[TELEGRAPH.CO.UK] Stabs in the back don’t get much nastier than this.
For the past year, Western leaders have feted the Kurds of Northern Iraq, praising them as one of the few forces gutsy enough to face down the death cult of Isil.
Now, those leaders turn a blind eye, or even worse give an active nod, to attacks on Northern Iraqi Kurds by the Turkish air force.
Heroes one minute; fair game for massacre the next. In the long list of Western betrayals of former allies overseas, this one feels especially grotesque.
Last Friday, following months of negotiation with Washington, The Sick Man of Europe Turkey ...the only place on the face of the earth that misses the Ottoman Empire.... launched its first-ever air strikes against Isil in Syria.
A few hours later it started dropping bombs in Northern Iraq -- not on Isil, but on the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, with which Turkey has been locked in bitter conflict since 1984.
Posted by: Fred ||
08/28/2016 00:00 ||
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#1
Kurds got screwed --- can we have surprise meter?
#2
not the west generally, its the USA with Joe Biden as the key anti Kurd voice
Posted by: lord garth ||
08/28/2016 7:59 Comments ||
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#3
Not screwed yet.
Wait until Obama/Kerry declare their resistance to Turkish advance as an attack on a US ally, and all embedded intel is turned over to Erdy.
[DAWN] Many security experts assume that murderous Moslems target non-combatants to divert the attention of security institutions from conventional security targets. Then, an attack on civilians increases the impact of terrorism and puts states on the defensive due to public pressure. However, you can observe a lot just by watching... if we look at the patterns of attacks, murderous Moslems continuously target specific non-combatant individuals and groups. With little variations in different regions, murderous Moslems mainly target sectarian and religious minorities, intellectuals and sociopolitical elites and other groups that hold divergent views from those held by them.
Terrorists consider these segments their enemies. But in most cases, security institutions prioritise securing state infrastructure and power elites. Militants take the same amount of time in planning and executing their operations to hit both ’soft’ and ’hard’ targets. The state and its security institutions may have an excuse that they lack human resources, logistics, and even capabilities, but murderous Moslems exploit these same weaknesses.
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Posted by: Fred ||
08/28/2016 00:00 ||
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[NationalPost] Last Sunday marked the three-year anniversary of the most egregious use of weapons of mass destruction in the 21st century: the sarin gas massacre in Ghouta, Syria, where President Bashar Assad caused the death by asphyxiation of 1,300 men, women and children. No particular fuss was made over the milestone, and it’s not hard to understand why.
Any public reflection of the Ghouta massacre or of the many lies Obama has told about his response to the event would have been redundant this week, thanks to new evidence that supports the proposition that from the beginning, all that mattered to the U.S. president as far as Syria was concerned was his foreign-policy vanity project: détente with the Iranian ayatollahs. And now, nearly half a million Syrians have been obliged to die for what has turned out to be a caveat-riddled, vaguely enforceable nuclear deal the White House struck with Assad’s backers in Khomeinist Iran.
As far back as Iran’s aborted Green Revolution in 2009, Obama’s supplications to the country’s ruling theocracy have amounted to diplomatic shivs in the backs of its youthful democratic insurrectionists, mash notes written directly to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the scuttling of programs documenting the regime’s human-rights outrages. As laid bare in The Iran Wars, the just-published book by Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent Jay Solomon, all the rationalizations the White House has been palming off ever since Ghouta have been falsehoods and cheap alibis.
Obama’s chemical red-line reversal had nothing to do with clever triangulation, war weariness, nation-building at home, the absence of “good guys” in the Syrian revolutionary opposition or the devilish complexity of the struggle. It was because Iran’s negotiators threatened to call off the nuclear talks if he used the unanimous Senate resolution he’d been given to punish Assad for Ghouta, senior American and Iranian officials told Solomon. At the time, Obama’s emissaries were meeting Iranian negotiators secretly in Oman. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps “would not accept a continued engagement with the U.S. if their closest ally was being hit,” Solomon reports.
Once facing the most youthful, pro-American, pro-democracy uprisings of all the Arab Spring convulsions, Assad is now more firmly entrenched than at any time since the early days of 2011. His Baathist regime and its Shabiha death squads now enjoy bottomless bank loans and military aid from Beijing, seasoned Iranian Quds Force commanders to direct the strategies of battle, Iranian-sponsored mercenaries from as far away as Central Asia and bloodthirsty Shia militiamen from Hezbollah. And for nearly a year now, Russia’s direct and generous assistance.
It’s hard to fault the rebels for the company they’re now keeping. Obama has refused to equip, or to arm, any rebel groups fighting Assad or his forces. And while the Russian bombardment of Aleppo was ascending in a grisly crescendo these past few weeks, the U.S. president was fine-tuning an offer to Putin: the coordination of U.S. and Russian military and intelligence agencies, coordinated air attacks, a joint command and control headquarters and an accelerated bombing campaign to target Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, a gruesome crowd that broke ties with al-Qaida only last month.
It’s true that there are few “good guys” left in the Syrian opposition. Five years ago, the population of Syria was about 22 million. The number of Syrians the UN counted as refugees in February was 4.8 million and of the people remaining within Syria’s borders 13.5 million require humanitarian assistance. More than half of them have had to flee their homes. Most of the “good guys” are dead.
There are heroes still in Syria, though, and none are more heroic than the non-violent, non-sectarian Syrian Civil Defence brigades. They’re the White Helmets activists who have pulled 60,000 people from the rubble of Syria’s cities since 2011. More than 130 organizations around the world have nominated the White Helmets for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, and it would be a great thing if they won it.
It would be even better if this year the Nobel committee took back the peace prize it awarded Obama in 2009 for doing absolutely nothing. He didn’t deserve it then. He certainly doesn’t deserve it now.
#2
ValJar. Her hand is in every part of the administrations policies. When the history of this administration is revealed, her corrupting power to point Barry at things preset for him to embrace and talk about endlessly will show just how shallow, self absorbed and clueless he was. She should be indicted for being a foreign agent of influence for Iran.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
