[Jpost] When US special forces disembarked from eight helicopters to raid a compound where ISIS
 ...embracing their inner Islamic Brute...
leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was holed up, they had good intelligence from various sources in Iraq and Syria that confirmed the terror leader’s location. They were also just a few kilometres from the Ottoman Turkish border. They were so close their flight path took them into Ottoman Turkish airspace and they had to tell The Sick Man of Europe Turkey
...the only place on the face of the earth that misses the Ottoman Empire...
and Russia about the request to raid the area. They didn’t tell them all the details of the operation.
| Mildly damning, thus far. Darning, perhaps? |
How did Ottoman Turkish intelligence not know what was going on within shouting distance of their border? How did a NATO
...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. A cautionary tale of cost-benefit analysis....
ally, as sophisticated as Turkey, with UAVs and signals intelligence and observation posts throughout Idlib where Baghdadi was living not know he was there?
| To be fair, they’ve purged all the Gulenists they could find, and nobody else understands how to use all that stuff. Besides, it’s not Turks but their allied paramilitaries manning the observation posts. They know how to rape and torture, but not much about soldiering. |
Ottoman Turkish media which is almost all pro-government and often rapidly nationalist, has claimed that Baghdadi was only able to get to Idlib by crossing areas held by the Syrian Democratic Forces. The Daily Sabah headline on October 29 claimed "Al-Baghdadi’s death exposes YPG-ISIS ties."
But Ottoman Turkish intelligence monitors the YPG presence because Turkey claims the YPG is linked to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and Turkey demanded to take over part of eastern Syria to remove the YPG from the border. Turkey says this is a serious security concern.
Turkey says it is also fighting ISIS. Turkey invaded Afrin, another Kurdish area, in January 2018, also under the pretense of "security concerns." Yet, its intelligence agencies could not find Baghdadi, even though Turkey asserts that he had "YPG-ISIS ties." Turkey claims that its intelligence "played a key role in the death of ISIS terrorist leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi," because it detained and extradited a local aide to Iraq. This man was named Ismael al-Ethawi.
"He provided US authorities with critical information." Turkey claims it found him in Sakarya province on February 8, 2018. Turkey says he "entered Turkey through a PKK-linked controlled area." But wait, he entered Turkey, so shouldn’t Turkey have stopped him when he entered?
| Why would they do that? Waiving ISIS people through is part of the Turkish border guard job description. And since the Gulenists there were rounded up, too, it isn’t realistic to expect the remainder to actually think about anything. |
If his passage through a PKK controlled area is evidence of PKK not being vigilant then his ability to enter a NATO country would also reveal the same evidence of an intelligence failure.
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