- (august 2015)
Erdogan's wars.
It is incredible how international events can be driven by the electoral
ambitions of some megalomaniacs.
Israel's prime minister Netanyahu has created all sorts of problems in his
backyard just to be reelected.
Turkey's president Recep Tayyip Erdogan is now doing the same in Turkey after
his party Justice and Development Party (AKP) lost the majority in recent
parliamentary elections.
Let's start from the beginning.
Erdogan pretty much invented ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria).
When in 2011 the "Arab Spring" spread to the streets of Damascus
and popular protests seemed to be
about to topple Syria's dictator Bashar Assad, Erdogan's Turkey clearly sided
with the rebels. So far so good. But Assad's regime proved harder to topple
than Mubarak in Egypt.
Erdogan, a Sunni fanatic, was so obsessed with getting rid of Assad (an Alawite
ruling over a mostly Sunni country) that he gladly allowed thousands of
Islamists to enter Syria via Turkey.
As Martin Chulov wrote in the Guardian:
"Turkey has openly supported other jihadi groups, such as Ahrar al-Sham, which espouses much of al-Qaeda's ideology, and the Nusra Front, which is proscribed as a terror organisation by much of the US and Europe."
Thousands of Syrian refugees fled into Turkey. Many of them were willing
to go back and fight against the Islamists, but, in one of the most grotesque
refugee situations ever, Erdogan forbade them from reentering Syrian territory.
Meanwhile, Erdogan was allowing Turkish middlemen to help the Islamists
smuggle oil and antiquities out of the conquered oil fields and museums
of Syria and Iraq, thus helping ISIS finance
its terror campaign.
ISIS would not even show on a map without Erdogan's criminal tacit complicity.
Now, after allowing ISIS to grow, accumulate money and arms, and expand, finally
Erdogan has decided to bomb ISIS.
His target is not ISIS though...
The other obsession that he has is the Kurds. He is fundamentally a racist
who cannot digest the idea that Kurds exist. Unfortunately, Turkey has 14
million Kurds out of a total population of 78 million. Erdogan's predecessors
a century ago exterminated most of the Armenians and he probably regrets
that they didn't finish the Kurds too.
The entity that has been fighting for Kurdish independence within Turkey is
the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), shamelessly labeled a "terrorist
organization" by the European Union and the USA.
For mysterious reasons it is ok if the Palestinians or the Kosovars fight
for independence but it is not ok if the Kurds do so.
The Kurds are spread across Turkey, Syria and Iraq.
Unfortunately for Erdogan, the (Syrian) Kurds have proven to be the only
effective force fighting both Assad's regime and ISIS.
The Syrian Kurdish region has become de facto independent and governed by the
Democratic Union Party (PYD).
The PYD and its armed wing, the People's Protection Units (YPG),
are the ones behind the only significant success in fighting ISIS: the
reconquest of the town of Kobane.
Belonging to the same ethnic group despite silly borders designed by the old
colonial powers, it is no surprise that the PYD is on friendly terms with
the PKK.
Erdogan cannot tolerate a Kurdish state on the Turkish border, the very same
reason behind his strong opposition to partitioning Iraq in Sunni, Shiite
and Kurdish states, despite the fact that the Kurdish province is the
only peaceful and prosperous (and secular and pro-Western) region of Iraq.
Only now that the Kurds have become such an important factor in the fight
against ISIS has Erdogan decided to bomb ISIS.
But that is so obviously just an excuse to diminish the importance of the Kurds.
In fact, Turkey has not really bombed ISIS as much as it has targeted Kurds in
all three countries where they live:
Syria, Iraq and Turkey itself. Turkish planes hit Kurdish fighters in all three
countries.
The official excuse to enter the war was a suicide attack that killed 32
volunteers who were ready to help rebuild Kobane. But those 32 young men were
Kurds, not Turks. And many in Turkey immediately suspected that Erdogan
had some responsibility in that suicide attack, so much so that the
PKK killed two Turkish police officers in retaliation for that suicide
attack. In other words, the PKK ignored the official version of the facts
(that ISIS had killed 32 volunteers) and opted for an alternative and
almost opposite version:
that Erdogan had engineered that massacre in order to weaken the Kurds
fighting ISIS in Syria.
Erdogan announced that Turkey was bombing ISIS targets in Syria on a friday,
but the very following day Turkey began bombing Kurdish targets in
northern Iraq.
And the British-based monitoring group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights
unequivocably reported that "a number of shells fired by Turkish tanks fell
on the village of Zur Maghar, which is controlled by the YPG".
After 4 years of indifference towards the massacres in Syria,
Erdogan is suddenly hysterical about fighting ISIS, and has summoned
a special meeting of NATO to create a safe haven in
Syrian territory along the Turkish border. Needless to say, that is
precisely the territory controlled by Syrian Kurds.
In other words, Erdogan's real goal is to demilitarize the only force
that has been successful in fighting ISIS.
Within two weeks, Turkey had carried out only three bombings on ISIS
position, but about 400 on Kurdish positions.
ISIS is dangerous, but Erdogan is probably more dangerous.
The PKK may have been a terrorist organization in the past but Erdogan has
legitimized them.
Shame on the European Union and the USA for keeping the PKK on their terror lists.
We should be arming the PKK in its liberation war against the Nazi-Islamist Erdogan.
P.S.
Note: my website is currently banned in Turkey and Turkish people will never be able to read this opinion piece just like they cannot view about one million
other websites. Shame on the USA and the European Union that accepts a
fascist regime like Turkey's in NATO.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2015 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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