Up In Smoke: The Neocon Assault on Syria Is
Finally Over
By David Stockman
October 24, 2019 "Information
Clearing House" - By a vote of 354-60
last week the U.S. House of Representative proved
that Imperial Washington is addicted to war, and
that the level of ignorance, bellicosity and
mendacity among the people’s representative has
reach appalling heights.
Having never voted for Washington’s pointless,
illegal and destructive fomenting of Syria’s
calamitous civil war in the first place, as the
constitution requires, the bipartisan congressional
mob actually had the gall to vote to keep US forces
in the middle of a centuries old Kurd/Turk conflict
that has zero implications – and we mean as in none,
nichts and nada – for the security and safety of the
American homeland.
The pretext, of course, is that the ISIS
caliphate will come roaring back to life absent the
armed resistance of the Kurdish-SDF forces
positioned in Syria’s northeast quadrant; and that
with these bombed-out, impoverished, no-count towns,
villages, farms and dusty plains back under the
black flag of ISIS, next up will be IEDs in the New
York City subways.
That’s just blatant claptrap. If Syria becomes
whole again, the Islamic State doesn’t have a
snowball’s chance in the hot place of reviving. And
letting Syria become whole again was exactly the
purpose and consequence of Trump’s courageous
decision to remove American forces from the
Syria/Turkey border.
That singular move paved the way for the already
emergent tripartite deal between Turkey, Damascus
and the Kurds. The latter would:
reestablish Syrian sovereignty on it border
with Turkey (already substantially
accomplished),
establish an approximate 13-mile deep
"buffer zone" (per the map below) that would be
off-limits to the Kurdish SDF, which Ankara
considers to be an extension of its long-running
domestic Kurdish separatist insurrection,
set the planking for a reciprocal withdrawal
of Turkish support for rebel militias on the
northwest border (blue area) as well as the
handful of border towns in the Kurdish northeast
they had penetrated before today’s ceasefire,
accommodate the formation of some kind of
limited self-governance arrangement for the two
million Syrian Kurds domiciled in the Syrian
northeast, and
provide regular Syrian military uniforms and
paychecks to Kurd fighters now enrolled in the
SDF.
Moreover, once this emergent tripartite deal is
reasonably finalized and implemented, the remaining
cleanup of the giant political and military mess
Washington has foisted upon Syria could be
accomplished with alacrity. Together with its
Russian, Iranian and Hezbollah allies, Damascus
would make short shift of the remaining jihadist
fighters in Idlib province (dark brown area) now
known as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which was formerly
called al-Nusra Front and before that Al Qaeda.
In short, the Donald’s bold decision to stand
down rather than dither in place forever ala the
Afghan fiasco has paved the way for a swift end to
the horrific Syrian Civil war. The latter caused
more than 500,000 deaths, generated upwards of 9
million internal and external refugees, utterly
ruined the Syrian economy and civilian
infrastructure and dangerously roiled the entire
middle east.
Needless to say, with Syria whole again and
Damascus able to militarily secure its own territory
with the help of the Russian air force and the
professional military detachments of the Iranians
and Hezbollah, there won’t be any ISIS caliphate
reviving itself anywhere on the map below.
Nor would there be any reason for Washington’s
war addicts to tie-on another binge of full-throated
fear-mongering about the threat of "radical Islam"
and the barbaric head-choppers of the short-lived,
flukish Islamic State.
Even a cursory examination of the history, in
fact, reminds us that the caliphate was actually
enabled, fostered and armed by Washington’s regime
change interventions in Iraq and Syria. Had the
neocons not caused Washington to plunge into the
2011 Syrian uprising with billions of weapons,
training and walking around money, there would have
been no armed civil war in Syria; ISIS would not
have implanted itself in Raqqa and in the north and
east of Syria; and Washington would not have had
cause to arm the Kurdish separatists, which had long
been a both thorn in Damascus’ side and viewed as an
existential threat by the Turks.
And that gets us to last week’s idiotic House
resolution, most of which was ignorant hot air in
the form of gravely worded whereas clauses run
amuck. But here is the operative phrase and the meat
of the matter,
Whereas an abrupt withdrawal of United States
military personnel from certain parts of Northeast
Syria is beneficial to adversaries of the United
States government, including Syria, Iran, and
Russia: Now, therefore, be it resolved…..that
Congress opposes the decision to end certain United
States efforts to prevent Turkish military
operations against Syrian Kurdish forces in
Northeast Syria…
There you have it. It’s not really about the
Kurds or ISIS at all. The crocodile tears for the
former flowing out of Washington at the moment could
fill a modest sized lake.
The truth is, Washington’s attempted destruction
of Syria as a functioning state was always about
waging a proxy war against Iran and violating
Syria’s sovereign air space and territory in order
to clear it of the Iranian, Russian and Hezbollah
forces that Damascus had legally invited to
participate in its governance and security
arrangements.
Yet that’s how the Empire rolls. Get the John
McCain’s and Lindsey Graham’s of Imperial Washington
looking at you cross-eyed and you are likely to have
cancerous interlopers like ISIS planted in your
midst and domestic ethnic and political factions
armed by Washington and mobilized against you – and
sometimes each other.
Are You Tired Of
The Lies And
Non-Stop Propaganda?
That happened aplenty in Syria as the
residual clashes at this very moment
between the Pentagon sponsored Kurdish-SDF
and the CIA-sponsored and
Turkey-supported Free Syrian Army (FSA)
so clearly illustrate.
In that context, it is absolutely true that
pictures are often worth a thousand wars, and this
one’s a classic. It depicts the work of some
American F-15s which bombed a large ammo storage
dump US forces had hastily vacated near Kobani on
the Syria/Turkey border. The purpose, apparently,
was to insure that it did not end up in
hostile hands.
Then again, the "hostile" forces in question do not
refer to remnants of ISIS, the Assad government,
meandering Iranian Quds forces in the area or even
Hezbollah warriors up from the south. As the
Pentagon briefer made clear, Washington bombed what
had once been a large cement factory to save it from
our allies, not our enemies:
The military described that a pair of F-15
jets "successfully" conducted the targeting of the
ammo storage site, destroying what the Pentagon
wanted to ensure didn’t get left behind, calling it
a “pre-planned precision airstrike” before
Turkish-backed fighters could take control.
Let’s see. Those "Turkish-based fighters" used to
be called the Free Syrian Army (FSA), and have now
substituted the term "national" least we remember.
But whatever the title, it is not actually the
Turkish Army, but the good folks pictured below who
have attacked the Kurdish positions and committed a
few scattered atrocities.
In the above photo,Turkish-backed members of the
Syrian National Army were preparing for Tuesday’s
military operation by Turkey into Kurdish areas of
northern Syria.
Needless to say, these folks used to be called
the Free Syrian Army. But we think a better title
might be the Senator John McCain Memorial Brigade.
Indeed, we think a better insignia might be the
Senator John McCain Memorial Brigade. How this
vaunted ally suddenly came to be considered a
dastardly threat against the valiant Kurds is but
another illustration of Imperial Washington’s
psychopathic war addiction.
Part 2
We repeat: When you have to bomb a cement plant
that was storing weapons for one "ally" (the
Pentagon-supported Kurdish YPG/SDF) so that another
"ally" (the CIA-funded Arab FSA) doesn’t seize them,
and this happens in the context of a sovereign
nation that Washington had illegally attacked and
occupied for no reason of homeland security
whatsoever…why then the jig is up!
In one decisive stroke the Donald has sent
Washington’s war addicted jackboots and psychopaths
into a terminal fit of mindless hyperventilation.
That could not have been more evident than in Joe
Biden’s insipid attack on Trump for wisely getting
about 700 American troops out of harms’ way on the
Syrian/Turkey border. Said the foggy-minded Uncle
Joe during the Dem debates on October 15:
….. the withdrawal of US troops from northern
Syria was “the most shameful thing any
president has done in modern history in terms of
foreign policy.”
That’s absolutely ludicrous. But when it comes to
shameful actions it can be well and truly said that
Joe Biden is an expert practitioner of the cruel,
destructive policies that Imperial Washington has
been imposing on the middle east for upwards of
three decades now.
For example, Biden was an early, enthusiastic and
influential supporter of Washington’s 2003 invasion
of Iraq. Over one million died in Iraq during that
senseless calamity, including 4500 dead and at least
100,000 severely injured US soldiers; and worse
still, by destroying the Iraqi state and the
tolerable ethnic/religious balance under Saddam
Hussein’s Baathist rule by the sword and the spoils
of oil, Uncle Joe helped open the gates to hell and
the emergence of the scourge of ISIS.
Likewise, while he was Vice President Biden
supported Hillary and her harpies in their
"betrayal" of Khadafy after he gave up his nukes and
support for Mideast terrorists. Libya today, of
course, is still in chaos with tens of thousands
dead owing to the endless battles between warlords
and violent factions which have contested for
control of a ruined economy and savaged society.
Yet this Washington lifer has the nerve to attack
Trump’s small but welcome step toward disengagement!
As we said, Imperial Washington inhabits a looney
bin. And as we indicated in Part 1, the picture
below is indeed the "smoking gun".
It’s the handiwork of a pair of American F-15s
which bombed a large ammo storage dump US forces had
hastily vacated near Kobani on the Syria/Turkey
border.
The purpose, as we explained in Part 1 above, was
to insure that it did not end up in hostile hands.
That is to say, the Turkey-backed Syrian National
Army, nee the Free Syrian Army (FSA) – otherwise
actually the John McCain Memorial Brigade, which was
brought, trained, paid-for and stood-up by the CIA.
Moreover, it was these McCain Brigade descendants
which sporadically violated the cease-fire and
attacked the "innocent" and "betrayed" Kurdish
allies over the past week, not the NATO-certified
regular Turkish Army units. So all the sanctimonious
harrumphing on the MSM is about what?
Why, the rude deeds of the buccaneers, thugs,
criminals, mercenaries, jihadist and plain old
job-seekers that are wearing the same uniforms
mainly because of Washington’s billions of blood
money; and who have ended up mercenaries for pay
mainly because Washington’s demented policy of
Regime Change in Damascus destroyed the Syrian
civilian economy and turned it into a poison pit of
war-lordism.
Stated differently, without Washington’s endless
payroll and weapons supply, the FSA and its heirs
and assigns would not now exist – nor would they
have ever before. And they would not be attacking
and executing soldiers of the Kurdish SDF because
the latter wouldn’t exit, either.
To be sure, the War Party and its media
megaphones are revising history so fast as to make
the other Uncle Joe – Stalin – blush with envy. The
New York Times over the weekend gave
the McCain Brigades an instant do-over, turning them
into the darkest of bad guys:
…..Grandly misnamed the Syrian National
Army, this coalition of Turkish-backed militias
is in fact largely composed of the dregs of the
eight-year-old conflict’s failed rebel movement……Early
in the war the military and the C.I.A. sought to
train and equip moderate, trustworthy rebels to
fight the government and the Islamic State…..A
few of those now fighting in the northeast took
part in those failed programs, but most were
rejected as too extreme or too criminal.
That’s absolute risible baloney. As Moon of
Alabama deftly reminded, the leaders of the National
Syrian Army are the same as those of the FSA upon
which John McCain and his Deep State network
lavished billions for the purpose of attacking the
legitimate government in Damascus, not just or even
mainly ISIS.
Just a few weeks ago, in fact, the current
iteration – the Syrian Interim Government – came
together bringing 41 different factions under the
newly christened "Syrian National Army". So doing,
they elected Abdurrahman Mustafa as president and
Salim Idriss as defense minister.
These good folks are pictured below at the launch
of Senator McCain’s Free Syrian Army (FSA) back in
2013:
For want of doubt, Salim Idriss
made the ambitions of the new Syrian Interim
Government clear when during the recent announcement
press conference, he stated,
“We will fight all terrorist organizations,
especially the PYD/PKK terrorist organization.”
That’s right. Idriss has made a career shaking
the Washington money and sponsorship tree and has
never hidden his bitter anti-Kurd agenda. Yet
suddenly, the knuckleheads inside the beltway got
amnesia and are shocked, shocked that he is leading
the attack against the Kurdish/SDF.
In other words, Washington has sown the seeds of
sectarian mayhem in Syria and now arbitrarily sheds
crocodile tears for one of the victims of its
madness. Yet a recent Turkey-friendly analysis of
this newly unified opposition (i.e. the forces now
attacking the Kurds) shows that these factions have
been in the Syrian civil war business at all points
on the compass – nourished mainly by money, material
and weapons supplied by Washington.
Accordingly, 11 of these factions had fought
battles against Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) or the
old Al-Nusra Front nee al Qaeda; 27 of the 41
factions were previously engaged in fighting DAESH/ISIS;
30 factions fought the Assad regime; and 31
fought the YPG/SDF!
That’s right. The largest share of the 41
factions now operating under the banner of the
Syrian National Army claim to have been fighting the
Washington-armed Kurds – along with practically
everyone else.
Moreover, at least 21 of the
factions amalgamated into the Syrian National Army
were previously funded and armed by the Washington.
But here’s the thing: Just 3 of
them got help via the Pentagon’s program to combat
DAESH/ISIS. By contrast, 18 of these
factions were supplied by the CIA via the so-called
MOM Operations Room in Turkey.
The latter was a joint intelligence operation of
the "Friends of Syria." It was organized for the
explicit purpose of supporting the armed
opposition to Assad and the legitimate
government in Damascus. Fourteen factions of the 28
were also recipients of Washington-supplied TOW
anti-tank guided missiles, which are heavy-duty
lethal and costly to boot.
Yet now the NYT wants you to
believe that the 70,000-90,000 armed ruffians
recently aligned under the Syrian National Army were
simply outcasts and misfits who came together
spontaneously and that Washington had nothing to do
with it!
Indeed, the facts on the ground are so damn
obvious that we can actually be relieved that the
days of the Empire are numbered. That’s because the
Imperial City and its media megaphones have been so
dumbed-down that their utterances on the
Syrian/Turkish border matter have been reduced to
blithering stupidity and mendacious humbug.
At this rate, Imperial Washington ain’t going to
even pretend to rule the planet much longer.
Start with the flagrant contradictions and lies
that has flowed from the lips of every War Party
factotum and bag-carrier that filled the airways and
cyberspace since the Donald pulled the plug a week
ago. To wit, the risible claim that Trump’s action
is at once a victory for America’s alleged Russian
and Iranian adversaries, a betrayal of the Kurds
that gave 10,000 lives fighting ISIS and a signal to
the demented remnant of the latter to reconquer the
territory in north and eastern Syria from which they
were so recently routed.
C’mon! With the Syrian government now on the
northeastern border, the Russian air force
greenlighted to step into the territories that Trump
has wisely vacated and the Iranian Quds and other
Syrian government-allied ground forces at the ready,
what lame-brain Washington stooge can argue with a
straight face that ISIS is coming back?
Whether Washington likes them or not, these folks
hate the Sunni Jihadists to the last man and now
have the will and means to keep the Islamic State
permanently buried beneath the rubble of Raqqa and
the other towns in northeastern Syria from which
they have been driven.
For crying out loud, the only reason the
caliphate briefly implanted itself in this
godforsaken region is that Washington and the
petro-states had prevented the Syrian government and
its allies from policing and protecting its own
territory; and from safeguarding Syria’s meager oil
fields in the northeast, which for a brief period of
time ISIS looted in order to fund its pretensions to
being a state with an army.
But as this map below from the end of September
shows, the caliphate is long gone. And the remnants
of the affiliated jihadi forces in Idlib (purple
area) are likely to rendezvous with their 13 virgins
soon – now that Trump has greenlighted the Syrian
government and its Russian/Iranian allies to finish
them off.
Equally, importantly, all the handwringing about
the Kurds is vastly exaggerated. They have made
their deal with Assad. In now completing the
re-conquest and unification of his own country, he
has every reason to abide by the arrangement which
has already reestablished Syrian military control in
strategic towns on the Turkish border.
Moreover, for reasons explained in Part 1 and
amplified further below, Turkey’s goal is the
establishment of a "safe zone" signified by the
white hash marks over the current Kurdish controlled
(blue area)part of Syria. The purpose is to move the
US-armed YPG/SDF 20 miles inland from its border –
given the fact that rightly or wrongly Erdogan
considers Kurdish separatism and armed insurrection
an existential threat to the Turkish state.
In any event, within days the YPG/SDF will have
moved out of the safe zone, thereby permitting
Turkey to call off the attack permanently, and
re-purposing the corridor into a staging and
processing area for the repatriation of some 3.6
million Syrian who have fled to refugee camps in
Turkey.
So the question recurs. What’s wrong with the
five-day ceasefire and plan for a "safe zone" that
essentially all parties to this senseless, bloody
conflict have agreed to?
As far as we can tell, the only objectors are the
denizens of the Imperial City who brought this
plague to the peoples involved. Yet within a matter
of days as the ceasefire is implemented and made
permanent, the Dem pols will move on to their next
set of anti-Trump talking points – even as the
neocon fifth column in the Trump administration ever
more desperately seeks to prevent peace from
breaking out.
That’s because their true agenda has nothing to
do with the Kurds or ISIS. They simply want the
Kurdish blue areas of the map to remain under US
control so that Assad’s Iranian allies won’t use it
as a land bridge to move weapons and supplies into
the rapidly expanding government controlled (yellow)
areas of Syria and Lebanon.
That is to say, Imperial Washington recognizes no
sovereignty that inconveniences its own writ, yet is
suddenly up in arms owing to Turkey’s legitimate
national security concerns about what it believes to
be US armed terrorists on its own border:
Turkey’s illegal invasion was largely designed
to create a buffer between Syrian Kurds and Turkey –
a "safe zone" – which would be about 300 miles long
by 20 miles deep. Terms of the ceasefire allow for
this buffer zone to be created: "The safe zone will
be primarily enforced by the Turkish Armed Forces
and the two sides will increase their cooperation in
all dimensions of its implementation…The Turkish
side will pause Operation Peace Spring in order to
allow the withdrawal of the YPG [militant People’s
Protection Units] from the safe zone within 120
hours. Operation Peace Spring will be halted upon
completion of this withdrawal."
Nevertheless, War Party critics of the ceasefire
argue that the deal is unfair to Kurdish Syrians,
even though the Kurds themselves welcomed the
ceasefire:
“We will do whatever we can for the success of
the ceasefire agreement,” the commander of the
Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces said.
As one commentator further and aptly noted,
But leading democrats, republicans, war
profiteers, US Empire builders and liberal media
personalities have the hubris and indecency to be
angry that a ceasefire has been negotiated, and
instead have turned the ceasefire into a way to bash
Trump.
Indeed, the shrill Dem attack on Trump’s Syria
move is the final proof that the old pro-peace wing
of the Democrat party is now deader than a doornail.
In fact, House Democrats last week voted unanimously
(225-0) to keep 700 troops in harm’s way, and then
spent the weekend churlishly ragging on Trump
because he sent them to western Iraq first before
bringing them back the USA.
Even then, it is evident that the Donald is
fighting the War Party consensus and its advocates
within his own administration. When it comes to
issues of foreign policy, the HuffPost, NPR, PBS,
Democracy Now, etc. are often using the same talking
points as the neocons, liberal war hawks and
warmongering Republicans.
That could not have been more evident during the
last week than in their blatant, incessant misuse of
the words “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide” in
describing Turkey’s threatened invasion.
But the Syrian Observatory reported as recently
as Thursday that contrary to the hysteria, the
violence to date has been overwhelmingly
against Kurdish SDF units. By its reckoning,
274 SDF soldiers have been killed – combatants who
did not hesitate to return the fire in-kind toward
the advancing Syrian National Army invaders of their
towns and communities.
Unfortunately, a reported 72 civilians were also
killed in the first eight days of the Turkey’s
offensive, which is 72 too many, but in no way shape
or form does it constitute an ethnic cleaning.
More importantly, all of these crocodile tears
completely ignore the history of why the thin red
corridor depicted in the enlarged map below has
become such a tinderbox after Washington’s
bull-in-the-china-shop intrusions into the age-old
sectarian fissures and political conflicts of the
region.
To begin, the Kurds did not bleed and die in
behalf of American security and liberty. They fought
ISIS and gladly received American money and weapons
in defense of their own communities – after
Washington unleashed the US armed ISIS marauders
into their regions.
The 10,000 who were killed in the 2015-2017
battles with ISIS, died protecting their own homes
and villages from the barbarians who arrived in US
military vehicles toting US guns and artillery left
behind in Iraq or sent to anti-Assad forces in
Syria, who unhesitatingly sold them to the Islamic
state.
Behind that reality, of course, stands the fact that
US covert intelligence agencies (among others) were
the force behind the “revolution” in Syria against
the Bashar al-Assad. The majority of the fighters
coming into the region were trained and equipped in
Jordan in camps run by the CIA and other western
agencies. The program was called Operation Timber
Sycamore and was launched in different segments
during 2011-2013.
Indeed, the evidence is overwhelming that the
Arab Spring and the conflict in Syria were the
result of external intervention and subversion.
Weapons were funneled from the Libyan crisis into
the hands of “rebels” that infiltrated Syria, and
equipment directly provided by the US found its way
into the hands of groups that would eventually
become ISIS. The Obama Administration, Hillary
Clinton, John McCain, John Bolton and many others
were all involved in Timber Sycamore.
The Syrian Kurdish were consequently forced to
defend themselves against the incursions of the ISIS
barbarians into their towns and communities,
fighting bravely and losing 10,000 fighters in the
process.
But that’s where the plot thickens because the
Kurds ended up as sloppy seconds in Washington’s
quest for mercenaries to do the fighting and dying
both against the Assad regime it was determined to
overthrow in Damascus and the ISIS marauders it
unleashed in the northeast.
Thus, in 2012 Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
junketed to Istanbul to rally support for the
anti-Kurd Arab/FSA militias during a “Friends of
Syria” conference convened by Erdogan – militias
which today the Clinton Democrats are furiously
denouncing.
But not back then, as the Queen of Warmongers
(hat tip to Tulsi) coldly averred:
“The hard men with the guns are going to be
the more likely actors in any political transition
than those on the outside just talking. And
therefore we needed to figure out how we could
support them on the ground, better equip them…”
One of those “hard men”, of course, was the above
mentioned Salim Idriss, the present “Defense
Minister” of Syria’s nonexistent“provisional
government” and de facto leader of the mercenary
forces dispatched by Turkey into northern Syria this
past week.
The truth is, however, the Kurdish side wasn’t
much better. There never was a theological or
ideological struggle between the YPG and Daesh, it
was just a rivalry for a territory to be shared on
the rubble of Iraq and Syria.
In fact, when the Islamic State collapsed, the
YPG helped the jihadists join al-Qaeda forces in
Idleb by given safe passage across their
“Kurdistan”.
Moreover, the Kurdish intrigue was every bit as
devious as the that among the Turkey-backed Arab and
Turkmen factions. To wit, the Iraqi Kurds of the
Barzani clan were directly involved in the original
ISIS conquest of western Iraq in the summer of 2014.
Accordingly, the son of the President and Head of
Intelligence of the Iraqi Kurdish Regional
Government attended a secret CIA meeting in Amman
Jordan in June 2014, which planned the capture of
Mosul and the Sunni provinces of western Iraq.
Consequently, other than a few for show
skirmishes, the Barzani Kurds in Erbil (Iraq) did
not fight any real battles against ISIS. They simply
re-enforced their own territorial perimeters and
sent them to face the Sunnis. Worse still, they
enabled ISIS to enslave non-Muslim Kurds, the
Yezidis, during the Battle of Sinjar. Those who were
rescued were saved by Turkish PKK and Syrian YPG
fighters dispatched to the area.
From there, of course, ISIS moved on to the
Syrian east and north. But having unleashed ISIS on
the Syrian state, Washington then compounded insult
with injury by encouraging its newfound Kurdish ally
to pursue its dream of an independent state called "Rojava"
in northeast Syria.
Needless to say, Turkey saw the Rojava project as
an assault on the territorial integrity and security
of its own state from the get go.
Yet in October 2015 the Pentagon created the
Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) as the official
military wing of Rojava. The SDF was comprised
mainly of Syrian Kurdish YPG militants, which then
expelled Arab and Assyrian Christian families from
their homes as the SDF expanded the control area of
this proto-Kurdish state into historically
non-Kurdish towns and communities.
Indeed, Kurdish fighters from Iraq and Turkey
settled in their homes and took possession of their
lands. Thereafter in March 2016, the autonomy of
“Rojava” was declared with no small amount of help
from Turkish Kurds and the ruling Barzani clan from
the Iraqi Kurdish region in what is now the Kurdish
controlled (yellow area) of the map above.
From there, the tangle only thickened. For
instance, worried that the Turkish PKK and the Iraqi
Barzani clan would pave the way for the creation of
a Greater Kurdistan, the Iraqi government secretly
sent weapons to the PKK in order to help overthrow
the independence-seeking Barzani clan in northern
Iraq.
Likewise, in early 2018, the Russian Ambassador
to the UN revealed that Syrian Kurds had pardoned
120 Daesh/ISIS leaders and had incorporated them
into the YPG.
All the way through, of course, Washington had
studiously ignored the checkered history of its 11th
hour Kurdish ally. In fact, however, the Syrian YPG
was just an offshoot of the Turkey-based Kurdistan
Workers’ Party or PKK.
The latter, in turn, was a Marxist-Leninist
insurgency supported by the Soviet Union during the
cold war years, which fought against the
dictatorships of the Kemalist generals, who were
members of NATO. With the aid of Hafez el-Assad
during that period, the PKK set up a military
training camp in the Lebanese plain of Bekaa, under
the protection of the Syrian Peace Force
When the USSR collapsed, the PKK had more than
10,000 full-time soldiers and more than 75,000
reservists. This war of liberation destroyed more
than 3,000 villages and displaced more than 2
million people, killing upwards of 50,000 civilians.
Despite these immense sacrifices, it failed.
In fact, during a joint operation with the
Turkish, US and Israeli secret services in 1999, the
historic leader of the Turkish Kurd revolt, Abdullah
Öcalan, was captured and imprisoned on the island of
Imrali in the Sea of Marmara. The PKK thereafter
largely collapsed, causing large numbers of its
activists and combatants to flee Turkish prosecution
and settle in the Kurdish communities of northern
Syria among others.
At the beginning of the 2011 Arab Spring,
Abdullah Öcalan rebuilt the PKK from his prison cell
around a new ideology. After secret negotiations
with NATO in the Imrali prison, he abandoned
Marxist-Leninism in favor of a vague form of
stateless communitarianism. So the Kurdish firebrand
who had always struggled against Turkey in order to
build his own state, Kurdistan, now claimed that any
state is in itself a tool of oppression.
Then came a further double-cross. The
aforementioned militants of the PKK, who had been
forced to flee to the north of Syria after Öcalan’s
capture, initially had adhered to his written pledge
to Assad that his followers would never lay a claim
to Syrian territory.
Indeed, at the beginning of Washington regime
change war on the Syrian government, the Kurds
formed militias to defend the country which had
given them shelter and awarded them Syrian
nationality.
However, on October 2014, Salih Muslim, who was
one of the co-chairman of the YPG (the Syrian branch
of the PKK), took part in a secret negotiations with
French President François Hollande and his Turkish
President Erdogan. There he was apparently promised
that he would become the head of his own state if he
agreed to help re-create Kurdistan…in Syria!
Soon thereafter the so-called international group
which had been stood up by Washington to fight ISIS
per the usual "coalition of the willing" ploy
offered support to the YPG. Accordingly, the above
mentioned nation of Rojava was declared and the rest
is history – right up until the last week.
In the end, we doubt whether the Donald has taken
the trouble to become informed on the sordid history
of what amounts to the war lordism unleashed in
Syria by the Washington War Party. Yet somehow he
has managed to cut through all of the Imperial City
lies, ruses, myths and ever-changing self-serving
narratives to get to the essence of the matter.
The key to finally leaving this misbegotten war
is to allow the Syrian state to become whole again,
and for the interested parties in the region to work
out the framework, timetables and arrangements for
its reconstruction in a manner that best meets the
objectives of the parties involved.
To be sure, there isn’t much left of the Donald’s
original call for America First, but at least he is
putting a spear in the heart of the Regime Change
folly.
And he is doing so in a manner that will soon
prove that the War Party has been wrong all along
about the benefits of intervening in the region
where no homeland security interests are at stake;
and now also about the costs of leaving, which are
actually not costs at all.
As the Donald recently tweeted:
"I view the situation on the Turkish border
with Syria to be, for the U.S., strategically
brilliant. Our soldiers are out of there, our
soldiers are totally safe. They have to work it out.
Maybe they can do it without fighting. Syria is
protecting the Kurds," Trump said in wide-ranging
remarks to reporters in the Oval Office alongside
Italian President Sergio Mattarella.
"If Syria wants to fight for their land,
that’s up to Turkey and Syria, as it has been for
hundreds of years. They’ve been fighting, and the
Kurds have been fighting for hundreds of years, that
whole mess," he said. "It’s been going on for a long
time. Syria may have some help with Russia, and
that’s fine. It’s a lot of sand. They’ve got a lot
of sand over there. There’s a lot of sand they can
play with."
Truer words were never spoken from the Oval
Office or any other official Washington platform.
There will be no massacre or extended war, but only
a settlement among the parties actually submerged in
the mayhem Washington has inflicted on this
long-suffering region. As the Donald further
tweeted:
Just spoke to President
@RTErdogan
of Turkey. He told me there was minor sniper and
mortar fire that was quickly eliminated. He very
much wants the ceasefire, or pause, to work.
Likewise, the Kurds want it, and the ultimate
solution, to happen. Too bad there wasn’t……….this
thinking years ago. Instead, it was always held
together with very weak bandaids, & in an artificial
manner. There is good will on both sides & a really
good chance for success. The US has secured the Oil,
& the ISIS Fighters are double secured by Kurds &
Turkey……..I have just been notified that some
European Nations are now willing, for the first
time, to take the ISIS Fighters that came from their
nations. This is good news, but should have been
done after WE captured them. Anyway, big progress
being made!!!!
And oh by your way, there was no betrayal,
either. After he spoke to the Kurdish commander by
phone, the latter reported the truth of the matter –
something the MSM did not even bother to convey
amidst all its sanctimonious harrumphing:
“We told (Trump) that we are contacting the
Syrian regime and the Russians in order to protect
our country and land,” the commander, Mazloum Abdi,
told local TV station Ronahi TV. “He said, ‘We
are not against that.”’
As for the claim that ISIS prisoners are running
loose, Abdi had this to say:
“The matter is in our hands. We captured them.
We are holding them, and we will decide what to do
with them. No one else,” he told the channel.
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