129 Shares 0



129

0







Various international parties agree: the West created the ISIS.

This is what M K Bhadrakumar, a contributor to Asia Times wrote at the Indian Punchline blog on 28 November.

According to a Chicago Tribune op-ed by Isobel Finkel and Bloomberg News, “On Thursday a court in Istanbul ordered that Cumhuriyet newspaper's editor-in-chief, Can Dundar, and the Ankara bureau chief, Erdem Gul, be jailed pending trial on charges of political and military espionage. Their crime: publishing images which allege to show Turkey's intelligence agency shipping weapons to Syria.”

The allegations say Turkey’s secret service sold weapons to Syrian rebels and ISIS terrorists, despite staunch denials by Turkey’s government of providing any aid to fighters in the country to its southern border. Turkey wants to see Syrian president Bashar al Assad toppled, and so it is not a stretch to imagine the country is aiding in the fight against him, regardless of the intentions of the fighters it helps.

Editor-in-Chief Can Dundar told reporters before he was taken into custody “Don’t worry, this ruling is nothing but a badge of honour to us,” a statement especially poignant in response to Turkish President Erdogan’s threat that Dundar would pay a “heavy price” for the allegations and publishing the pictures.

Bhadrakumar asserts with certainty that Turkey has been selling weapons to the ISIS, making sense of the recent Russian fighter jet shot down by Turkey’s military. Bhadrakumar states, “No wonder, Turkey shot down the Russian strike aircraft targeting the northern Syrian border region through which the IS convoys reach Turkey.”

He further quotes Russian President Vladimir Putin, who in a statement on Friday after the downing of a Russian jet, alleged that Turkey has been engaging in oil commerce with Syria. Putin said, “At the G20 summit, which took place in Turkey as it happens, in Antalya, I showed a photograph… taken by our pilots at a height of 5,000 metres. Vehicles transporting oil made a long line that vanished over the horizon. It looks like a living oil pipeline. These are industrial-scale oil supplies coming in from parts of Syria now in the terrorists’ hands… We see from the air where these vehicles are heading. They are heading for Turkey day and night. I can imagine that perhaps Turkey’s senior leaders are not aware of this situation. It is hard to believe, but theoretically, it is possible.”

Putin goes on to state explicitly that Turkey’s government is breaking international law and UN Security Council resolutions by doing industrial size business with “terrorists.”

“I would be willing to believe that some corruption and shady deals might be involved. Let them sort out just what is going on there. But there is absolutely no question that the oil is heading for Turkey. We see this from the air. We see that loaded vehicles are heading there in a constant stream and returning empty. These vehicles are loaded in Syria, in territory controlled by the terrorists, and they go to Turkey and return to Syria empty. We see this every day,” Putin added.

In the piece at Indian Punchline, Bhadrakumar goes on to allege that if Turkey is doing oil business with Syria and Russian planes have spotted it, then American intelligence certainly knows of the oil trade as well.

And if that is the case, then the Obama administration and State Department are on one hand publicly pushing against the illegal oil trade with terrorists as in their support for the UN Security resolution--and on the other hand complicity supporting it with knowledge that their ally Turkey is engaging in this process.

But of course, America has always meddled in the Middle East, making allies when convenient and dropping them when troublesome. Take the case of Osama Bin Laden--America’s public enemy number one. In a piece by Ben Norton at Salon.com, Norton clearly outlines the US’s tacit support for Bin Laden and the mujahedin in the proxy fight against the Soviet Union in the 1980s, the CIA’s active recruiting of jihadists and copious dollars to the war effort.

After being abandoned by the west, Bin Laden took his revenge on 11 September. But these are the very same weapons, ideology and extremists that are waging war in Afghanistan and Iraq under the name of the ISIS.

Norton asserts, “After the fall of the USSR, the secular socialist groups that dominated the resistance movements of the Middle East were replaced by Islamic extremists ones that had previously been supported by the West.”

So once a friend, then an enemy. This is the doctrine the US applies to the Middle East and always has.