August 24, 2016

Kurds Lose Out As Neo-Ottoman Turks Steal Syria's Jarablus

Early this morning Turkey invaded Syria. A contingent of 1,500 Turkish sponsored "Syrian rebels", aka Islamist from all over the world, were accompanied by some Turkish special forces and twenty tanks to capture the city Jarablus at the Turkish-Syrian border. The move followed a night of artillery warm-ups and bombing raids. Shortly after noon the "Syrian revolution" flag and the Turkish banner(!) were raised over the city.

There was no resistance to the move. The Islamic State, which had been informed of the attack, had evacuated all fighters and their families out of Jarablus. (The families went to Raqqa but the fighters went where?) No shots were fired. As one commentator remarked: They even left mints on the pillows. The toleration of ISIS by Turkey, which includes some not so secret support, will likely continue.



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The claimed aim of the Turkish move is to close the Turkish border to ISIS. That claim is obviously nonsense. The border can be closed on the Turkish side. To move the crossing point a few kilometers south does not change anything. The second, more plausible claimed aim, is to prevent the movement of the Kurdish YPG forces, under the U.S. assigned label SDF, towards west-Syria. Such a move would create a Kurdish statelet all along the Turkish border and endanger Turkey itself while it is fighting a Kurdish insurgency on its own ground.

The Kurds had announced the move west and recently taken the city of Manbij away from the Islamic State. This with the help of heavy U.S. bombardment. As part of their future plans a new SDF-Jarablus Military Council was announced yesterday. But the head of that entity was assassinated just three hours after the introductory press conference. The Kurds blamed the Turks for the killing. Today the Turkish government announced that it will not only take Jarablus but also Manbij and throw the Kurds back east behind the Euphrates river.

The U.S. had so far supported the Kurdish move towards west-Syria with special forces and air support. But it reacted to the Turkish move against its alliance with the Kurds as it always did over the last 30 years. It immediately betrayed the Kurds as a bigger interests arouse. Turkey is a NATO ally that threatens to move to a closer alliance with Russia and Iran. The U.S. can not condone that. The Kurds will therefore again have to suffer for their gullibility and ambition.

U.S. vice president Biden arrived in Ankara today for a penitential pilgrimage. The Turkish government accuses the U.S. to have been involved in the recent coup attempt against it. There may well be some truth to that. In a public snub Biden was received at the airport of the Turkish capital by the deputy mayor of the city. For now the Turkish president Erdogan will continue his way no matter what the U.S. says or does.

The real plan behind the Turkish invasions is way beyond ISIS or the Kurdish issue. As Turkish papers were eager to point out, the invasion happened to the day 500 years after the battle of Marj Dabiq north of Aleppo:

The battle was part of the Ottoman–Mamluk War (1516–17) between the Ottoman Empire and the Mamluk Sultanate, which ended in an Ottoman victory and conquest of much of the Middle East, ...

The choosing of this date points to Erdogan's real ambition: To recreate an Ottoman empire which would include at least north Syria and north Iraq.

There has been little protest by the Syrian government against the Turkish move on Jarablus. It lamented a lack of coordination in fighting terrorism. Not that it could have done much else. After five years of war there is no capacity left to oppose its big northern neighbor. No protest at all came from Syria's allies Russia and Iran. Blunt words were reserved for U.S. behavior on the Syria issue and its support for al-Qaeda. There clearly is some kind of agreement between Russia, Iran, Syria and Turkey to accommodate the Turkish invasion.

Any sympathy for the Kurds, which might have led to some countermove, has vanished after Kurdish YPG fighters recently attacked Syrian government forces in the north-eastern city of Hasakah. That attack, completely useless and unnecessary in the big picture, cost them- as predicted - their dream of a viable nation state. The Kurdish gamblers, like they always tend to do, became overambitious and now lost all they had gained. They will have to retreat eastward, surrounded by enemies and without any friends left in today's world. What can the anarcho-marxists of the YPG do now? Ally with and bleed for wahhabi Saudi Arabia? For how long?

The "Syrian rebels" Turkey used to march towards Jarablus were pulled from the ongoing attack on the Aleppo city front. The Syrian government forces will be somewhat relieved to have less enemies to kill (vid) in their defense of the 1.2-1.5 million of their people in the city. But that relief will only be for a short time. As the emphasis of the Marj Dabiq battle shows, Erdogan's ambition are much bigger than some rural strip of land along the Syrian Turkish border. He wants to rule over Aleppo in Syria as well as over Mosul in Iraq. The war on Syria in the west, run by Turkey, the U.S. and various Gulf states, will continue. In this bigger context the Turkish move to Jarablus is a mere skirmish on the side.

Posted by b on August 24, 2016 at 16:45 UTC | Permalink

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