Why, oh why, would we choose the YPG-dominated SDF, over our long time NATO ally?

Make no mistake, we have set our military against Turkey, and that is huge.



A US plan to establish military observation posts in Syria near the border with Turkey is designed to prevent Ankara from launching an all-out military assault on positions held by Washington's Kurdish allies, according to experts.

Why are we militarily containing Turkey? Because of Iran. It's all about Iran.

This is how it happened.



The US Army started on Saturday to build five observation posts at the border with Turkey, as part of Washington’s procedures to enhance its military and diplomatic presence northeast Syria. The posts came as part of a one-year memorandum signed to train 30,000 members of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) to combat “ISIS cells” and to contain Iran. “The US Army started yesterday establishing three posts in Tal Abyad and two others in Ain al-Arab (Kobani) at the border with Turkey to protect the back of its Syrian ally forces against ISIS,” a leader from the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) told Asharq Al-Awsat on Saturday. The five observation posts, which would be followed by others in Ras al-Ain, Amouda and Derbassiyah at the Turkish borders, come as part of military and diplomatic steps to implement a US strategy in Syria set to achieve three objectives: Fight ISIS and prevent it from reemerging, remove Iran from Syria, and push forward towards a Syrian political solution.

The implications of this are staggering.

1) Not only are we setting our military against a NATO ally, we are also helping to enlarge and enhance Turkey's declared enemy, the YPG. This is just short of a declaration of war against Turkey.

2) What exactly does it mean to "remove Iran from Syria"?

The New Yorker has an article titled Is the Trump Administration Pivoting the Fight in Syria Toward a War with Iran?



Earlier in the year, Bolton had said on Fox News, “Our goal should be regime change in Iran.” A month after Bolton joined the White House, the Trump Administration reneged on the Iran nuclear deal and reimposed sanctions meant to strangle the Iranian economy. Brian Hook, a Bolton aide during the Bush Administration, is now Trump’s “special representative for Iran.” James F. Jeffrey, a diplomat who served as Bush’s chargé d’affaires in Baghdad, is now the “special representative for Syria engagement.” On September 6th, Jeffrey announced that Trump had agreed to keep U.S. troops in Syria indefinitely.“We are not in a hurry,” he said. On September 22nd, Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani spoke at an Iran Uprising summit held in Manhattan. “I don’t know when we’re going to overthrow them,” he said. “It could be in a few days, months, a couple of years. But it’s going to happen.” On September 24th, Bolton confirmed to reporters in New York that American troops would not withdraw from Syria until all Iranian forces were gone, including Iranian “proxies and militias,” which could describe any number of armed groups, including the Assad regime itself.

The fact that Bolton is in charge of our foreign policy here should cause you nightmares.

If we start bombing Iran, American forces would be engaged in a war zone that would span four contiguous countries: Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan, stretching nineteen hundred miles.

Suddenly Hitler's two-front war strategy in WWII looks modest in comparison.

OTOH, it makes sense why we would be looking to beef up the SDF. Without them we don't have the numbers to defeat the Iranian proxy forces in Syria, plus the inevitable conflicts with Syria forces.

Not to mention potential conflicts with Russian forces, something that is happening more often than you realize.

Even the rebel forces in Idlib province, which have united under al-Qaeda, are getting into the act.

Just this week, al-Qaeda attacked Aleppo with chemical weapons.



The attack – which was confirmed by both pro-government and pro-opposition sources – left over 100 civilians hospitalized after the gas released by the mortars caused “difficulty breathing, eye inflammation, shivering and fainting,” according to the head of the Aleppo Doctors Syndicate, Zaher Batal, as cited by Reuters. Batal and other Aleppo doctors suspect that chlorine gas was the substance responsible for the symptoms of those affected. Despite the fact that chemical weapons were used by al Qaeda-linked militants in Idlib, the U.S. government and its allies have thus far been silent about the recent attack, even though the incident was covered by mainstream Western outlets such as CNN and Reuters. This is particularly telling given that the U.S. – along with the U.K. and France – bombed the Syrian government earlier this year in April after the Syrian “rebel” group Jaysh al-Islam accused the Syrian government of launching a chlorine gas attack in the Damascus suburb of Douma. Furthermore, the Trump administration – despite admitting last year that Idlib is the “largest al Qaeda safe haven” since 9/11 – rushed to defend the province from a Syrian military operation back in September, claiming al Qaeda-linked militants were “not terrorists, but people fighting a civil war against a brutal dictator.”

Seriously, how hard is it to denounce a chemical attack on civilians by al-Qaeda?

Too hard for the Trump Administration, it seems.

Well, al-Qaeda terrorists may be fanatics, but they aren't stupid.



Iran’s militias were behind the chemical attack targeting Aleppo, and they seek to abort the Sochi deal in Idlib, the head of the High Negotiations Committee, Naser al-Hariri, told al-Hadath news channel.

...

He added that Tehran is “part of the problem and not part of the solution to the Syrian cause, and any role, decision or attempt to trim or weaken Iran militarily, politically or economically, will have a positive impact on the Syrian file, but these actions alone are not enough.”

Right. So Iranian militias attacked the civilians of their allies with chemical weapons for...reasons.

Oh, and we have absolutely no evidence for this.

Oh yeah, we also don't like how the Russian-sponsored peace talks are making progress.

That's totally believable, and it just happens to be something Bolton would want to hear.