It's that time once again: over the weekend Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan for perhaps the twentieth time warned his army is making preparations to act on its southern border with Syria, saying it will take unilateral steps to create a "safe zone" amid accusations the US is dragging its feet implementing agreements to push Syrian Kurdish forces from the border.

This as yet another 'conspiracy theory' gets belatedly confirmed as conspiracy fact by the mainstream. The New York Post asks "Why isn’t the media covering Turkish President Erdogan’s ties to ISIS?" — well, it's at least been endlessly reported here and other places for about the past half decade. Better late than never, we suppose. The report details:

The evidence of Erdogan’s direct, personal and institutional support for ISIS and related jihadi groups is so extensive, the wonder is why the American media is not paying more attention to it.

The report doesn't merely stop at saying NATO-member Turkey had an indirect or remote relationship with ISIS, but points out that Turkish intelligence service (MIT) while under the immediate oversight of Erdogan has been directly weaponizing and funding the terror group.

Barely surveying the tip of the iceberg in terms of the total mountain of evidence to have emerged over the years, the NY Post asserts:

It’s Erdogan’s commitment to global jihad, and specifically, to ISIS terrorists. Since 2012, the Turkish intelligence service, MIT, under Erdogan’s direction, has been providing resources and material assistance to ISIS, while Turkish Customs officials turned a blind eye to ISIS recruits flowing across Turkey’s borders into Syria and Iraq. Scores of ISIS fighters captured by pro-U.S. Kurdish forces in northern Syria showed Turkish exit stamps on their passports, and otherwise boasted of the direct assistance they had received from Turkish authorities.

The report further cites a recently captured ISIS fighter, who told his Kurdish captors, “Turkish intelligence knows everything.”

Interestingly, then Vice President Joe Biden as early as 2014 in a Harvard address identified "our allies" and "our great friends" — among them Turkey, UAE, and Saudi Arabia — as being behind the rise of ISIS (of course, he stopped short of naming the United States, despite previously acknowledging the US worked "hand in glove" with these very countries in the Syrian war).

"Turkey admitted it had let too many foreign fighters cross its border into Syria," Biden explained at the time, as paraphrased by the BBC. "We could not convince our colleagues to stop supplying them," Biden confessed, in what constituted America's #2 most powerful leader admitting the US' own role in fueling the rise of ISIS to topple Assad.

Biden's astounding 2014 admissions, the televised footage of which was easily available, were essentially buried by the mainstream media, which only commented on his later being forced to apologize for the frank and blunt remarks. The footage itself didn't air on any major network and is still by and large unknown to broader American public.

How is this country allowed to stay in NATO? pic.twitter.com/NSKOuXCGt4 — Mark B. Spiegel (@markbspiegel) September 22, 2019

And now five years after this and other evidence has been readily available, the NY Post documents that—

Turkey’s assistance to ISIS starts right at the top. In 2016, Wikileaks published an archive of 58,000 emails documenting the involvement of Erdogan’s son-in-law, Berat Albayrak, in helping ISIS market oil stolen from Syria and Iraq.

And more recently, many ISIS terrorists have simply donned a new uniform and joined Turkish-backed 'rebel' groups, to as the Post notes, to engage in "ethnic cleansing" of Syrian Kurds.

And yet after all this it remains that Erdogan's Turkey is still a key member of NATO, American forces still work closely with the very military and intelligence services backing ISIS, and US troops still operate out of key Turkish bases like Incirlik air base.