the days before the strike. In a meeting with the Russian ambassador on Nov. 20, the foreign minister accused the Russians of “intensive bombing” of “civilian Turkmen villages” and said there might be “serious consequences” unless the Russians ended their operations immediately.
Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu was even more explicit, declaring that Turkish security forces “have been instructed to retaliate against any development that would threaten Turkey’s border security.” Davutoglu further said: “If there is an attack that would lead to an intense influx of refugees to Turkey, required measures would be taken both inside Syria and Turkey.”
The Turkish threat to retaliate – not against Russian penetration of its airspace but in response to very broadly defined circumstances on the border – came amid the latest in a series of battles between the Syrian government and religious fighters.
The area where the plane was shot down is populated by the Turkmen minority. They have been far less important than foreign fighters and other forces who have carried out a series of offensives in the area since mid-2013 aimed at threatening President Bashar al-Assad’s main Alawite redoubt on the coast in Latakia province.
Charles Lister, the British specialist who was visiting Latakia province frequently in 2013, noted in an August 2013 interview, “Latakia, right up to the very northern tip [i.e. in the Turkmen Mountain area], has been a stronghold for foreign fighter-based groups for almost a year now.” He also observed that, after Islamic State (also known as ISIS, ISIL or Daesh) had emerged in the north, al-Nusra Front and its allies in the area had “reached out” to ISIL and that one of the groups fighting in Latakia had “become a front group” for ISIL.
In March 2014, the religious rebels launched a major offensive with heavy Turkish logistical support to capture the Armenian town of Kessab on the Mediterranean coast of Latakia very close to the Turkish border. An Istanbul newspaper, Bagcilar, quoted a member of the Turkish parliament’s foreign affairs committee as reporting testimony from villagers living near the border that thousands of fighters had streamed across five different border points in cars with Syrian plates to participate in the offensive.
During that offensive, moreover, a Syrian jet responding to the offensive against Kessab was shot down by the Turkish air force in a remarkable parallel to the downing of the Russian jet. Turkey claimed that the jet had violated its airspace but made no pretence about having given any prior warning. The purpose of trying to deter Syria from using its airpower in defense of the town was obvious.
Now the battle in Latakia province has shifted to the Bayirbucak area, where the Syrian air force and ground forces have been trying to cut the supply lines between villages controlled by Nusra Front and its allies and the Turkish border for several months. The key village in the Nusra Front area of control is Salma, which has been in jihadist hands ever since 2012. The intervention of the Russian Air Force in the battle has given a new advantage to the Syrian army.
The Turkish shoot-down was thus in essence an effort to dissuade the Russians from continuing their operations in the area against al-Nusra Front and its allies, using not one but two distinct pretexts: on one hand a very dubious charge of a Russian border penetration for NATO allies, and on the other, a charge of bombing Turkmen civilians for the Turkish domestic audience. . . .
Uncle Sam and Il Duce
Reuters: Russia’s payback against Turkey over shoot-down may turn deadly
http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2015/12/15/why-russias-payback-to-turkey-could-be-lethal/
Could this lead to a World War between a key NATO Member and Russia? The article states:
“Putin could therefore strike a serious blow at Turkey’s geopolitical interests by ordering delivery of more advanced Russian weaponry to the Kurds, some of which would be aimed at Turkey. Syrian Kurds control two enclaves in northern Syria along the Turkish border, and wish to capture the final 60 miles needed to link these two territories together. Although Turkey repeatedly warns it will use force to prevent this scenario, Russian support and encouragement could motivate Syria’s Kurds to take the plunge. This would establish a 400-mile-long anti-Turkish cordon along Turkey’s southern border, which would be nothing short of a disaster in the minds of Turkish leaders.”
“Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov publiclywondered why Turkey bombs Syria’s Kurds against Washington’s wishes. Putin also suggested that Syria’s Kurds unite with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to fight Islamic State, an alliance that would upend the entire game in Syria.”
“Putin’s vindictiveness towards the Turkmens is clear, as they killed one of the Russian pilots as he parachuted down, and then released a video showing them cheering and yelling “Allahu Akbar” as they found the body.”
“Turkey is allowed to close the Straits in a war with Russia or if it considers itself to be “threatened with imminent danger of war.” This would bottle up Russian ships in the Black Sea, and significantly increase the difficulty for Moscow to resupply its forces in Syria. Turkey has already created “delays” for Russian cargo ships travelling through the Straits — a clear warning from Erdogan.”
“Given that the Turks have fought and lost 17 wars against Russia since the 15th century, Ankara likely hopes this is the case.”
Here’s another unpleasant situation to add to Iraq’s woes: Baghdad just issued the threat of military action if Turkey doesn’t remove its troops from Kurd-controlled territories in Northern Iraq. And Ankara’s response was basically, ‘we respect your sovereignty, but no, we aren’t leaving. And anyway, you don’t currently control this territory’. As far as tensions between neighbors go, the unwelcome presence of foreign troops along with taunts of ‘we’ll respect you’re sovereignty once you actually control this territory’ is quite a doozy:
“If we are forced to fight and defend our sovereignty and riches, we will be forced to fight”
Military conflict between Iraq and Turkey is now openly discussed. And while open conflict between the two is probably still a remote possibility at this point, keep in mind that the odds of Turkey shooting down a Russian jet was probably pretty low this time last year and yet here we are. Happy New Year.
Uh oh: Turkey accused Russia of violating its airspace again, threatening that “the unwanted consequences of such irresponsible behaviour will belong fully to the Russian Federation.” Russia responded that such accusations are hysteria “launched by the Turkish side that we define as ‘unsubstantiated propaganda’ looks pretty much like a premeditated provocation,” and then asserted that Russia’s military is in possession of video showing “a Turkish artillery battery shelling a Syrian frontier village”.
So things could definitely be going better in Russian-Turkish relations. Of course, they could get worse too. For instance, according to an anonymous Russian secret service source, the FSB suspects that the Grey Wolves loyal to ISIS may have been behind the downing of another Russian jet: the Russia-operated Airbus A321 that was bombed on route from Sharm el-Sheikh. It’s unclear how substantive that claim is at this point, but if that really is something the FSB believes, those relations will presumably be getter much, much worse:
“If the involvement of the Grey Wolves is confirmed, Russia will demand that Turkey pay compensation to the relatives of the victims of the crash, the RIA Novosti news agency reported, citing Victor Ozerov, the chairman of the Federation Council’s defense and security committee. The Kremlin has declined to comment on the reports alleging the existence of a Turkish lead in the investigation.”
Sabre rattling between Russia and the West is continuing to heat up, with Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev lamenting the emergence of what he characterizes as a ‘new Cold War’:
Well, it wasn’t all bad news: “World powers, including the United States and Russia, this week agreed to a ceasefire in Syria and to the delivery of immediate aid there.” Note that, as the article below points out, the peace talks had collapsed just a week before this latest ceasefire was announced. So if this ceasefire holds it’s going to be really good news. Especially for the tens of thousands of Syrians from Aleppo currently getting blocked from fleeing to Turkey:
“Huge crowds of Syrians, most of them women and children, have spent days waiting at the Oncupinar border crossing into Turkey, sleeping in the open or packed into tents.”
Part of what makes stories about refugees unable to flee the country so disturbing is that it highlights why a political resolution is vital but any of the military “solutions” and yet the fact that these refugees are fleeing in such large numbers also highlights why the prospects of a political solution is looking so bleak. If the Syrian civil war has accomplished in building one thing, it’s an abundance of irreconcilable differences between the various warring parties, which makes some sort of military ‘solution’ seem inevitable and yet inevitable catastrophic. Whether its the Syrian military, Sunni rebels, or ISIS taking over the country, the military solution to Syria’s civil war would almost certainly involve similar mass flights by refugees but on a much, much larger scale. That and the ever-present risk that one of these ‘new Cold War’ proxy-wars heats up beyond a thre growing war of words:
“Russia wants Assad to remain in power while the United States flatly rejects any ceasefire proposal that leaves his regime intact.”
That really doesn’t bode well for either a political or military solution. And since we’re talking about two nuclear super-powers engaged in a proxy-war, it’s hard to see any military solution that isn’t a nightmare.
Now, regarding Russia’s claims that it was the US bombing Aleppo, it’s unclear what the US would be trying to achieve with secret A‑10 missions against a rebel held city, so it’s probably not a genuine claim by the Russian defense ministry but more an attempt to counter the charges that Russia has been bombing civilian areas in Aleppo. But whatever the reality is of who is bombing whom, the whole situation is a dark reminder of what a grim clusterf#ck the situation has become. It’s now a daily threat that multiple foreign powers are potentially bombing different forces in the same region. Or bombing the the same forces. And as the article below points out, it’s a clusterf#ck that’s only getting more clusterf#cked as more regional powers begin implementing military solutions of their own:
Ok, let’s try to unpack all that: So the US-backed Kurdish PYD fighters seize control of an Syrian airbase from Syria rebels just days ago. Turkey shells the base, accusing the US of supporting terrorists, and also asserts that the Kurds won’t be allowed to participate in restarted peace talks. Erdogan is charging that the West was creating a “sea of blood,” publicly asking “Are you on our side or the side of the terrorist PYD and PKK organisation?”. At the same time, Turkey has announced that it may team up with Saudi Arabia to launch a joint ground force operation.
Yeah, that’s looking like a bloody clusterf#ck. And as the following article points out, one of the absolute demands of the Saudis is that Assad must go, whether politically or by force. But one way or another he must go, which is not going to go over well with the Russians. Or Iranians. And another demand of the Saudis is that they will only join a ground coalition that the US leads. So the joint Turkey-Saudi ground force that is forming right now has an explicit goal of overthrowing the government Russia and Iran are desperate to protect.
It’s all part of why, depending on how the situation unfolds, this is a clusterf#ck that could make a ‘new Cold War’ a relatively benign outcome. Not that a new Cold War wouldn’t be a complete disaster for humanity and a horrible and senseless waste of the future. It would indeed be a complete disaster. But it’s still better than a new non-proxy Hot War. It’s quite a clusterf#ck:
“Iran is our neighbor...But neighbors have to live with each other based on the principle of good neighborliness, And the principle of non-interference in the affairs of others.”
Yes, the Saudi foreign minister actually said that non-ironically as the government declares that it will remove Assad one way or another:
But Saudi government hypocrisy also beside the point, especially in the midst of a through-the-looking-glass multi-actor proxy war where even allied powers’ proxy forces are in opposition to each other.
So if the recently renewed peace talks collapse, which seems likely since the US is demanding Assad goes and Russia demands that he stays, we may soon see a US-led Turkish-Saudi ground invasion, which could also include the UAE, Jordan, and Bahrain. And while it will be explicitly and anti-ISIS coalition, overthrowing Assad is also going to be an absolute mandate and Turkey will probably attack the Kurds, who the US backs. And Iran might join in the fun if it perceives the Saudis are gaining too much power.
Despite the fact that ISIS’s terrorist capabilities are nothing to take lightly, that was never the biggest threat ISIS created for the global community. The biggest threat ISIS created was by being so awful that it would provide a very good excuse for the regional powers which are dead set on seeing the Assad government fall create an invasion force and invade Syria. Why? Because a ground invasion by the Sunni powers that would inevitably attack Assad after they rout ISIS was obviously going to create the kind of situation where we could see ground war involving most of the Middle East’s military powers with the US and Russia providing air support for opposing sides. So it’s looking like ISIS is on track to accomplish its goal of creating an apocalyptic scenario, although it’s only going to do this by getting wiped out by an Arab army with even bigger goals in mind. Mission accomplished.
The Turkish government is pinning the blame for the recent bombing in Ankara on the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia, which denies the allegation. And considering that the Turkish government claims it identified a suicide bomber from an identity card he was wearing, the YPG’s denials would appear pretty reasonable. And as the article below makes clear, whether or not the YPG was behind the bombing, the chorus of voices calling for the US to break its ties to ties YPG and get behind a Turkish/Saudi ground invasion that would presumably involve conquering both the Assad government and the Syrian Kurdish groups (and maybe ISIS and the various al-Qaeda affiliates once they are no longer useful) and prompting a major showdown with Russia is only getting louder:
“Is the U.S. going to risk confronting Russia in Syria in order to help Turkey beat the Kurds, on whom the U.S. relies to beat ISIS?”
That’s one way to frame it, although it’s pretty clear that some analysts prefer to frame it a different way:
Yep, ISIS is a distraction from “the violent, catastrophic breakdown of the post-Ottoman regional order,” and the way to deal with this breakdown is apparently a ground invasion that takes out not just Assad, but the Syrian Kurdish militias too. And maybe ISIS at some point, but ISIS is just a small part of what’s going on in the Middle East. At least according to the folks that see a major military confrontation pitting the Turks, Saudis, and US against Russia and Iran as the best path towards forging a lasting peace.
With the cause of crashed EgyptAir fight 804 from Paris to Cairo still under investigation, public concerns over the dangers of terrorist attacks on airlines is going to be heightened right now. And while flight 804 was probably destroyed by a bomb if indeed it was a terrorist attack, concerns about surface-to-air missiles falling into the wrong hands are inevitably going to be increased. So it’s worth noting that CIA has been working on a ‘Plan B’ for Syria’s civil war if the cease-fire doesn’t hold, and one of the key features the Saudis and Turks would like to see in any ‘Plan B’ revolves around giving the Syrian rebels anti-aircraft weapons including shoulder-fired missiles:
“Saudi Arabia and Turkey have increased pressure on Washington to up the ante in support of the moderate opposition in part by calling for the introduction of weapons systems that they know are a red line for Mr. Obama, such as Manpads.”
As we can see, ‘Plan B’ might not be very plane-friendly since it revolves around weapons for shooting down planes. Also note that when you read:
the cease-fire is basically already collapsed. So ‘Plan B’ could become the new ‘Plan A’ sooner than you might suspect. Especially since the Saudis have been talking about such a ‘Plan B’ for years, and one day before the crash of EgyptAir flight 805 Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister declared that it might be time for a ‘Plan B’ in Syria:
“We believe we should have moved to a ‘Plan B’ a long time ago,” Adel al-Jubeir told reporters after a meeting of foreign governments in Vienna.
Yep, the ‘Plan B’ has been the preferred ‘Plan A’ for a while now. And it’s looking like that could happen. It’s more than a little ominous, especially given some of the other features of the Saudis’ and Turks’ current ‘Plan A’.
And as is always the case, the WSJ cannot bring itself to name EVEN ONE of the “moderate, anti-Assad” groups. Not one. Is it because, in the age of Google search, it is just too easy for folks to research these groups and find that, surprise, surprise, they really aren’t that moderate at all? To be fair, this is not just the WSJ, it is the entire Western media. Did we call the Serb partisans “moderate, Alled Forces-aligned groups?” Was the ARVN in Vietnam called a “moderate, anti-Viet Cong military”? So why can’t we NAME these damn groups? It’s total Orwell, all the time...
I actually did see a BBC article a few months ago that I will see if I can find, which quite clearly named some of the groups, including at least one alligned with Al Qaeda. And, no, it was not al-Nusra, it was one that we supported without qualifications.
The clusterf*ck in Syria just got a lot more clusterf*cked: Turkey and its Free Syrian Army (FSA) allies (which was initially backed by the CIA) are waging a campaign to expel the YPG from the border region of Afrin in an air and ground offensive. And the YPG is, of course, the primary Pentagon-backed military force in the country and integral to the US’s anti-ISIS campaign. The former CIA-backed rebels are in an alliance again the Pentagon-backed forces. Again.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said DC had proposed working with Turkey and in Afrin to “see how we can stabilize this situation and meet Turkey’s legitimate concerns for their security.” And Turkey replied that the US had better drop its support for the YPG if it wants any cooperation:
“Turkish forces and their Syrian anti-Assad rebel allies began their push on Saturday to clear the northwestern border enclave of Kurdish YPG fighters. Ankara considers the YPG to be allies of insurgents that have fought against the Turkish state for decades. The United States, meanwhile, has armed and aided the YPG as its main ground allies against Islamic State.”
And these Turkish military operations aren’t just in Afrin, which means this might not be resolved any time soon:
And note how clearing out the Afrin region of the YPG would link up Idlib with another area Turkey had previously cleared out of Isamic State and YPG fighters back in 2016–2017. So while Turkey is largely framing this an ‘anti-terrorist’ operation targeting the YPG on its border, there’s also clearly a strategic element to this move regarding the larger battle for control of Syria:
So how is the US going to respond to Turkey and the FSA militarily expelling the US’s closest military ally in the anti-ISIS campaign? Well, that’s rather unclear, because President Trump reportedly told Turkey’s government back in November that arming the YPG was a mistake and it would end, but these reports caught US officials by surprise:
“Mevlut Cavusoglu, the Turkish Foreign Minister who was in Mr Erdogan’s office during the call, told a press conference in Ankara: “Mr Trump clearly stated that he had given clear instructions and that the YPG won’t be given arms, and that this nonsense should have ended a long time ago.””
That was Turkey’s claim: “Mr Trump clearly stated that he had given clear instructions and that the YPG won’t be given arms, and that this nonsense should have ended a long time ago.”
So did Trump actually say that? Well, if so, he apparently didn’t run this past US officials in advance:
So there’s some ambiguity about what Trump actually said. But one thing that isn’t ambiguous is that Trump had high hopes for that phone call since he tweeted about “bringing peace” to the Middle East with Erdogan right before making the call:
That was Trump’s public stance before the phone call where he reportedly pledge an and to support for the YPG. So if Trump pledged to end YPG support back in Nobemver, what explains the current Turkish demands that the US better stop its arming of the Kurds? Well, that’s because the US announced its backing for a new 30,000-strong “border force” of Kurdish-led fights in northern Syria last week. So while Trump may have been talking about ending support for the Kurds during that phone call, his actions last week say something very different:
“The United States announced its support on Sunday for plans for a “border force” to defend territory held by U.S.-backed, Kurdish-led fighters in northern Syria.”
That was the US’s stance on this issue just a week ago: a new 30,000 strong “border force,” which, according to Kurdish forces, is required to protect themselves from threats from Turkey and the Syrian government forces:
So it looks like the declaration of a planned force intended to protect the Kurds against Turkey is what triggered Turkey’s invasion.
And note that the US actually back-tracked somewhat on this in the days following the declaration, with Rex Tillerson trying to reframe it as definitely NOT a border force:
“The Pentagon qualified Wednesday what the planned force’s role would be and dismissed its description as an “army,” and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told reporters on a flight home from a conference in Vancouver, Canada, later Wednesday that the issue had beemn “misportrayed and misdescribed.””
So the US tried to recharacterize the planned US-backed Kurdish force as definitely NOT a border security force at all. Which obviously didn’t convince the Turks:
And all that’s part of what led to this current Turkish attack on the YPG.
What’s next? Well, that’s part of what makes this so ominous. Trump’s administration announces a new military force and Turkey almost immediately attacks it. It’s a helluva diss and also a potentially significant complication for US anti-ISIS operations. Does Trump feel that his self-declared image as the ISIS-slayer is at risk? What’s he going to do in response to this? Who knows, but we now have ‘the Chaos President’ facing a critical test with the chaos Syria and it’s hard to imagine that more chaos isn’t going to be the result. Although if he can pull off that ‘peace in the Middle East’ thing he was tweeting about back in November, now would be a good time to do it (someone call Jared).
Now that Turkey has committed itself to wiping the YPG Kurds out from the Afrin region of Northern Syria just a week after the US announces the planned creation of a 30,000 strong “border security” force led by the YPG, the question of what exactly Turkey is planning regarding its broader goals in Syria loom large. Because while Turkey’s long-standing opposition to any whiff of Kurdish independence is certainly going to be a major motivating factor in this new military push, Erdogan’s broader ambitions in Syria — like the overthrow of the Assad regime and the potential breakup of the country — are presumably going to be part of this decision-making too.
And as we already saw, by driving the Kurds out of the Afrin region Turkey would link up two other regions controlled by anti-Assad rebels: Idlib — controlled by al-Nusra/al-Qaeda — and a second area where Turkey fought for seven months in 2016–17 to drive back Islamic State and the YPG. So we could be seeing the start of a much of involved Turkish role in the ground war in preparation for either a final push to topple the Assad regime or to simply make the breakup of the country a de facto reality by provided an umbrella of protection for the anti-Assad rebels.
Does the military action in the Afrin region point towards a larger Turkish military role on the ground in Syria? Well, that depends a lot on what exactly Turkey means when it talks about its plans for creating a ‘safe zone’ inside Syria:
“The Turkish prime minister, Binali Yildirim said the aim of the campaign, dubbed “Operation Olive Branch”, would be to create a zone inside Syria’s borders that was 30km (19 miles) deep. Turkish officials also said they wanted to significantly degrade the military capabilities of the YPG, which they say has 8,000 to 10,000 fighters in Afrin.”
“Operation Olive Branch” is now underway. A campaign to create a safe zone by attacking the YPG. From Turkey’s standpoint that’s a pretty efficient use of its military resources.
So will the ‘safe zone’ will also be haven for the rebel forces that Turkey is backing in its ongoing efforts to topple Assad? Well, probably, since the plan is for those rebels to secure and administer this safe zone:
And that strongly implies the anti-Assad Turkey-based rebel forces more or less have Turkey’s military available for defending that safe zone territory.
So what does the US and UK say about this plan? Not much, other than to say Turkey has a right to do what it’s doing in Afrin:
So the US and UK are viewing the “Operation Olive Branch” military campaign as a legitimate right of Turkey’s. So what’s the response going to be when the YPG and other Kurdish groups refuse to give up Afrin without a fight? Well, the response from the US appears to be that any Kurds found fight Turkey in Afrin will no longer be considered a US partner:
““If they [U.S.-backed forces under the SDF] carry out military operations of any kind that are not specifically focused on ISIS they will not have coalition support,” according to Pentagon spokesperson Adrian Rankine-Galloway in reference to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, another name for Daesh.”
So the US will not support any Kurdish units fighting in Afrin, which is not surprising since that would involve the US fighting its NATO ally Turkey at this point. Beyond that, however, if any Kurdish units are found using equipment the US gave to the group for the fight in Afrin, they’ll get off from military assistance in general:
So the US appears to have the stance that the Kurds are free to fight the Turks and other rebels in Afrin, but only as long as it doesn’t involve using equipment the US gave them.
Now, assuming the Turks do manage to create this ‘safe zone’ on the border, connecting both Idlib with a second region under Turkey’s control, what’s Turkey going to do about the fact that al-Nusra is the dominant force in Idlib and the most powerful and effective anti-Assad element of the Sunni rebels? Are they going to directly team up against Assad? Well, not quite. Because as this following article from back in October describes, Turkey has a plan for how to address al-Nusra’s control of Idlib: separate the al-Qaeda/al-Nusra jihadists in Idlib from the rest of the jihadists who are encouraged to just blend in with the populace. In other words, as long as the members of al-Nusra are willing to become former members of al-Nusra, they should be fine. That appears to be Turkey’s plan for dealing with al-Nusra in Idlib:
“Idlib is one of four “de-escalation” zones which foreign powers agreed to establish in opposition territory in western Syria after years of civil war. But the former al Qaeda branch which controls the province has pledged to keep fighting Syrian government forces and their allies.”
The international plan for Idlib is “de-escalation”, which doesn’t appear possible as long as al-Qaeda runs the place. But Turkey has a plan according to a rebel source: encourage defections from the jihadist alliance, to break it up, isolate it and reduce its capacity to oppose any Turkish military deployment. And do that by encouraging jihadist fighters who are not members of al-Qaeda to “melt into society”:
That sure sounds like a plant to have Turkey have a military presence in Idlib in partnership with rebel allies that include a whole lot of ex-al-Qaeda jihadists. Which isn’t at all surprising but it’s pretty notable that it appears to be happening:
So should we expect the military campaign in Afrin to pivot towards a move to effectively unify the anti-Assad rebels under Turkey’s control by splintering al-Nusra’s jihadist alliance? That probably depends a lot on how the conflict in Afrin goes and how long it takes to actually clear out the YPG (which sure sounds a lot like ethnically cleansing the region of Kurds). Because time may not be on Turkey’s side when it comes to Idlib:
“The province in northwest Syria has become a focal point of the war, with government forces taking scores of villages in recent weeks. With the help of Iran-backed militias and Russian air power, they advanced towards Abu al-Duhur military airport, where rebels had ousted the army in 2015.”
And note how Islamic State is also operating in Idlib:
So pretty much everyone but the Kurds are trying to gain control of Idlib at this point: Turkey and its rebel allies. Al-Nusra and its jihadist allies (who Turkey is trying to woo). The Syrian army and its allies. ISIS. It’s the kind of situation where you have to wonder if Turkey’s plan is to let the Syrian army slug it out with al-Nusra and ISIS first while the Turkey-backed rebel forces get trained and plan on picking up the pieces and soaking up all the leftover jihadist. We’ll see. But it’s pretty clear that any plans for a Turkish-backed ‘safe zone’ also include plans for unifying the anti-Assad rebels (jihadist and secular) under Turkey’s direction for either breaking up the country or waging a knock-down-drag-out fight to the death with the Assad government. Which, of course, means those ‘safe zones’ had better include ample resources for A LOT of fleeing refugees.
It appears that “Olive Branch operation” — Turkey’s military campaign in the Afrin region of Syria to clear out the Kurdish military forces — is extending an ‘olive branch’ to a new area: the town of Manbij. And unlike Afrin, this new area contains US military forces:
“A Turkish operation in Manbij would be fraught with risk due to the presence of the U.S. military personnel in and around the town. They were deployed there last March to deter Turkish and U.S.-backed rebels from attacking each other and have also carried out training missions in Manbij”
So the US gets deployed to the town of Manbij to help deter Turkish and U.S.-backed rebels from attacking each other, and now a force consisting of Turkey and Turkish-backed rebels is getting ready to roll into town and push out all the Kurds. Yeah, that sounds like a situation fraught with risk.
And note how Erdogan is framing this move: ‘Operation Olive Branch ’ is being done to ‘thwart the game of those sneaky forces whose interests in the region are different’:
Are those “sneaky forces” a reference to the US? Or just the Kurds? Because if he was referring to the Kurds it seems like he would have described them as “terrorists” or something like that. “Sneaky forces” sounds a lot more like a reference to the US in this context (and, by proxy, Israel). If so, that sure sounds like this move in Manbij is being framed to the Turkish domestic audience as an operation targeting Kurdish and US forces operating in Syria.
And by moving into places like Manbij where the US is actively working with the Kurds that makes “Operation Olive Branch” a potentially significant disruption of the anti-ISIS operations in that region. The attack on Afrin was an indirect disruption of those anti-ISIS operations simply by drawing Kurdish forces away from the front-lines with ISIS to fight in Afrin, but there weren’t US troops actually in that region. But it sure sounds like the new plan involves a much more frontal assault on that US/Kurdish anti-ISIS force. As Erdogan says, “Starting in Manbij, we will continue to thwart their game.” In other words, the attack on Manbij is just the start of a military campaign that appears to be targeting a lot more than Afrin.
Also note the apparent plans of the US for how to use the territory under Kurdish control as leverage for reviving UN-led settlement talks:
So are those planned talks part of the ‘game of those sneaky forces whose interests in the region are different’ Erdogan was talking about?
Those are just some of the questions raised by this dicey new phase of the Syrian conflict. But perhaps the most immediate question is what’s the US going do in response to this? Well, according to the Pentagon, the US hasn’t decided yet how to respond and much of that response will be determined by the State Department’s negotiations
“American troops “will either stay or they will go. I don’t know what the answer will be,” McKenzie said Thursday. He added that decision would rely heavily on State Department policy for the region.”
The US’s response is going to be heavily reliant on diplomacy at this point. Trump White House diplomacy. That should go well.
But while that diplomacy plays out, there’s still the reality that US-trained and armed Kurdish forces are going to be increasingly drawn away from the fight against ISIS to defend against Turkey’s military offensive:
So given the expanding nature of “Operation Olive Branch” and the extensive evidence that Turkey played a critical role in fostering the growth of ISIS — from turning a blind-eye in allowing the flood of ISIS fighters and arms to move through its border with Syria to allowing ISIS to facilitating ISIS’s oil trade — you have to wonder if part of the motivation for this whole campaign is to stop ISIS was being completely defeate by effectively drawing away the YPG fighters that comprise the bulk of the anti-ISIS forces operating in the East of the country. Don’t forget that it was only a couple of year ago when Turkey’s head of intelligence basically called ISIS a “reality” that the world needs to accept. In other words, is ISIS the one getting the ‘olive branch’ here?
It sounds like the ‘olive branch’ being extended in “Operation Olive Branch” is going to be a really, really long branch: President Erdogan just announced that Turkey’s military campaign inside Syria is going to extend all the way to Syria’s Eastern border with Iraq. Which, of course, is the parts of Syria controlled by the Kurds. So Erdogan basically just declared war against the Kurds of Syria. That appears to be what “Operation Olive Branch” is all about.
And what about the US’s partnership with the Kurds as part of the anti-ISIS operations? Well, the government of Turkey is hoping that its military campaign against the US’s partners will ‘encourage Washington to stop and think.’ That’s pretty much the only response by Turkey regarding the fact that it just declared war on the US’s military partners and its military campaign is going to be moving through regions of Syria where US forces are working side-by-side with the Kurdish forces. So if you thought things going get any more chaotic in Syria, the Turkish government is encouraging you to stop and think about that:
““Operation Olive Branch will continue until it reaches its goals. We will rid Manbij of terrorists, as it was promised to us, and our battles will continue until no terrorist is left until our border with Iraq,” Erdogan said in a speech in Ankara.”
Keep in mind that Turkey considers the YPG to be a terrorist organization, so when Erdogan says, “and our battles will continue until no terrorist is left until our border with Iraq”, he’s probably not referring to ISIS.
And if the US has a problem with Turkey declaring war on the US’s allies, well, the US is apparently just going to have to ‘stop and think’ about that and adopt a new policy, according to Erdogan’s chief diplomatic adviser:
“Aybet said Turkey was aware that a confrontation on the ground in Manbij risked pushing ties to breaking point: “Everyone is aware of that risk. We hope that the Americans are aware, too.””
So Turkey has declared war on the US’s closes anti-ISIS military partner. Is there any resolution for this conflict that any sides are dangling out there? Well, sort of. While Turkey isn’t backing away from its pledge to wipe out the YPG across the Syria, it is laying out a set of demands for reducing tensions with the US. Those demands are, of course, for the US to completely cut off is partnership and arms to the YPG. And according to Turkey’s foreign minister, that’s exactly what U.S. National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster confirmed in a phone call late Friday: that the U.S. will no longer arm the Syrian Kurdish fighters:
“The Turkish offensive has strained ties between Turkey and the U.S., which has expressed major concerns over the Afrin attack. Turkey has vowed to expand its operation against the YPG to other areas along the border including Manbij, where some U.S. troops are stationed. Ankara views the YPG as a major threat because of its links to Kurdish insurgents in Turkey known as the PKK.”
Note how Turkey is framing the YPG as a major threat not just to Ankara’s ambitions in Syria, but also a major threat to Turkey because if its ties to the PKK. And that’s one reason to suspect this military campaign could be a sustained one despite the reports of fierce Kurdish resistance.
It’s being framed as the kind of threat that is so serious that Turkey appears to have almost no concerns about the fact that it just declared war on a force working side-by-side with US military troops. It’s a pretty remarkable power play, and if Turkey’s foreign minister is to be believed, it’s a power play that’s working with stunning success:
Did H.R. McMaster really confirm in a phone call late Friday that the U.S. will no longer arm the Syrian Kurdish fighters? Only time will tell, but if so that’s a pretty remarkable policy shift for the US in Syria, especially given the circumstance.
And if these claims are true, and the US really is planning on cutting off its support for the YPG, it raises the question of what sort of deal the US and Turkey might be trying to work out. Is this the Trump administration just unilaterally caving to Erdogan’s demands or is there a broader strategy in play? Well, as the following article reminds us, there is one area where we could be see a broader strategy in play as part of the US’s decision-making regarding virtually any issue involving Turkey: The agenda of keep the Trump Towers in Istanbul up and running. Yep, this US/Turkey conflict in the making contains some very Trump-specific conflicts of interest:
“On Bannon’s radio show, Breitbart News Daily, Trump said on December 1, 2015, “I have a little conflict of interest ’cause I have a major, major building in Istanbul. It’s a tremendously successful job. It’s called Trump Towers—two towers, instead of one, not the usual one, it’s two.””
“I have a little conflict of interest...” Those were Trump’s own words. And it isn’t a little conflict of interest. It’s two very big conflicts of interest in the form of the Trump Towers in Istanbul:
Would Turkey have been this bold and brazen if there wasn’t this clear point of leverage Erdogan has directly over Trump’s business interests? Who knows, but the very fact that we have to ask the question is the latest reminder that Trump’s conflicts of interest might actually fuel military conflicts.
So what is the actual scale of this conflict of interest in terms of revenues? According to the following article, it’s about $5 million a year. And as the following article also notes, this isn’t the first time a Trumpian conflict of interest appeared to work against the US-YPG anti-ISIS military alliance over Turkish concerns. Because it turns out the US-YPG assault on the ISIS stronghold of Raqqa was actually delayed by former US National Security Advisor Michael Flynn...the same former Trump official who was simultaneously on the Turkish government payroll. And that assault on Raqqa didn’t get approved until Flynn was gone:
“According to both disclosure forms, Trump was paid as much as $10 million in royalties from his Istanbul project for the previous two years, and he—and his children—will presumably continue to receive money from this arrangement.”
$10 million in royalties to the Trump family over 2015–2016. That’s the ‘little conflict of interest’ disturbingly playing right now as this Turkish declaration of war on Syria’s Kurds unfolds.
So was that Trump Org conflict of interest part of what led to Michael Flynn’s decision to put off the US/YPG attack on Raqqa at the end of the Obama administration? It’s unclear but it’s hard to see why that isn’t very possible. After all, when someone like Michael Flynn — a Turkish government lobbyist — was in charge of making these crucial decisions, it’s hard to rule out any conflict of interest at work in the Trump administration’s policies towards Turkey:
“The plan to take Raqqa was not approved until after Flynn was fired as national security adviser, and, as the Miami Herald noted, “Despite the Trump administration’s attempts to downplay the red flags, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the administration was repeatedly warned about Flynn’s foreign involvement.””
And note how Turkey appeared to want to hold off on an attack on ISIS’s capital, ostensibly over concerns of Kurdish ambitions in Syria (Turkey said it wanted its own rebels to lead the assault). And while those concerns were no doubt part of what led Turkey to oppose the assault on Raqqa, it’s hard to ignore the Turkish government’s extensive assistance to ISIS as a Sunni jihadist proxy army and calls for the world to recognize ISIS as a “reality” that needs to be recognized. That’s why we really do need to ask the question of whether or not protecting ISIS from a complete collapse in Syria is one of the objective Erdogan is trying to achieve at this critical moment with this war on the Kurds. The temptation to rehabilitate ISIS as a Sunni jihadist proxy army to further Erdogan’s ambitions in the region would be the ultimate nightmare conflict of interest, but that could be a very real conflict of interest in this situation (and not exactly an unprecedented one).
So that’s all part of what we need to keep in mind as Turkey’s war on the US’s Syrian Kurdish allies plays out: Trump’s ‘little conflict of interest’ could be fueling a much, much darker ‘Great Powers’ conflict of interest that relies on ensuring the conflict in Syria doesn’t end any time soon.
As Turkey’s anti-Kurd military campaign in the Afrin region of Syria continues and Erdogan threatens to expand the eastward across the entire Kurdish-held areas of Northern Syria, the question of how the US is going to respond isn’t going to away. Especially after Erdogan declared his intent on driving the YPG out of the town of Manbij, where US forces partnering with the YPG are also based.
So what’s the US response going to be? Well, the Kurds have an interesting suggestion: invite the Syrian army to act as a buffer between the Turkish military and the Kurds. And while Assad’s government has turned down the proposal, the US is reportedly open to the suggestion. At the same time, the Trump administration is apparently telling the the Kurds may be disappointed if they are expecting any sort of loyalty when it comes to Turkey’s war on the Kurds despite the YPG being the US’s primary, and most effective, anti-ISIS partner. When a senior Trump administration officials was asked if Washington had a moral obligation to stick with the Kurds, they responded that Trump’s “America first” doctrine dictated that the U.S. must always prioritize its own interests:
“The Trump administration has also quietly acknowledged that ultimately, the Kurds may be disappointed if they are expecting loyalty even on matters where U.S. and Kurdish interests diverge. Turkey, after all, is a NATO ally. Asked recently if Washington had a moral obligation to stick with the Kurds, senior Trump administration officials said Trump’s “America first” doctrine dictated that the U.S. must always prioritize its own interests.”
“America first!” That appears to be the generic explanation the Trump administration is going to use to explain why it’s going to hang the YPG out to dry.
At the same time, note the following description of the US’s priority for the YPG: for them to govern the large swath of territory wrested from the Islamic State group in northern and eastern Syria:
So if the US has been planning on the YPG preventing the return of ISIS across a large swath of territory in northern and eastern Syria, and Turkey decides that this represents a security threat to Turkey and moves to wipe out the YPG across that area, what’s the US going to do? Will that be an “America First!” moment because Turkey — which was quietly supporting ISIS for years — is deemed to be a more important ally? We’ll see. But note the remarkable opportunity for a significant reshaping of the situation in Syria in terms of the standoff between virtually all of the sides fighting in Syria: what if the Kurds invited the Syrian army to act as a buffer between Turkey and the Kurds:
“One option is a proposal by the Kurds to persuade Assad to deploy his troops as a buffer between the Kurds and Turks in Afrin. Nobohar Mustafa, a Kurdish envoy to Washington, said the Americans appear open to that proposal. However, so far Assad’s government has refused; they want full control of the area.”
So if the US and Syrian governments eventually accept that offer, what’s Turkey going to do? And is the US actually open to the proposal or was this just positive spin by a Kurdish envoy? Well, one reason to assume that the US might actually be open to offer is that there really aren’t a lot of great options here. As the Turkey specialist with the Institute for the Study of War notes, even if the US manages to pull its own troops and the YPG out of the town of Manbij, it’s not like that’s going to end Turkey’s war on the Kurds:
So we have a situation where Turkey declared war on the US’s primary military partner in Syria and the best option could very well be to invite the Syrian army to act as a kind of peacemaker unless the US is planning on standing by and watching Turkey and the Kurds fight it out for who know how long. It’s really quite stunning, but given how incredibly convoluted the situation has been in Syria all along it’s perhaps not surprising that using the Syrian army as a buffer between the US’s two closest allies operating in the country really could be the “America first!” thing to do. This is, of course, assuming “Trump first!” isn’t the actual decision-making model at work here.
Here’s a story to keep in mind in relation to the speculation over whether or not the US is going to provide should-fired missiles (Manpads) to Ukraine: Remember those reports from May of 2016 about how the governments of Saudi Arabia and Turkey were lobbying pushing to provide Syrian rebel forces with Manpads as part of a “Plan B” strategy for defeating the Assad government? Well, it looks like the rebels have Manpads. Specifically, it looks like Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a rebel faction that officially broke off from an alliance with al-Qaeda last year, had at least one Manpad because it just shot a Russian jet down with one:
“Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, a powerful rebel alliance that publicly split from al-Qaeda last year, said it had used a shoulder-fired weapon to down the Su-25 fighter jet as it flew low over the opposition-held town of Saraqeb.”
When a powerful rebel alliance of ex-al-Qaeda jihadists shoots a jet down with Manpads it’s only natural to ask the question of where the hell did this group of al-Qaeda associates get its hands on shoulder-fired missile systems:
The US, being one of the default suspects for supplying the weapons, is asserting it had nothing to do with it:
And Turkey is another very obvious suspect, since it’s been working the most directly with the Sunni jihadist rebel elements, including the group that shot down the jet:
And, again, let’s not forget that Saudi Arabia and Turkey were openly lobbying to get Manpads to the rebels back in 2016. That was “Plan B”. So when we read that, “despite repeated appeals to their international backers, rebel groups in Syria have never had a sustained supply of MANPADS,” the question of whether or not the rebels are going to have a sustained supply of Manpads is more of an open question:
So are the Syrian jihadist rebels that were now armed with a lot more Manpads or was that a one-off that they found on the battlefield? That’s one of the big new urgent questions in relation to Syria’s civil war. And the kind of question that might get answered with more planes getting shot down by jihadists.
Here’s a profoundly disturbing report about the situation in the Afrin region of Syria as the offensive by the Turkish army and its allied Syrian rebel forces continues: It sounds like the Yazidis of Afrin are facing a similar fate as the Yazidis of Northern Iraq that were slaughtered and/or enslaved by ISIS if they didn’t convert to ISIS’s brand of Islam.
And it’s not a particular surprise because it sounds like many of the Turkey-allied rebel forces operating in Afrin are indeed ex-ISIS and ex-al Qaeda/al Nusra fighters, which is in keeping with previous reports that the Turkish army was planning on dealing with the large number of Islamists in Idlib by basically encouraging them to “melt into society” at which point these Islamist extremist would be considered acceptable.
But even more disturbing is that this is all happening in the context of what appears to be conscious effort by Turkey to effectively move all the Kurds and Yazidis out of Afrin and replace them with the Sunni refugees for other parts of Syria, in particular Eastern Ghouta. Recall that Douma, where the alleged (and highly suspect) chemical attack recently took place is in Eastern Ghouta.
There are also reports that the Turkish army and its allies aren’t allowing the Yazidis of Afrin to return to their homes if they choose to do so.
So it looks like Turkey’s campaign in Afrin has become a Turkish campaign to ethnically replace the population of Afrin using ISIS and al Qaeda:
“The Yazidis, who were recently the target of massacre, rape and sex slavery by Isis, are now facing forcible conversion to Islam under the threat of death from Turkish-backed forces which captured the Kurdish enclave of Afrin on 18 March. Islamist rebel fighters, who are allied to Turkey and have occupied Yazidi villages in the area, have destroyed the temples and places of worship the Kurdish-speaking non-Islamic sect according to local people.”
Forcible conversion of the Yazidis under threat of death. Sound familiar?
And the people conducting these forced conversions are pretty open about it...after they lure people to mosques with offers of food and medical attention:
And as we should expect, this is coinciding with reports that many of the Sunni Arab fighters in the Free Syrian Army (FSA) are former members of Isis and al-Qaeda:
And this persecution/slaughter is all happening in the context of what appears to be a Turkish campaign of ethnic replacement. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reports that the movement of people is heavily restricted and many who want to return to their homes are not being allowed to pass through checkpoints:
And the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), widely seen as neutral or pro-opposition, says it has reliable information that ‘the resettlement of the displaced people of Eastern Ghouta in the Afrin area is still continuing.’:
“The SOHR notes that the ethnic cleansing by Turkey of Afrin is being carried out “amid a media blackout” and and is being ignored internationally.”
Yes, the Kurds and Yazidis are being pushed out and replaced with Eastern Ghouta refugees via the same kind of vicious ‘convert or die’ mandate that captured the world’s attention back in 2014, except this time the campaign has Turkey’s backing and is taking place amid a de facto international media blackout.
It looks like we may have hit that long-predicted point when the US abandons its Kurdish allies in Syria. Allies that happen to be the primary anti-ISIS fighting force in the country. First, here’s a report from Friday describing how the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which are primarily comprised of the YPG, announced that its on the verge of taking the last major ISIS-controlled town, at which point a string of villages will be the only ISIS-controlled territories left in Syria. The fighting in expected to be particularly brutal because ISIS has no where else to retreat to.
But earlier last week, Turkey announced that it might invade Syria to launch a military operation against the Kurds “within days”. The US and the Kurds responded by pointing out that such an invasion would force them to stop their anti-ISIS operations. So the Kurds/US are literally about to wipe ISIS out in Syria and Turkey appears to be doing what it can to stop it:
“Kurdish forces are on the brink of capturing the last town under Isis control in Syria – but before that battle is over they might have to face a Turkish invasion.”
The timing is pretty notable. Right when the Kurds are about to wipe out ISIS, Turkey vows to wipe out the Kurds. Soon:
And while this is obviously a highly controversial move for Turkey in general since it’s going to potentially allow ISIS to regroup, it’s especially controversial since there are 2,000 US troops working with those Kurdish forces Erdogan is vowing to attack. It’s also particularly treacherous given that this last round of anti-ISIS operations are expected to be especially brutal and lead to high Kurdish casualties:
So that was the situation last week. Then, on Monday, we get work from Erdogan that he spoke with Trump and received “positive answers”. He also asserted that Turkey is waiting for the US to “keep its promises”, but reiterated that Turkey is ready to attack any day now. So we aren’t told what exactly what those positive answers were. We just know they were positive from Erdogan’s perspective, which sounds very negative for the Kurds and potentially positive for ISIS:
“Turkey’s leader said Monday he received “positive answers” from President Donald Trump on the situation in northeastern Syria, where Turkey has threatened to launch a new operation against American-backed Syrian Kurdish fighters.”
So some sort of mystery “positive answers” were given to Erdogan by Trump on Friday. And Turkey is waiting for the US to keep its promises:
So what might those positive answers be? Well, it looks like we just found out: Trump declared that he’s pulling ALL US troops out of Syria within 60–100 days, which will pave the way for that Turkey assault on the Kurds:
“President Donald Trump has ordered the complete withdrawal of all American troops from Syria within 60 to 100 days — ending the small US presence in the war-torn country, curbing the fight against ISIS, and weakening America’s ability to counter Iran.”
So in 60–100 days the US is entirely out of Syria. That’s presumably one of the “positive answers” from Trump Erdogan was referring to. It is exactly what Erdogan has long wanted, after all.
But aside from the morally dubious act of leaving the Kurds to be slaughtered by the Turkish army right after allying with them to defeat ISIS, it’s hard to ignore the reality that letting Turkey slaughter the Kurds is the perfect recipe for allowing ISIS to bounce back because they are the only military force in Syria that’s actually been focused on destroying ISIS:
So it’s sure looking like Trump may have made a decision to avoid a conflict with Turkey at the cost of risking the regrouping of ISIS. And when you consider the role Erdogan’s government played in the rise of ISIS, you have to wonder if the possibility if a resurgent ISIS is also part of what Erdogan considers “positive” about this new development. Might that be part of the long-term plan? We’ll see, but it’s pretty increasingly clear that Erdogan has a lot to feel positive about this week. People who don’t like ISIS and don’t want to see another slaughter of the Kurds have much less to feel positive about.
Following the sudden resignation by Secretary of Defense James Mattis, who made it very clear that he was resigning in protest to Trump’s policies and who made this decision says after Trump announces the US is pulling out of Syria entirely soon, the Associated Press had a rather remarkable story on how exactly President Trump arrived at his decision to rapidly pull all US troops out of Syria in the face of Turkey’s threats to launch an assault on the Syrian Kurds: It sounds like Trump’s decision was made spontaneously in response to Erdogan making the point that US official policy had been to stay in Syria until ISIS was defeated and ISIS had already lost 99 percent of its territory. It was in response to Erdogan making this point that Trump suddenly decided to pull out. The decision even took Erdogan aback, who then cautioned Trump not to pull out too hastily.
The scenario described by the sources for the article is as follows: after Erdogan’s threats to launch in military operation against the US-backed Kurds last week, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his Turkish counterpart Mevlut Cavusoglu agreed to have Trump and Erdogan hold a conference call on December 14th. Pompeo, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, and other members of Trump’s national security team put together a list of talking points in advance of the call that Trump could use to get Erdogan to call off the imminent assault. The talking points included offering Erdogan some sort of concession, like holding territory at the Turkey/Syria border. But then the call happened and talking points were forgotten. Erdogan made the point that the state US goal was the defeat of ISIS and ISIS lost 99 percent of its territory, so why isn’t the US pulling out? Erdogan also assured Trump that Turkey would take care of the remaining ISIS fighters. Trump then asked NSC adviser John Bolton if what Erdogan said was true, Bolton agreed it was true, and Trump then immediately agreed that the US will pull out completely. Everyone was reportedly shocked by this, including Erdogan, who immediately cautioned Trump against an overly hasty retreat. Over the next four days, White House officials tried to convince Trump to reverse course, but to no avail.
Now, it’s possible Trump was already looking for an excuse to pull US troops out as soon as possible and this was just the excuse he was looking for. There were reports in November of 2017 that Trump told Turkey he was going to stop arming the YPG at that point. So it’s not like we don’t have reason to believe that Trump was searching for a reason to cut off Kurdish support. But it sounds like Trump sudden decision legitimately took his staff by surprise, which raises the question of whether or not Trump was indeed planning on this policy change at this point in time and simply kept it a secret, perhaps in response to the push-back he got from his advisers the last time he tried to cut off support for the Kurds.
Also keep in mind that, while ISIS has lost 99 percent of its territory, that doesn’t mean it’s lost 99 percent of its fighters. Recall how one of the reasons the final defeat of ISIS is expected to be particularly difficult is because the thousands of remaining fights are all left in that remaining 1 percent of territory with nowhere else to go. So it’s a particularly deceptive argument to point to the amount of territory lost as evidence of ISIS’s imminent demise, and particularly stupid to assume Turkey is actually going to defeat a proxy force it helped arm, but that’s what apparently the excuse Trump used to make this decision:
“The Dec. 14 call, described by officials who were not authorized to discuss the decision-making process publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity, provides insight into a consequential Trump decision that prompted the resignation of widely respected Defense Secretary Jim Mattis. It also set off a frantic, four-day scramble to convince the president either to reverse or delay the decision.”
So based on the accounts from those familiar with what happened, this history policy change simply came about by Erdogan noting that ISIS had already lost 99 percent of its territory. It was so sudden that even Erdogan cautioned against a hasty withdrawal:
So, despite Erdogan’s bluster the previous week about an imminent Turkey attack on the Kurds, it doesn’t sound like Erdogan was actually in favor of the US imminently pulling out. And that brings us to the following article: Erdogan just announced that Turkey will be delaying its planned assault on the Kurds and ISIS for several months:
““In the upcoming months, on the ground in Syria, we will follow a style of incursion that eliminates both P.K.K.-Y.P.D. elements and remnants of Daesh,” Mr. Erdogan said, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State. “This should be known.””
So Erdogan is standing by his pledge to “eliminate” the Kurdish forces, along with ISIS, but this is a few months away, not a few days away.
Does this mean the US’s anti-ISIS operations and cooperation with the Kurds is going to continue for another few more months? We’ll see, but the Kurdish forces have already warned of one significant response they might be forced to employ in response to Turkey’s threat: the release of thousands of ISIS fighters and their relatives currently being held as prisoners so those resources can be used for the defense against the Turkish assault. So while we’re already warned that tens of thousands of former ISIS fighters are still active and have gone underground, that underground ISIS network might be getting a big infusion soon:
So, at this point, it appears the world is going to have to hope Erdogan actually follows through on his pledge to crush the remaining ISIS fighters. And that’s exactly the kind of thing the world should not expect Turkey to do. Yes, Erdogan will no doubt direct the Turkish army to crush the Kurds. But given the reality that ISIS has been treated as a kind of proxy-army by Turkey that could be used against the Assad government, it’s hard to see Erdogan actually ordering the destruction of his own proxy force when the objectives of that proxy force have yet to be met. Recall how Turkey had previously declared its intent to create a “safe zone” for Syrian rebels and that by wiping the Kurds out of the Syrian territory of Afrin, Turkey would effectively link up Idlib with another area controlled by Turkish-backed militants. Also recall how it appeared that one of the methods Turkey was going to use to deal with the extremist militants running Idlib was encourage militants who aren’t al Qaeda members to simply “melt into society” (and presumably join up Turkey-backed militant groups).
The general assumption is that with the US leaving Syria that ends the battle to overthrow Assad. But now that Trump is essentially handing Turkey control of much of Syria and leaving the fate of ISIS in the hands of Erdogan, we have to ask the question: Is Turkey’s plans to ‘defeat’ ISIS and the Kurds going to revolve around encouraging the militants to leave ISIS and join the various Turkey-backed militant groups so they can continue the fight against the Kurds and, eventually, Assad? It doesn’t seem like we can rule it out.
Here’s an interesting new detail on what led up to President Trump’s sudden decision to pull US troops out of Syria in the face of President Erdogan’s threats invade Syria within days and attack the US-backed Kurdish forces: Erdogan apparently promised Trump that he would finish off ISIS. And he made this promise to Trump, “as your friend”, telling Trump, “In fact, as your friend, I give you my word in this.” Given how much Trump appears to need the approval of world leaders, and given the business interests Trump has in Turkey, you have to wonder how much that lone friend about being Trump’s friend had to do with Trump’s seemingly sudden policy shift.
At the same time, Turkey just announced that it’s holding off on its imminent Syrian invasion for a few months. And that raises the question of whether or not US anti-ISIS operations are going to continue during that time or if they’re effectively stopping now. It also raises the question of whether or not that Kurds have any interest at this point in attacking ISIS following this announcement. Especially when we hear that Kurdish leaders are already considering releasing thousands of ISIS prisoners to free up resources in anticipation of an attack by turkey. So it’s possible that anti-ISIS operations have effectively halted at this point. Although it’s possible the Kurds are operating under the reasonable assumption that Turkey is probably going to try and recruit as many of those ISIS fighters as possible for use against the Kurds (by encouraging them to join Turkey-allied Sunni jihadist rebel groups), in which case it’s possible the Kurds might conclude that doing as much damage to ISIS as possible while US forces are still engaged is worth it.
We’ll see how this unfolds. But the fact that Erdogan personally promised Trump that Turkey would finish off ISIS right before Trump announced he would pull the US out of Syria makes it sound like the anti-ISIS operations in Syria are pretty much up to Turkey now. Which is pretty much the best news ISIS could have hoped for:
““Erdogan said to the president, ‘In fact, as your friend, I give you my word in this,’” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to disclose details of a presidential phone call.”
Yep, Trump got a personal promise from his friend Erdogan. A promise that Erdogan — who has arguably done more to support ISIS than any other world leader and who stands to benefit the most if the Syrian civil war succeeds in balkanizing Syria — will finish off ISIS. Don’t worry. It’s a promise.
And while Turkey will probably try and entice as many ISIS fighters as possible to leave the group and join alternative jihadist rebel groups under Turkey’s control, also keep in mind that a Turkish war against those ISIS members who refuse to leave the group, along with the war against the wars, is going to give Turkey a great excuse to remain in the oil rich Northeast Syrian region for the foreseeable future. Which is the perfect recipe for the balkanization of Syria, with a Sunni jihadist-run Eastern Syrian under Turkey’s protection.
And that growing possibility of a Turkish-led balkanization of Syria might explain why seemingly opposed players are all in favor of Trump’s decision to pull the US out. Why would Russia, Assad, and Turkey all be in favor of a US decision to pull out when Turkey has long been pushing for the overthrow of Assad and the takeover of Turkey by Sunni jihadists? Well, given that the US has long held that Assad must go for there to be a resolution to the Syrian civil war, it’s not hard to see why the Syrian government would be happy to see the US leave. And Turkey is obviously going to be excited to see the primary protector of the Kurds relinquish that protection, especially if it opens up a vacuum that Turkey can enter. So we may have reached a point in Syria’s civil war where having Turkey invade Syria, and lay the foundations for a Turkish-protected oil-rich breakaway region for the Sunni rebel groups, could be seen as a desirable alternative to the status quo by a number of the opposing sides in this conflict. It’s a reflection of how awful the status quo is, as is the fact that it’s still unclear why what’s coming next isn’t going to be even worse.
There was an ominous update to Trump’s announced plans to withdraw US troops from Syria shortly and leave the remaining fight against ISIS to Turkey: Turkey is making substantial requests for ongoing US military assistance against ISIS. The requests are so big that it’s possible the US military presence in Syria could actually increase from the current levels and that makes this the kind of request that the Trump administration might not agree to, at least not entirely. And at least one US official in the following article and saying that the Trump administration is unlikely to provide all of the military support the Turks are seeking, especially on air support.
There also appears to be widespread skepticism within the Pentagon that Turkey actually can handle the anti-ISIS operations on its own. The skepticism is directed at Turkey’s logistical capacity to maintain supply lines deep inside Syria where ISIS remains. On some level that’s a surprising area of skepticism given the size of Turkey’s military, so you have to wonder if the skepticism is really about Turkey’s logistical capacity as opposed to its willingness to actually wage a campaign against ISIS on its own. Keep mind Turkey’s key role in supporting the growth of ISIS, a history that should be raising serious concerns that Turkey is simply going to inadequately follow through on its pledge and basically let the thousands of remaining ISIS fighters either regroup or leave and join the many other al Qaeda-affiliated jihadist groups operating in the region.
Also keep in mind that US air support really has played a critical role in the current anti-ISIS operation, so perhaps Turkey really doesn’t have the air capacity required for this type of operation and really does require ongoing US assistance. Either way, if it turns out that Turkey needs the US to make military commitments to anti-ISIS operations that the Trump administration is unwilling to make because it would involve a deepening of the US’s involvement in Syria, we could be looking at the pretext for the official excuse Erdogan needs to let the remaining ISIS fighters either scatter or regroup:
“The Turkish requests are so extensive that, if fully met, the American military might be deepening its involvement in Syria instead of reducing it, the officials added. That would frustrate President Trump’s goal of transferring the mission of finishing off Islamic State to Turkey in the hope of forging an exit strategy for the U.S. military to leave Syria.”
Will the price of finishing off the remaining ISIS stronghold be a deepening of US military involvement in Syria? That sounds like a possibility. And that makes it a real possibility that the US won’t be meeting those requests, giving Turkey an excuse to not actually finish that fight. And excuse that’s going to be especially compelling since the Pentagon is basically saying that it doesn’t think Turkey can actually finish the fight without US support:
And despite that skepticism within the Pentagon, at least one US official is expecting that the US is NOT going to be providing the full scope of what Turkey is requesting, especially on air support:
And even if that US support is provided, there’s still the issue of keeping the Turks from engaging with the Kurds:
“Sykes-Picot on acid.” That’s how one US official described the arrangement US officials are trying to work out to keep the Turks and the Kurds from open war. Recall that the Sykes-Picot agreement is one of Erdogan’s pet peeves and he’s openly talked about redrawing the map of the Middle-East. So the current talk of ‘Sykes-Picot on acid’ is the kind of negotiations that could end up in real attempts to redraw borders...presumably in a way that gives Turkey a chunk of Syria.
Keep in mind that one of the key factors that’s currently preventing the Turks from slaughtering the Syrian Kurds at this point is the presence of US troops alongside Kurdish forces as part of these anti-ISIS operations. So if the US does maintain a military presence in Syria as part of these requests from Turkey, you have to wonder if keeping at least some US troops embedded with the Kurds is going to be part of how the US avoids a Turk-Kurd conflict from quickly erupting.
If not, it looks likely the Kurds are going to be forming a much closer alliance with Assad. And that does bring us at least one step closing to a diplomatic end to this conflict, which is one rare bit of good news coming out of Syria:
So, at this point, it’s looking likely that we’ll see a Kurdish/Assad alliance blossom at the same time Turkey moves in to take control of at least parts of Northeast Syria, raising the question of whether or not Turkey has any plans of leaving that oil-rich territory or if this is seen in Ankara as a permanent occupation and eventual redrawing of borders (‘Sykes-Picot on acid’, etc). And that points towards another reason we should be concerned about Turkey’s resolve to actually wipe out the remaining ISIS forces: fighting ISIS is looking like it’s going to be Turkey’s primary excuse for staying in Syria, which could make that a fight Erdogan won’t want to be winning too soon. And given that both Turkey and the US appear to be confident that Turkey won’t be able to win that fight soon with US support, and given that the US may not be providing that support, it appears that Turkey already has in place an explanation for why its upcoming anti-ISIS operations will end up being semi-permanent operations. Which would be great news for ISIS.
Here’s a story to keep in mind in the context of the Trump administration decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal at the same time the administration attempts to sell Saudi Arabia nuclear power technology while the Saudis are asserting their right to develop nuclear weapons: Erdogan is now demanding that Turkey gets nukes of its own too:
““Some countries have missiles with nuclear warheads. Not just one or two. But I cannot have them. I don’t accept this,” Mr Erdogan said in a speech in central Turkey that was broadcast on national television. “There is almost no developed country in the world that does not have nuclear warheads.””
Turkey’s lack of nuclear weapons is some sort of global insult. That’s how Erdogan appears to be framing this issue. And while we don’t know if it was bluster, the pro-government media was strongly getting behind this theme so it sounds like this is an issue that could become some sort of nationalist rallying cry for the Erdogan government:
And note the disturbing possible leverage Erdogan would have if he does decide to pursue nuclear weapons and faces the threat of sanctions from Turkey’s European trading partners: Erdogan is also threatening to open a new route for Syrian refugees to travel to Europe if Turkey doesn’t get the level of international support its demanding for setting up a refugee ‘safe zone’ in Northeast Syria. It’s unclear if Erdogan might be tempted to use that same threat as leverage during future sanction threats from Europe over nuclear weapons, but the threat of releasing refugees into Europe is obviously potentially the kind of threat that could apply to all sorts of showdowns with Europe:
Keep in mind that, if Erdogan does indeed view the threat of releasing refugees into Europe as potential leverage that could be used during a showdown over nuclear weapons, that’s the kind of leverage that’s only going to exist as long as there are large numbers of refugees. In other words, if Erdogan is considering using refugees as leverage to acquire nuclear weapons without European sanctions, he’ll have to do it relatively soon.
Adding to the possible urgency for Turkey’s nuclear ambitions is the fact that it’s very unclear if Trump will be in office after 2020, and the Trump administration is clearly going to be much more open to the idea of a nuclear armed Turkey than a Democratic administration would be. Another Trump Tower in Turkey might do the trick.
Also keep in mind that if Saudi Arabia or Iran manages to openly acquire nuclear weapons, that’s likely going to be used as an excuse for any other countries in the region to openly get their own nuclear weapons. Not just Turkey. So Turkey, and any other countries in the region interested in acquiring nuclear weapons, probably have rather mixed feelings about the idea of Saudi Arabia getting its own nuclear arsenal. It’s a grimly fascinating dynamic: countries obviously don’t want their regional rivals to get nuclear weapons in general...unless those rival acquisition makes it easier for the country to get their own nuclear arsenal. Given that the Trump administration has demonstrated a desire to sell out to all sorts of foreign interests, the fact that a growing number of those Middle Eastern foreign interests are likely interested in creating a regional nuclear-free-for-all is going to be something to watch.
It happened again. The US just threw the Kurds under the bus. Technically it was Trump’s decision and it appears he made this decision alone and over the long-standing opposition of his military advisers. Well, not quite alone. He spoke with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan by phone right before declaring his decision to entirely pull the ~2000 US troops currently stationed with the Kurdish-led SDF forces that made up the bulk of the anti-ISIS coalition that has nearly destroyed ISIS’s caliphate. As the following article from a few days ago makes clear, the US had a tough decision to make soon due to the fact that Turkey has been signaling its intent on moving its military into Kurdish-held territories and turn these areas into resettlement zones for the two million Syrian refugees currently living in Turkey. Such a move would force the Kurds to either flee from those areas or fight the Turks and the only thing that’s prevented this conflicted up until now has been the presence of those 2,000 US troops embedded with the Kurdish forces. So Trump decided to remove the one buffer preventing war between the Turks and Kurds, after a phone call with Erdogan.
Oh, and we’re also learning that Turkey will be expected to take over the responsibility of watching over the ISIS caliphate refugees, including former ISIS fighters, that the Kurds have captured in recent years. So Turkey, the long-time primary sponsor of ISIS, will be responsible for ensuring those fighters don’t reform ISIS or go off to join one of the many other jihadist rebel groups operating in Syria. In other words, ISIS was probably just given the green light to reform.
But Trump appears to be using bluster as some sort of safeguard against Turkish acting in bad faith regarding its new responsibilities to watching over the captured ISIS fighters. Trump tweeted out this morning that:
So in Trump’s “great and unmatched wisdom”, he’s handing responsibility of the captured ISIS fighters to one of ISIS’s key state sponsors at the same time he threatened to totally destroy and obliterate the Turkish economy, which he apparently has done before (this is presumably a reference to the sanctions against Turkey Trump imposed last year over a dispute involving a US pastor, which certainly didn’t help Turkey’s economy). Keep in mind that if Turkey adopts of policy of quietly letting capture ISIS fighters regroup or join up with other jihadist groups, this probably isn’t going to be openly advertised. So it’s very unclear how Trump’s threat of obliterating Turkey’s economy can actually be enforced. Also note that Trump’s threats didn’t say anything about the Turks not attacking the Kurds.
Ok, first, here’s a report on how the situation looked right before he made this decision after speaking with Erdogan. As the article describes, Erodogan told Turkey’s parliament during its opening session last week that Turkey had no choice but to act unilaterally to create a safe zone in northern Syria, declaring, “We have not achieved any of the results we desired...Turkey cannot lose even a single day on this issue. There is no other choice but to act on our own.” As the article also notes, the decision to pull out would essentially end the US’s fight against ISIS in Syria. But it was seen by US officials that, if the Turks do decide to mover their military into the Kurdish held region, it’s probably going to prompt the Trump administration to pull out entirely to avoid a conflict with the Turks. Some US officials appeared to be spinning the prospect of a US pull out as some sort of “a perception ploy” intended to convey to Turkey that they were be worse off dealing with Assad government alone without the US. It’s not exactly convincing spin. So while Trump’s eventual decision to pull out was a surprise in the sense that there was no warning, it wasn’t particularly surprising because the expectation even with the US government was that Trump would concede to Erdogan’s demands:
“A U.S. pullout would essentially end the fight against Islamic State in Syria, which U.S. officials still consider a viable terrorist network capable of staging attacks against the U.S. and its allies and interests despite having lost its so-called caliphate.”
It’s quite a way to end the US’s fight against the Islamic State: handing all the captured fighters over to Turkey, ISIS’s key state sponsor. But US officials appeared to be openly saying that if Erodogan decides to move Turkish forces into Kurdish held territories the US will have no choice but to leave. And Erdogan publicly signaled last week that he was planning on exactly that unilateral move. So Trump’s capitulation on this issue was getting publicly signaled in advance:
And as the article notes, there’s one other big factor driving this move: Trump’s desire to be able to declare he’s pulled the US out of Syria for the 2020 election:
Is pulling out of Syria good politics for Trump? We’ll see, but as the following article notes, not only is it inviting a slaughter of the Kurds — which certainly won’t be popular in the US military even if the broader US public doesn’t notice — but it’s, again, inviting the reconstitution of ISIS and it’s hard to imagine this decision helping Trump with the US electorate if ISIS ends up regrouping. In other words, while the decision to pull the US out of Syria might seem like potentially good politics for Trump, it’s also a giant political gamble the relies on one of ISIS’s key sponsor behaving itself, which doesn’t seem very strategic:
Some might say that Trump has proved once again that America First means America Alone. But in this case, he is not even putting America first, he’s violating all but the narrowest definition of American interests. That is because, at bottom, Trump has no idea what American interests are.
Keep in mind that it was primarily the Kurds, not the US, that was holding these thousands of captured ISIS fighters. It’s the presence of the US troops embedded with the Kurds that allowed the Kurds to do this in the face of Turkey’s threats, but the Kurds were the ones actually securing these captured fighters. But Trump appears to be framing this move as saving US taxpayers the cost of securing these captured fighters and instead they’ll be handed over to Turkey, ISIS’s key state sponsor:
We’re going to see if Trump’s tweet threats to “obliterate” Turkey’s economy if those fighters are allowed to escape actually results in the Turkey preventing that from happening. It’s hard to see how Trump can realistically made good on that threat. But it’s also worth keeping in mind that this move actually gives Erdogan an immense amount of leverage over Trump...he could create a political nightmare for Trump if he wants to after this move. That’s Erodogan’s counter-threat. It’s like a weird form of mutually assured political destruction between the two leaders.
So while increasing focus is being given to the investigation of whether or not Trump abused his power by using US foreign policy to force Ukraine to publicly investigate his political opponent, it’s going to be worth keeping in mind that Trump may have also just given ISIS the biggest boost it could have hoped for and betrayed one of the US’s strongest allies in the region so he can tell US voters that he got the US out of Syria.
@Pterrafractyl–
Worth noting what the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood just said:
https://www.globalmbwatch.com/2019/10/07/syrian-muslim-brotherhood-issues-shura-council-statement-russian-iran-declared-occupiers-and-turkey-as-supporter/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheGlobalMuslimBrotherhoodDailyWatch+%28The+Global+Muslim+Brotherhood+Daily+Watch%29
Goodie!
Keep Up the Great Work!
Dave
President Trump appears to be in damage control mode following the widespread criticism of his surprise decision to pull the US troops out of Syria. As the following article describes, Trump appears to be claiming that the US wasn’t withdrawing forces from Syria entirely, just from the Kurdish held areas, which is a rather curious form of spin because his primary justification for this move is to get the US out of Syria entirely. It’s confusing spin. In addition, Trump is now declaring, via tweet, that the US has in no way abandoned the Kurds, and then suggested the US was arming the Kurds (which is true, but not enough to withstand the Turkish army) and then reiterated his vague threat that he would destroy Turkey’s economy if any “unforced or unnecessary fighting by Turkey” takes place...
Turkey’s government, on the other hand, has already dismissed Trump’s threats, with Turkey’s Vice President Fuat Oktay declaring that, “Where Turkey’s security is concerned, we determine our own path, but we set our own limits.” So it doesn’t look like Turkey is taking Trump’s threats very seriously, which underscores how the US has indeed abandoned the Kurds because the only thing ostensibly protecting the Kurds at this point was Trump’s vague threats:
“Turkish Vice President Fuat Oktay said his country wants to create a zone to permit the resettlement of Syrian refugees. “Where Turkey’s security is concerned,” he said, “we determine our own path, but we set our own limits.””
Trump clearly needs to work on his twitter threat technique because Turkey appears to be utterly unphased. And note Trump’s claim that the US isn’t going to pulling out of Syria entirely. Instead the soldiers currently with the Kurds in northern Syria will be reassigned to “other parts of the beleaguered country”. So it’s like Trump isn’t even withdrawing the US from Syria...just from the areas Turkey wants to invade:
Again, it’s all rather confusing spin coming out of the White House. But perhaps not as confusing as the fact that the primary way the Trump administration is expressing its disapproval of Turkey’s plans to invade Kurdish held areas of northern Syria is to announce that if Turkey does invade the US is going to be pulling out of the area completely. That was literally the Trump’s threat to Erdogan during their phone call on Sunday when Trump made his surprise decision to pull the US out of those areas. The pull out that opens the path for Turkey to invade is supposed to be a threat that makes Turkey not want to invade. It’s Trumpian diplomacy in action:
“But Sunday’s phone call didn’t go as expected, officials said. Erdogan was adamant about Turkey going into Syria, officials said. Even Trump’s offer of a White House visit wasn’t enough to deter him.”
Erdogan was apparently so furious about not getting a personal meeting with Trump at the UN that Trump couldn’t talk him out of invading northern Syria. That’s what we’re told transpired on this phone call. Instead, Trump eventually tells Erdogan, “If you’re going to do it, you’re going to get no support,” and that appears to be the primary source of leverage Trump tried to use in these negotiations: if Erodogan does this invasion that the US doesn’t approve of, the US will respond by not supporting the invasion and instead pulling US troops (an obstacle to the invasion) out of the area:
Now, it’s worth noting there’s was the subsequent threat Trump issued about destroying Turkey’s economy if Turkey’s military actions go too far. But there’s still no indication of what ‘too far’ would be. Plus, don’t forget that Trump’s threat about destroying Turkey’s economy only mentioned retaliation if Turkey didn’t responsibility take over the captured ISIS prisoners. There was no mention of that threat applying to military action against the Kurds. In the end, the only threat Trump has publicly made about attacking the Kurds is the threat to pull the US entirely out of Syria if that happens.
It’s also worth noting that critics won’t be able to charge Trump with issuing a ‘red line’ threat in Syria that he doesn’t back up. Because there was no actual ‘line’. That’s how vague the threat was, and it was followed by the threat to pull the US out entirely if Erdogan crossed that vague line. So instead of Trump drawing a ‘red line’ with Erdogan, he waved a big red cape in front of raging Erdogan and invited him to come charging in.
It’s a sad day when the controversy here boils down to pro/anti Trump with no discussion as to the farce of US involvement in Syria to begin with. The level of discourse over Syria/Ukraine/Russia/China and the rest of US interventionism is extremely shallow and controlled.
This manufactured situation breeds action/reaction which advances fascism on the political left and right, from which I see no relief anytime soon.
@Dave: Related to the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood’s embrace of Turkey’s invasion of Syria, Here’s an interesting piece from back in the Spring of this year that discusses how the pan-Islamist worldview underpinning Erdogan and the AKP drove Turkey’s support of the Arab Spring with the idea that any popular movement would inevitably bring to power groups like the Muslim Brotherhood. It’s a vision of a borderless Middle East where all Muslims should eventually be united in a single Muslim state. It’s the kind of worldview that the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, and any other forces who might want to see a resurgence of the Syrian jihadist rebel forces, are going to find very convenient.
Interestingly, the article notes that, Erdogan and the AKP began aggressively dropping the ‘nationalist’ mask around 2010 and more openly embraced an Islamist agenda and portraying Erdogan in a religious light (many Turkish Islamists continue to see Erdogan as a reincarnation of historical figures as Ertugrul Ghazi and Abdul Hamid II). But Erdogan was forced to strengthen his ties to Turkey’s nationalists since 2013–2014 following the large Gezi Park street protests of 2013 and corruption investigations into the AKP. And its been under this banner of ostensible nationalism that Erdogan and the AKP leadership has framed Turkey’s prime goal in the Middle East as simply eradicating the Kurdish YPG from Northern Syria.
So the political necessity of appealing to the AKP’s nationalist allies has been part of the domestic political calculus behind the new assault on Syria’s Kurds, but that ‘nationalist’ goal of ethnically cleansing northern Syria of the Kurds is happening in the broader context of the AKP’s Islamist vision for the Middle East, shared by the Muslim Brotherhood the transcends borders and calls for all Muslims to form one giant Islamist super-state. It’s the kind of agenda that suggests Turkey’s military adventures might not end with crushing the Kurds, or overthrowing Assad, or invading Syria:
“Turkey utterly embraced the Arab Spring more than any other country, even though it had excellent economic and political relations with all the pre-Arab Spring states and regimes, including Syria. There was no compelling economic or geopolitical reason behind such a wholehearted embrace except that the AKP leadership thought that the Arab Spring was paving the way for ittihad‑i Islam. And as we have seen, this has always been the political goal and ideal of Islamists in Turkey.”
As the article describes, it was a globalized vision of Islamism (along with Pan-Turkism) was at the core of Turkey’s enthusiastic embrace of the Arab Spring. An embrace that assumed the Arab street would rally around groups like the Muslim Brotherhood when given the chance. Even during the initial decade of the AKP’s grip on power, before the Arab Spring when the AKP adhered to a more traditional Turkish nationalist foreign policy, the AKP’s leadership held this vision of uniting all Muslims in the region into a single state. So when we’re forced to speculate about the possible ambitions of the Turkish government as it launches this latest invasion of Syria, we can’t ignore that it’s a part with a vision of a single unified Muslim state that’s launching this invasion and the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies around the region are going to share that vision:
Then, in 2013, the Gezi Park protest broke out and spread across Turkey. These are seen/spun by the AKP as evidence of Western meddling, in keeping with the pan-Islamist foundation of the party. But Erdogan has nonetheless faced real political challenges and, as a result, has adopted a more nationalistic tone, including taking the stance that Turkey’s prime objective in the Middle East is simply wiping out the YPG:
As we can see, this current campaign to ethnically cleanse northern Syria of the Kurds is actually a limited foreign policy ambition compared to the much more expansive goal of united the Middle East’s Muslim populations under a single super-state. A goal that happens to be shared by groups like the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood. And that’s all why we probably shouldn’t be surprised if this attack on the Kurds ends up refueling the Syria jihadist rebel groups and drags Syria’s civil war into the next decade.
So given the AKP’s grand ambitions for the region, we have to ask the question of whether or not facilitating Turkey in pursing that vision was part of the rational for Trump’s seemingly spontaneous to greenlight this invasion during a Sunday phone call with Erdogan. Don’t forget that Mike Pompeo was on that phone call with Trump and Erdogan and Trump’s decision was actually foreshadowed by a WSJ article days before the phone call when US government officials made it clear the US saw itself as having no choice to withdraw US troops for the area of Turkey invaded. Might the ethnic cleansing of Syria’s Kurds be seen as just the opening of the next phase of Syria’s civil war? A plan held by more than just Turkey? If so, large numbers of escaping ISIS prisoners is probably a also part of the plan.
Here’s an interesting interview of Jonathan Spyer, an Israeli expert on the Syrian Kurds, about Turkey’s invasion of northeast Syria. It sounds like Spyer is expecting a complete disaster, with over a million displaced Kurds. As Spyer points out, the 30 km deep region along Syria’s border with that Turkey claims it will limit its invasion to in order to create a safe zone for Syrian refugees happens to be where around a million Kurds already live. So based on that alone, and the fact that Turkey appears to view all Kurds as ‘terrorists’, we shouldn’t be surprised if the number of displaced Kurds exceeds a million people.
But Spyer points out another key aspect of this invasion that should make us expect a possible slaughter of the Kurds: The Turkish army isn’t going to do this operation alone. It’s also going to be relying on the Turkey-aligned Syrian Free Army to do a lot of the ground work. And the Syrian Free Army consists of a number of former members of the jihadist militias known for their extreme hatred of the Kurds and a capacity for extreme violence against civilians:
“Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said the military intends to move 30 kilometers (19 miles) into northern Syria and that its operation will last until all “terrorists are neutralized,” referring to the predominantly Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).”
Turkey’s Foreign Minister asserts that the operation will last until all “terrorists are neutralized,” and that’s why this is looking like the start of an ethnic cleansing campaign. Because the way Erdogan’s government sees it, the Kurds are Northern Syria are the terrorists. Talk of ‘neutralizing the terrorists’ is another way of saying Turkey is planning on removing Kurds from that region. As a result, there’s every reason to expect a mass evacuation of the Kurds, which is more than a million people:
But it gets worse. Because we’re not just looking at the forced displacement of more than a million people. We’re also looking at a likely slaughter. Because it’s not just the Turkish army waging this campaign. The jihadist Syrian National Army of jihadist militiamen are also going to be involved. And if the invasion and ethnic cleansing of of Afrin is any indication of what we can expect when Turkey works with these Syrian militias we should expect widespread looting and civilian murder too:
So it’s looking like the creation of a safe zone for the millions of Syrian refugees in Turkey is going to result in the creation of over a million Kurdish refugees, along with widespread looting and murder.
In related news, senior Pentagon officials just told Newsweek that a group of US special forces operating on Mashtenour hill in Kobani fell under artillery fire from Turkish forces that was so intense the US personnel considered firing back in self-defense.
While there’s a great deal of understandable concern that Turkey’s invasion of northeast Syria is going to result in the release of thousands of ISIS prisoners and the possible refounding of if an ISIS-controlled territory, here’s a set of articles that lay out why we should probably be more concerned about Erdogan actively planning on releasing the thousands of Kurdish held ISIS prisoners and incorporating them into the Turkey-allied jihadist militias and using them to further ethnically cleanse northeast Syria of the Kurds and other minorities:
For starters, as the first article below describes, we already have a very recent template for Turkey turning a blind eye to jihadist proxy militias terrorize local Kurdish and other minority populations and driving them out of territory under the auspices of ‘fighting terrorism’: that is precisely what happened in the Turkey invasion of Afrin last year. The Turkish army didn’t commit the atrocities reported in Afrin. But it didn’t stop those atrocities either. It just turned a blind eye and let its proxy militias drive the Kurds out of Afrin unless they agreed to convert to the kinds of extreme forms of Sunni Islam followed by ISIS and al Qaeda. That’s the template.
The second article excerpt below is a report by Patrick Cockburn from March of 2018, where he describes the threats of beheadings, caught on video, being waged against the Kurds in Afrin at that time. The third article excerpt below is another report by Cockburn from February 2018 about allegations that Turkey was actively pressuring former ISIS fighters to join the Turkey-allied jihadist militias that make up the Free Syrian Army (FSA), and sending these former ISIS-fighters to fight in Afrin. The fourth article excerpt below is from June of 2018 and describes the aftermath of that ethnic cleansing campaign, with widespread reports of refugees for eastern Ghouta taking over the homes of the Kurds and Yazidis driven out of Afrin under the threat of violence from the proxy militias. Recall how the city of Douma, in eastern Ghouta, was held by jihadist rebels before its fall to Syrian government forces, and the people who agreed to leave Douma for Afrin tended to be the jihadists and their families. So when we’re talking about replacing the Kurds of Afrin with refugees from Douma, those refugees from Douma are largely going to be sympathetic with the jihadist militias. And this already happened. So we don’t have to wonder if Turkey might be willing to use former ISIS fighters to reinforce its jihadist proxy militias and fuel an ethnic cleansing campaign in northeast Syria. We know Erdogan is more than willing to oversee such an operation because he did the exact same thing last year in Afrin:
“Aydintasbas said the Turkish military has been mostly professional and disciplined, but noted the same cannot necessarily be said of the militia groups fighting alongside them. “I think these the Kurds living in this area might be more scared of them rather than the Turkish army,” she explained.”
This is why Turkey’s promises that it won’t commit atrocities and ethnic cleansing against civilians are hollow. The Turkish army isn’t the group tasked with committing the atrocities. That’s left up to its proxy militias, as Turkey’s campaign in Afrin has made abundantly clear. Militia’s that imposed ISIS-style threats of beheadings if the Kurds and other minorities of Afrin didn’t convert to ISIS-style strict forms of Islam. It’s the perfect situation for ethnic cleansing: convert, or flee, or die:
“The Turkish offensive against the Kurds in Afrin will not end when it falls, but its elimination may set the stage for further Turkish attacks against Kurdish-held territory further east. This will bring the Turks into a confrontation with the Washington which will try mediate, but, if US forces are to stay in Syria, then they will still need the Kurds as their one ally on the ground. But, if the fall of Afrin is accompanied by mass killings and ethnic cleansing, then the war in northern Syria is about to get a whole lot worse.”
If Turkey’s ethnic cleansing campaign in Afrin succeeds, that’s only going to set the stage for a further campaign in northeast Syria. That’s how the situation looked early last year and as we now know it’s exactly how things played out. It’s also why we should probably expect the kinds of ‘convert or die’ ISIS-style threats from these militias when they invade northeast Syria. It already happened in Afrin, along with evidence that Turkey’s army was actively pushing former ISIS members into these proxy militias:
And it’s those videos of these militias issuing ISIS-style ‘convert or die’ threats to the local population that add evidence to the claims of former ISIS fights that Turkey is actively pushing ISIS members into these militias for the purpose of waging war against the Kurds. They’re certainly acting like former ISIS members. Although they’re also acting like al Qaeda members. ISIS doesn’t represent the only pool of jihadist extremists that make up convenient cannon fodder for Erdogan’s war against the Kurds. But the collapse of ISIS’s caliphate, brought about largely through the actions of the Kurds, did inevitably create a large pool of former ISIS fighters available for recruitment and it looks like Turkey — long one of ISIS’s key state sponsors — decided to recruit them...for war against the Kurds who created this large pool of former ISIS fighters. It’s a remarkably cynical cycle of violence:
“Isis fighters are joining the FSA and Turkish-army invasion force because they are put under pressure by the Turkish authorities. From the point of view of Turkey, the recruitment of former Isis combatants means that it can draw on a large pool of professional and experienced soldiers. Another advantage is that they are not Turks, so if they suffer serious casualties this will do no damage to the Turkish government.”
Thousands of ISIS fighters might sound like a nightmare to most people. But for Erdogan they represented a large pool of experienced soldiers. Experience that includes carrying out exactly the terror of local populations required for the exactly the kind of ethnic cleansing Erdogan had in mind for Afrin and now has in mind for northeast Syria:
That was a report from February of last year. Flash forward to June of last year and we can see the results of this campaign: Afrin Kurds were steadily being replaced by refugees for eastern Ghouta, exactly what Turkey had in mind. In for those Kurds that decided to return to Afrin to reclaim their land and property, they find that a simple accusation that they’re associated with the PKK is enough to prevent them from being allowed to return. It’s an example of how Turkey’s claims that they are only driving out ‘the terrorists’ can become a blank check for blanket removal of the Kurds from a region:
“Many who remain unable to return to Afrin are unconvinced, particularly as the influx from elsewhere in Syria continues. Both exiles and newcomers confirmed to the Guardian that large numbers of those settling in Afrin came from the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, where an anti-regime opposition surrendered to Russian and Syrian forces in April, and accepted being transferred to northern Syria.”
Both the exiles and newcomers to Afrin agree, there really was a large-scale replacement of the Kurds of Afrin with refugees from eastern Ghouta. And it’s the jihadist militias, not the Turkish army, that driving the Kurds out. The Turkish army might try to stop the militias in some cases, but those militias are the groups actually controlling these towns so even if the Turkish army tries to stop some of the abuse of the locals they can’t stop it all:
And while the large scale displacement of the Kurds of Afrin, and their replacement with refugees from Ghouta, was no secret, it has been somewhat obscured by Erdogan’s framing of its operations in Afrin as a purely ‘anti-terrorist’ operation. An ‘anti-terrorist’ operation that resulted in large numbers of Kurds losing their land and homes simply by getting labeled a member of the PKK. And the people often making these charges of PKK affiliations were the jihadist militias leading the Afrin operation:
Yes, the jihadist militias, which are filled with former ISIS members, were put in a position where they could label the Kurds of Afrin “terrorists” and have their homes and land confiscated. That’s how messed up the situation is in Afrin and it’s exactly what we should expect to happen again in northeast Syria. Except this time there’s thousands more ISIS fighters just waiting to join these militias so they can start labeling Kurds “terrorists” and join in on the planned ethnic cleansing.
There was a recent piece by Pepe Escobar in the Asia Times that makes a number of interesting observations about the US raid that killed ISIS’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi: For starters it’s worth noting that the village where al-Baghdadi was hiding, Barisha, is only about 5 km from the Syria/Turkey border. In addition, according to Turkish intelligence, al-Baghdadi only showed up in Barisha 48 hours earlier. And the Iraqi National Intelligence Service acknowledged that the information it got on al-Baghdadi’s location came via a Syrian who had smuggled the wives of two of Baghdadi’s brothers to Idlib via Turkey. As Escobar notes, this circumstantial evidence strongly suggests al-Baghadadi was planning on crossing into Turkey and that’s why he was in this location.
As Escobar also notes, the notion al-Baghdadi could successfully leave Syria isn’t that unimaginable when you consider the years of success he had crossing back and forth between Iraq and Syria. Al-Baghdadi’s history of successfully crossing that Iraq-Syria border needs to be viewed in the context of a cynical vie of ISIS as a useful tool for waging a proxy Sunni-Shia religious civil war by acting as a Sunni army that could be directed against the Shia-led governments of Syria and Iran. So if al-Baghdadi was indeed hoping to cross the Syrian border into Turkey, it would be the end of a very long ‘lucky streak’ for the fake caliph that was highly useful for achieving the geostrategic objections of the various foreign powers — Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Western powers — that wanted to see Syria broken up.
As the piece also notes, one of the immediate effects of the death of al-Baghdadi will probably be the re-merging of many of the subgroups that make up ISIS that violently split with their al Qaeda-aligned counter-parts in 2014. In other words, while al-Baghdadi’s death may make it more difficult for ISIS to reconstitute itself in the wake of the potential release of thousands of ISIS prisoners following the Turkish invasion of Kurdish held areas of northeast Syria, his death might also make it easier to quietly incorporate those prisoners into the remaining al Qaeda-affiliated jihadist rebel groups. Groups that Turkey is current using to wage its ethnic cleansing campaign against the Kurds and are often portrayed as ‘moderate’ rebels despite their extremism. So while al-Baghdadi’s role leading ISIS has been extremely convenient for the powers that wanted to see Syria broken up and were happy to allow ISIS participate in that process, his death might also serve the purpose of facilitating the healing of the ISIS/al Qaeda jihadist divide and helping to turn remaining ISIS members into the kind of ‘moderate’ jihadist rebels those powers can again get behind:
“ISIS/Daesh anyway has already named a successor: Abdullah Qardash, aka Hajji Abdullah al-Afari, also Iraqi and also a former Saddam Hussein military officer. There’s a strong possibility that ISIS/Daesh and myriad subgroups and variations of al-Qaeda in Syria will now re-merge, after their split in 2014.”
Might the death of al-Baghdadi facilitate a re-merger of the various ISIS and al Qaeda sub-groups that split back in 2014? Hopefully not, but that scenario seems a lot more possible now that al-Baghdadi is dead. This isn’t to say the raid was a bad thing. Al-Baghadadi was among the worst people on the planet and the mouthpiece for a profoundly demented and evil ideology. But even good things can have negative repurcussions and it would be an extremely negative consequence if we end up seeing the ISIS/al Qaeda divide start to heal. Although Erdogan’s Turkey may not see a re-merger of the jihadists as a negative outcome given the Turkish government’s ongoing use those non-ISIS jihadist rebel groups for its ethnic cleansing campaign against the Kurds, which is part of what makes the evidence that al-Baghdadi was trying to escape into Turkey so interesting. And the rest of the foreign powers who viewed both ISIS and the rest of the jihadist groups operating in Syria as useful proxies that were indirectly carrying out their objectives in Syria may not be upset to see a re-merger either. It’s part of why the celebrations over al-Baghdadi’s death need to be tempered with a recognition that the positive event of al-Baghdadi’s death could end up further fueling the ultra-cynical strategy of relying on jihadists to wage a proxy Sunni-Shia religious civil war:
At the same time, the facts on the ground increasingly suggest the long-sought balkanization of Syria may never happen. With Russia and Turkey acting as the primary foreign powers still operating in Syria, and Russia and Turkey appearing to have worked out some sort of arrangement that forces the Kurds into making peace with the Assad government, the prospect of the steady restoration of Syria’s territorial integrity seems inevitable at this point. That’s part of what makes the prospect of ISIS members re-merging with al Qaeda affiliates such an important question going forward. We could be looking at a refueled jihadist rebel force or we might be looking at the inevitable end of that rebellion. It’s unclear at this point. But one thing that’s clear is that the Syrian army and its Russian backers are likely to eventually come for the oil fields in eastern Syria that US troops are currently ‘protecting’ in what Trump portrayed as a crass resource grab (he’s already talking about bringing Exxon in on it). Will the US be willing to literally fight the Syrian and Russian forces over oil fields that were seized in what appears to be an illegal oil grab? That’s also part of what remains to be seen:
So, on the face of it, it seems like the death of al-Baghdadi could be the latest sign that Syria is slowly but steadily progressing towards the eventual end of Syria’s civil. But with Turkey’s invasion threatening to refuel the existing jihadist rebel forces, and the Turkish plans on turning northern Syria into a giant refugee camp, we may not be looking at the eventual collapse of the jihadist rebels. It remains a highly dynamic situation. The kind of dynamic situation where the death of al-Baghdadi could end up be ‘good news’ for the jihadists and their foreign sponsors.
Here’s a quick update on the situation in northeast Syria and the Turkish-led invasion of the area previously held by the Syrian Kurds: The ethnic cleansing by Turkey’s proxy jihadist militia groups that everyone was warning would unfold back when this invasion was first announced is unfolding exactly as warned:
“Speaking to journalists recently, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan defended his Syrian rebel allies, saying they were not “terrorists” but Islamic holy warriors who were “defending their land there, hand in hand, arm in arm, shoulder to shoulder with my soldiers.””
It’s an interesting spin: These proxy jihadist militias aren’t terrorists engaged in a deliberate ethnic cleansing campaign, according to Erdogan. They’re Islamic holy warriors standing shoulder to should with Turkey’s army. It’s less of a refutation of the charges and more like a rebranding of them:
Although a case could be made that it’s not primarily ethnic cleansing that’s taking place based on the anecdotes from the non-Kurdish residents who have also been terrorized and driven from their homes by these proxy jihadist militias. Instead, it’s more or a sectarian religious based cleansing, where anyone who isn’t an adherent of the extremist forms of Islam practiced by these militias are targets of the cleansing operation. In other words, it’s like an ISIS operation:
“Aref, who is now in Kobane, about 35 miles west of Tal Abyad, said this incursion reminded him of when the Islamic State invaded his town in 2013.” Yeah, it’s hard to avoid the incredible parallels between this Turkish-backed operation and what ISIS does. Especially since these same forces carrying out this operation are reportedly freeing the SDF’s ISIS prisoners.
And in related news, the director of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights just stated that the group has not only heard reports of hundreds of escaped ISIS prisoners joining these proxy militias and taking part of the ethnic cleansing operation, but it now has documented evidence of eight former ISIS fighters and another former ISIS leader joining these groups:
“In a special statement to North-Press, the director of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights stressed that the observatory “has documented the presence of at least eight elements of the Islamic State fighting alongside al-Hamzat and Ahrar al-Sharqiya, as they were identified by citizens of al-Qalamoun and Eastern Ghouta. There are some information that hundreds of ISIS militants are among the ranks of Turkey-backed National Army, but we have only confirmed at least eight cases.””
Is the world going to show any significant interest in the absolute evidence the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights claims to possess of ex-ISIS fighters joining Turkey’s proxy jihadist? We’ll find out, but keep in mind another recent: Turkey began sending the foreign ISIS prisoners held in its prisons back to their home countries today. There are about 1,200 such prisoners in Turkey’s prisons. So that’s unfortunately another reason we’re probably going to see a muted Western response to these reports of ISIS members getting incorporated into these Turkish-backed jihadist proxy groups: The alternative to them joining the jihadist is sending them back home:
“Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu had warned last week that Ankara would begin sending back ISIS members to their home countries even if their citizenship has been revoked. Soylu said that Turkey is not “a hotel” for militants and announced that the deportations would start on Monday.”
So it’s going to be grimly interesting to see how rapidly Erdogan sends those 1,200 foreign ISIS members back to their home countries. It’s just a trickle now. Will it remain a trickle, with the implied threat that the pace can increase in response to international criticisms of Turkey’s ethnic cleansing operations? We’ll see, but for the time being it appears that future of these ISIS fighters is going to come down to sending them back home or letting them join the ongoing ethnic cleansing operation in northeast Syria will continue. An ethnic-cleansing operations that’s turning out to be a cleansing of anyone who doesn’t agree to become a jihadist extremist regardless if their ethnic background. So an ISIS-style ethnic cleansing operation.
Here’s an update on a potentially significant development in the ongoing war in Syria: Turkey launched what it claims were retaliatory airstrikes against Syrian government forces, killing dozens. According to Turkey, this was a response to an attack on a Turkish supply convoy that was bringing reinforcements to Turkish troops based in Idlib and left 6 Turkish soldiers dead. This exchange between Turkish and Syrian forces is happening as Syrian and Russian forces are waging an intensified fight against the jihadist forces based in Idlib. Turkey claims that it notified Russian forces of the planned movement of the Turkish convoy before the attack took place. Russia disputes this, claiming that they were never told about the convoy and that the Turkish troops were hit because they were in an area where Syrian forces where attack al Qaeda-linked jihadists.
So what actually happened here? At this point we don’t know. But we do know Turkish has long supported the al Qaeda-linked jihadist forces of Idlib, which raises the question of whether or not that Turkish convoy was reinforcing the jihadist and whether or not we’re going to be seeing a lot more ‘accidents’ like this taking place as the Syrian/Russian assault on Idlib continues:
“Mr. Erdogan warned Russia, which backs the Syrian government and which controls the airspace in western Syria, not to prevent Turkey from retaliating.”
A warning to Russia about not preventing Turkey from retaliating against Syrian forces. That’s a pretty big escalation of tensions. And it’s coming when there’s a dispute between Turkey and Russia over what actually happened, with Russia both denying that Turkish warned this about this convoy movement and suggesting that the reason the convoy was hit was because it was in the same area as al Qaeda-linked jihadists. It’s the kind of incident that raises a lot of questions about whether or not the intensifying battle over Idlib is going to turn into a kind of proxy-war between Turkey and Syria/Russia:
Granted, the entire Syrian civil war can be fairly characterized as a Turkish proxy war all along, but it’s becoming a much more direct proxy war when you have Turkish ‘observers’ getting hit by Syrian troops during an anti-al Qaeda operation. But if Idlib falls, Erdogan’s ambitions in Syria fall too. Idlib is basically the last stand for the rebels. And that’s why we probably shouldn’t be surprised if there are more of these ‘accidents’ as the assault on Idlib continues.
The ongoing showdown between Turkish and Syrian/Russian forces over Idlib is continuing, with Erdogan now declaring to the Turkish parliament that if Syria doesn’t pull troops back from Idlib that Turkey itself would “make it happen”. It’s a pretty clear threat. But part of what makes these threats difficult to interpret is the fact that, while Turkey might be willing to militarily take on the Syrian army, there’s no way it’s going to want to face off against Syria and Russia, especially in the air. Not only is Russia’s airforce operating in Syria but Syria also has advanced Russian surface-to-air missile systems. So if Turkey does end up trying to “make it happen” militarily to drive the Syrian government out of Idlib, it’s going to have to do it without air power realistically. And yet Erdogan has declared that, “Turkey’s air and land forces will move freely in all operation areas [in Syria] and in Idlib, and they will conduct operations if needed,” suggesting a willingness to use air power against Syrian and Russian forces. At least that’s what Erdogan just pledged to do, which is a big reason why there’s no reason to believe this standoff over Idlib is going to end anytime soon:
““Turkey’s air and land forces will move freely in all operation areas [in Syria] and in Idlib, and they will conduct operations if needed,” he said.”
Air and land operations across Syria. It’s quite a pledge. Especially because, as the following article notes, it’s not actually realistic that Turkey’s airforce can operate in Syria given the Russian air defenses. So should we interpret Erdogan’s words as bluster? Well, as the following article also notes, the collapse of the rebel forces in Idlib really would pose an enormous danger for Erdogan’s government. And not just because of a new flood of refugees out of Idlib that will end up flooding into Turkey. The big danger isn’t the women and children flooding into Turkey. The biggest danger is the fleeing jihadist radicals flooding into Turkey and feeling like they were betrayed by Ankara. But there’s also a warning from AKP spokesman Omer Celik that if there’s a big new wave of refugees flowing into Turkey, that’s going to result in a wave of new refugees flowing into Europe. As Celik put it, “If Turkey’s warnings are not taken into consideration, we warn everyone that a refugee exodus will affect Europe to a large extent.” That’s part of what makes the military calculus about Turkish military operations against Syria and Russia so complicated: if the rebels are driven out of Idlib, we could seeing pissed off jihadist driven into Turkey and millions of new refugees driven into Europe:
““If Turkey’s warnings are not taken into consideration, we warn everyone that a refugee exodus will affect Europe to a large extent,” said Celik.”
Refugee waves for Europe. That’s what the AKP just explicitly threatened if Idlib falls. But it’s not a threat directed at Syria and Russia. It’s directed at Turkey’s NATO allies. And it’s a threat that makes a lot more sense in the context of the military threats against Syrian and Russia Erdogan made that he can’t really keep given the Russian domination of Syrian airspace:
And that threat to release a new flood of refugees into Europe makes a lot more sense when you consider that the fall of Idlib just might result in a flood of jihadists relocating to Turkey, and all of the dangers that come with having a jihadist army relocate to your country, like suicide bombings and attacks on the Turkish government:
As that analyst warns, Turkey is basically facing the threat of a massive blowback. Blowback for Turkey’s intense sponsorship of the kind of ultraviolent jihadist extremists that have dominated the rebel forces during the Syrian civil war. It’s the kind of blowback threat that has Turkey back into a corner. If the rebels are forced out of Idlib they’re basically forced out of Syria at this point. The main thing that had been standing in between Turkey and that blowback is Turkey’s military presence in Idlib but it’s unclear if Turkey’s military is going to be enough to prevent the Syrian and Russian forces from retaking that terrority, hence the recent attack retaliatory attack by Turkey on Syria’s forces and Erdogan’s threats to do much more.
Although it’s worth keeping in mind that Turkey still controls quite a big of territory inside Syria that isn’t in Idlib. Territories like Afrin and the lands formerly held by the Kurds that Turkey recently invaded under the pretense of creating a zone for refugees. And as we’ve seen, jihadist militias under Turkey’s control are already operating in those areas. It’s possible that we’ll see a mass relocation of people from Idlib to those former Kurd-held territories. But with millions of potential refugees in Idlib it’s hard to imagine they can all be relocated to those new Turkish-held Syrian territories. A large number of them are going to have to go to Turkey.
So if the Syrian government doesn’t heed Erdogan’s warnings and continues its assault on Idlib the Turkish government is going to face a very stark choice: fight Syria and Russia to hold Idlib or get ready to deal with new waves of refugees and possibly an angry, defeated jihadist army in need of a new home.
Also keep in mind that if Idlib falls and the jihadist rebels are forced to flee, they aren’t all going to flee to Turkey. The jihadist rebels fighting in Syria came from around the world and a lot of those fighters are going to be returning to where they came from. Which is a reminder that Turkey isn’t the only country that’s going to be feeling the blowback. There’s plenty of blowback to go around for a disaster like the Syrian civil war.
The conflict between the Turkish forces stationed in Idlib and the Syrian/Russian forces trying to retake Idlib appears to be deepening with new fighting between Turkish and Syrian forces and a large influx of Turkish ground forces flowing into the area. And a key ally of Erdogan in Turkey’s parliament, Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) leader Devlet Bahceli, is suggesting that Turkey might have to directly overthrow Assad’s government.
It’s long been a mystery as to how Erdogan’s government would respond to the collapse of the rebellion its been sponsoring for years now. Turkey is very heavily invested in the success of those jihadist forces. And now we appear to be getting an idea of how Turkey might respond to the threat of the ultimate collapse of the Syrian rebel forces: a direct regime-change operation. How feasible that would be remains a huge question, especially given Russia’s alliance with Assad and the Russian forces that would be drawn into such a conflict. But with hundreds of Turkish tanks and armored cards flowing into Syria to protect Idlib and the Turkish and Syrian militaries already in open conflict with each other, it’s pretty clear that a direct military conflict between the governments of Turkey and Syria is no long unthinkable:
“The Turkish military ordered hundreds of tanks and armored cars dispatched to Idlib and struck about 170 targets in Syria in retaliation for attacks by Syrian forces that killed at least 12 Turkish soldiers in the northwestern province this month. Russia demanded a halt to attacks on Russian forces and their allies in the northwestern province, who’ve been conducting a months-long advance on the opposition bastion.”
Hundreds of tanks and armored cars flowing into Syria following strikes on 170 Syrian targets in retaliation for the earlier Syrian attack that killed Turkish troops in Idlib. That sure sounds like open warfare between the two government is already happening.
And note the description of Erdogan’s concerns about the collapse of the jihadist rebels in control of Idlib: it would give Turkey less of a say in postwar Syria. It’s a reminder that Erdogan’s vision for the future of Syria involves a postwar government with a significant jihadist element:
But it’s the comments by key Erogan ally Devlet Bahceli that represents the most ominous indication of what might be next for this conflict: Bahceli is calling for a review of Turkey’s ties with Russia and plans for “confronting Damascus if there is no other option left”. That sounds like the plan is for war on the Syrian government and any Russian forces in the area too:
Now here’s a report from the Turkish publication, TRT World. The article is about Turkey’s “Plan B” for Idlib. Turkish Defence Minister Hulusi Akar actually refers to a “Plan C” too if the recapture of Idlib by Syrian government forces continues. Erdogan himself asserted that, “If the regime does not pull back during this time, Turkey will have to do this job itself”. And Devlet Bahceli openly called for a regime change operation to overthrow Assad, declaring that “As long as Assad is not dethroned, Turkey will not have peace. From now, we have to make plans to enter Damascus and obliterate tyrants there”:
““If the agreement kept being violated, we have Plan B and Plan C,” Akar said in an interview on Sunday, indicating that Turkey will not let the Assad regime claim Idlib.”
Warnings of a Plan B and Plan C. That’s what Turkey’s defense minister is issuing. And while he wouldn’t saying what Plan B or C might entail, it’s pretty obvious that it would involve direct military operations, something Erdogan himself hinted at when he declared that, “If the regime does not pull back during this time, Turkey will have to do this job itself”:
And then there’s Devlet Bahceli’s call for Turkey to “enter Damascus and obliterate tyrants there”. So a top Erdogan ally in Turkey’s parliament is now openly calling for a regime change military campaign:
Then the piece raises the question of how Turkey might act in the case of a break up of Syria, and mentions how Turkey once claimed sovereignty over territories in northern Syria and Iraq following WWI. It’s a reminder that balkanizing Syria was always one of the likeliest objectives for Turkey and the other foreign powers fueling this civil war:
Also recall how Erdogan has long railed against the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 that drew the modern borders of the Middle East, so any talk of breaking up Syria needs to be seen in that context of Erdogan’s ambitions to redraw the borders of the region. Also recall how Trump’s former National Security Advisor John Bolton also called for breaking up Syria and creating a new Sunni state back in 2015. That’s part of the context to keep in mind when we hear that a US delegation is currently in Turkey to discuss the tensions and that any decision Turkey makes will likely be done after consulting with the US. In other words, we shouldn’t assume consultations with the US are going to make a Turkish military-led breakup of Syria less likely:
So at this point, assuming the Assad government doesn’t decide to back away from recapturing Idlib, the big question is whether or not a major Turkish military operation that involves either overthrowing the Assad government or breaking up Syria is “Plan B” or “Plan C”. We’ll find out, probably soon since it’s looking like “Plan A” is already over.
Here’s a set of articles updating the situation in Idlib: For starters, the cease-fire in Idlib between the Syrian government and Turkey brokered by Russia back in March was broken on Sunday following an attack by al Qaeda-linked rebel forces against Syrian government troops that resulted in the rebels recapturing a village. The group, Horas al-Din, broke off from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the largest rebel group in Idlib, in 2018 and refuses to adhere to any ceasefires with the Syrian government. Recall how Hayat Tahrir al-Sham formed from the merger of four al Qaeda-affiliates in 2017. So an offshoot of an al Qaeda offshoot just broke the ceasefire protecting Idlib in a pretty big way:
“The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said members of the al-Qaida-linked group known as Horas al-Din attacked government forces in the Ghab plain area. It said the fighting left 21 troops and 13 Horas al-Din members dead.
That sure sounds like Horas al-Din started the attack. And with 21 Syrian troops dead and the capture of the village that’s the kind of act that’s going to see a significant response. It’s now a question of how significant will that response be and is this the end of the ceasefire.
So why did this rebel group offshoot do this now? Who knows, but with COVID-19 sweeping the world it’s possible the virus is being seen as a military opportunity to exploit. Horas al-Din clearly wants the ceasefire to end. But who else might have an interest in blowing it up? That’s also a question we need to ask, especially in light of the following exclusive story in the Middle East Eye from a month ago with some rather remarkable claims about an attempt to derail that Russsian-brokered ceasefire. The article describes a secret offer by the crown prince of the UAE, Mohammed bin Zayed (MBZ), to Syria’s Bashar Assad of billions of dollars in aid if Assad refused the ceasefire. The motivation was apparently a desire by the UAE to see Turkey’s military bogged down in Idlib, primarily out of a larger desire to keep Turkey too occupied to get militarily involved in Libya’s ongoing civil war where Turkey and the UAE are backing opposite sides.
The article also suggests that MBZ was quite concerned about the US learning about his secret outreach to Assad and push to restart the offensive against Idlib. On that point, it’s worth recalling the still unresolved roles MBZ, including his arrangement of the now notorious ‘Seychelles meeting’ where Erik Prince — acting as a representative of the Trump administration — met with George Nader and Kirill Dmitriev in January of 2017. And then there was the earlier offer of secret campaign help made by MBZ to the Trump campaign in August of 2016 when Prince and Nader made a trip to Trump Tower to offer the services of PsyGroup. It’s a pair of incidents that highlight how MBZ clearly has a propensity for secret diplomacy but also how close he is to Erik Prince. It raises the question of whether or not Prince was even aware of MBZ’s secret offers to Assad and, if so, if he was one of the anonymous sources in the following piece about MBZ’s secret attempts to thwart the Idlib ceasefire.
And as we now know, MBZ failed to prevent that ceasefire. So we now have to ask: did the UAE also pay off Horas al-Din to stage this attack as an alternative means of breaking the ceasefire? There’s no direct evidence of that yet. But there’s certainly some circumstantial evidence pointing in that direction:
“However, MBZ both tried to prevent the ceasefire agreement between Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan from being implemented, and has since called Assad to encourage him to re-launch his offensive, MEE has learned.”
MBZ sure does love secret diplomatic initiatives. A diplomatic initiative in this case that basically involved directly paying Assad to continue the battle for Idlib: $3 billion to restart the conflict, with $1 billion delivered by the end of March:
When Russia found out about this plan and intervened, we then find MBZ continued to make the offer to Assad and continued paying installments of the initial $1 billion payment:
And based on these anonymous source, the reason for this secret push to restart the battle over Idlib was a desire to tie Turkey up in a costly war, in part to drain Turkey of the resources it needs to fight a different proxy war in Libya where Turkey and the UAE also find themselves backing opposite sides:
So that’s the intriguing report coming from the Middle East Eye last month based on anonymous sources. Again, we have to wonder, did those anonymous sources for that report include Erik Prince or someone in his orbit? If not, did Prince know about this secret offer to Assad that MBZ was allegedly trying to keep secret from the US? These are examples of the kinds of questions raised by Prince’s status as the head of a global mercenary force. Questions that don’t ever really appear to be answered.
Finally, here’s an article from a couple days ago that gives an update on the Turkey’s level of military involvement in Libya, the things MBZ was trying to
prevent: Turkey just threatened to treat the forces of Libyan General Khalifa Haftar “legitimate targets” if Haftar’s forces continue attacking what Turkey considers its interests in the country. This threat comes after accusations by Haftar’s Libyan National Army (LNA) that Turkey has established a military drone base on the country to support the Government of National Accord (GNA) government. As the article mentions, the countries backing Haftar’s forces include Egypt, Russia, and the UAE. So two months ago MBZ was trying to pay off the Assad government to attack Turkey’s proxy-forces in Syria in a bid to bog Turkey down there and drain resources for Libya and two months later we have Turkey threatening to treat the UAE’s proxy forces in Libya like legitimate targets:
“Turkey backs Libya’s internationally-recognised Government of National Accord (GNA). It has signed a military cooperation deal with the GNA, which has been trying to fend off an offensive by Haftar’s forces.”
Keep in mind that the GNA didn’t activate that military cooperation deal with Turkey until December of last year. This military alliance that would allow Turkish troops to help defend the GNA is only about six months old. So while the Libyan civil war has been underway for years now we do appear to be seeing a new phase of deepening foreign involvement. How much deeper that foreign involvement gets remains to be seen and is presumably now tied to how significant Turkey’s involvement in Idlib gets. So as we can see, the conflicts in Syria and Libya are now much more directly intertwined than before thanks to fact that the same countries are backing opposite sides in both conflicts and an apparent perception that both of these proxy wars can’t be proxy-backed simultaneously. #ProxyWarmongerProblems
With Finland and Sweden poised to become the newest two members of NATO, here’s a set of article excepts that underscore one of the potential near-term consequences of this historic NATO enlargement: a renewed Turkish invasion of the Kurish-held regions of Northern Syria. As we’ve seen, the last time Turkey did this in the 2019 it was effectively an ethnic cleansing operation. But also an ‘Islamic State rehabilitation’ operation that involved the mass incorporation of former Islamic State members into Turkish-backed militias. Ankara has determined that now would be a great time to get NATO’s implicit backing for another ‘special military operation’ in Syria.
As we’re going to see, both Finland and Sweden appear to have basically conceded to all of Turkey’s demands. Demands that revolved around dropping humanitarian support for the Kurdish populations in Turkey and Syria. With NATO touting the agreement, its effectively a NATO-backed agreement. An agreement that was arrived at despite Turkey’s renewed threats of a second invasion.
Keep in mind that the Syrian Kurdish forces do have one Western ally that is still operation in Syria: the US military. It’s part of their ongoing anti-Islamic State operations. Don’t forget how the Trump administration basically declared that the US military would stand aside do nothing to help its Kurdish allies during Turkey’s invasion in 2019. Is that going to happen again? We’ll see.
But there’s another fascinating angle here in relation to the conflict in Ukraine: it turns out Turkey is the only NATO member to have yet sanctioned Russia of the its invasion of Ukraine. And that’s the kind of status Moscow obviously wants to maintain. So in addition to getting the implicit backing from NATO for a renewed ‘special military operation’ against the Kurds in Syria, Turkey might even get the backing of Russia and the Assad government for this invasion, as long as its focused on the Kurds.
Over all, it sure looks like the Kurds are once again being set up for a mass international betrayal. An even bigger international betrayal than normal thanks, in part, to the conflict in Ukraine:
“Andersson hailed the deal as a “very good agreement”, rejecting claims that she had conceded too much to Erdogan in order to persuade him to drop his veto.”
Did NATO concede too much to Erdogan? Nope. That’s the message from NATO. The concessions were perfectly fine and really nothing other than a “very good agreement.” And then there’s Turkey, which appears to have gotten everything it demanded. Demands that included Finland and Sweden pledging to not provide any support for the PYD or YPG Kurdish militias. The same militias that have been actively fighting what’s left of the Islamic State in Syria. This isn’t just a story about two democracies being pressured into dropping their support for oppressed Kurdish populations. It’s also the story of how Turkey is once again coming to the effective aide of the the Islamic State:
But there’s another very imminent part of this story: Turkey is once again threatening to invade the Kurdish-help regions of Northern Syria. As we saw with the 2019 Turkish invasion of this region, the plan isn’t some ‘anti-terror operation’. The plan is ethnic cleansing and the incorporation of former ISIS-fighters into the Turkey-backed militias.
A plan that is now back on the table:
“At the same time as the NATO talks, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan has threatened a launch a fresh incursion into northern Syria to recapture towns held by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, which are backed by Washington. read more”
The timing is hard to ignore: at the same time Turkey was making these demands of Finland and Sweden in their NATO bids, Erdogan has been threatening to stage a new invasion of Kurdish held areas of Northern Syria. That’s part of the context of these NATO bed negotiations. On one, they’re negotiations over a security dispute between Turkey and the two putative new NATO members. But on another level, this is effectively negotiations over whether or not NATO members are going to have any serious objections to a renewed Turkish invasion of Syria. An invasion that, again, its effectively coming to the aid of what’s left of the Islamic State in Syria:
So is Erdogan making an astute gamble here? Is now the optimal time for a reopening of Turkey’s war on the Kurds? Well, as the following article points out, there’s another significant factor in these negotiations to keep in mind: Turkey is the only NATO member not to sanction Russian over the invasion of Ukraine. So how far is Moscow willing to go to maintain that status quo? That appears to be part of Erdogan’s gamble. A gamble that Turkey can invade Kurdish-held regions of Northern Syria with the backing of Russia and the Assad government in Damascus:
“Ankara says it must act because Washington and Moscow broke promises to push the YPG 30 km (18 miles) from the border after a 2019 Turkish offensive. With both powers seeking Turkey’s support over Ukraine, the conflict may offer it a degree of leverage.”
Turkey’s government understands the moment: the West’s fixation on Russia and Ukraine presents a wonderful opportunity. And as the only NATO member not to yet sanction Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, Turkey has enough leverage with Russia that not just get NATO’s tacit permission to invade the Kurdish-held regions of Northern Syria, but Russia’s permission too:
How will US special forces operating in Syria react to a Turkish invasion of its Kurdish allies? It’s undoubtedly a major question US policy-makers focused on the region are asking at this point. And that points towards one of the ongoing mysteries here: Turkey is clearly planning on using this opportunity for another attack. And yet those US special forces partnered with the Kurds present an obvious potential problem. We saw how Turkey got around that problem in 2019: Turkey convinced President Trump to completely betray the Kurdish forces and abandoned them. So what about now? Is the Biden administration open to a similar betrayal of the Kurds? If not, how will Turkey proceed? Or, more accurate, what can Turkey offer the US in relation to the conflict in Ukraine that would persuade the US to again drop its support for the Kurds? We’ll see. Or rather, the Kurds will see. The rest of the world will presumably barely notice either which way, as per usual.