In this episode of Mapping Faultlines, we look at the escalating crisis in Libya where warlord Khalifa Haftar is making a push towards Tripoli yet again. Meanwhile, the GNA [Tripoli] government has signed an agreement with Turkey, which enables the latter to lay claim on part of the Mediterranean Sea. The competition between Turkey and countries such as Egypt, Israel and Greece has added further complexity to the conflict in Libya.
TURKISH Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, whose country is preparing for troop deployment to Libya, says the prolongation of the Libyan conflict could plunge the North African country into ‘chaos’ and turn it into another Syria.
The accords – one on security and military cooperation and another on maritime boundaries in the eastern Mediterranean – were inked on November 27 and granted Ankara the right to deploy troops to Libya if asked by Tripoli.
Last Thursday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Ankara had received that request and that the Turkish parliament would soon authorise the dispatch of troops to Libya.
Erdogan said the Turkish parliament will soon pass a bill to send military forces to Libya as Tripoli has offered an ‘invitation’ for the deployment. …
On November 27, Turkey and Libya signed the maritime accord which marks the boundary between the two countries in the energy-rich eastern Mediterranean close to the Greek island of Crete. …
Also last Thursday, Libya’s Interior Minister Fathi Bashagha said at a press conference in Tunis that a Turkish-Tunisian-Algerian alliance had been formed to support the Libyan [Tripoli] government.
‘Rachida Ennaifer, designated Media in-Charge at the Tunisian Presidency, denies the press conference statement by Fathi Bashagha on Tunisia joining an alliance with Libya, Turkey and Algeria. She said the statement does not reflect the position of Tunisia’, the Libyan News Observatory tweeted.
Turkey’s Libya intervention escalates a dangerous power struggle: here.
The nine-year civil war between rival militias unleashed by NATO’s destruction of the Libyan regime in its 2011 war threatens to escalate into all-out war between major regional powers. As the Turkish parliament voted yesterday to authorize a military intervention to back Fayez el-Sarraj’s Government of National Accord (GNA) in Tripoli, key backers of Khalifa Haftar’s rival Libyan National Army (LNA) were denouncing the vote as illegal and threatening to intervene. After a call with French President Emmanuel Macron on December 30, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi issued a communiqué denouncing the Turkey-GNA accords as “illegal foreign intervention” in Libya: here.
Neo-Ottomanism: the political economy of contemporary Turkey. Turkish communist leader KEMAL OKUYAN explains the background to the despatch of Turkish troops to Libya and Turkey’s new claims to mineral resources in the eastern Mediterranean: here.
Turkey And Libya Prepare For Med Oil War Against Greece, And Egypt
11th December 2019
AN EXPLOSIVE situation that threatens all-out war between the NATO powers is fast developing in the Mediterranean region in a struggle to seize the eastern Med’s oil and gas resources.
On Sunday, Libya’s … Government of National Accord, based in Tripoli, announced a pact with Turkey over maritime jurisdiction areas as well as military and security cooperation in the oil-rich Eastern Med that would immediately come into force.
This government was placed in power by Islamist militias, backed up by French and UK airpower, mustered by the then Cameron–Sarkozy NATO leadership.
Turkey declared on Saturday that the maritime pact was now to be enforced. What makes this maritime treaty so explosive is that it gives Turkey complete oil and gas drilling rights in the eastern Mediterranean Sea and inevitably means Turkish troops intervening in Libya, their old colony, to ‘protect’ their interests.
This region and the rights to exploit its huge oil and gas deposits have been the subject of bitter dispute between Turkey and Greece.
Egypt is also raging about the deal which threatens its maritime interests and its own intentions to profit from exploiting oil and gas reserves, using the forces of General Haftar, based in Benghazi, and currently besieging Tripoli. Cairo has issued a warning that ‘Egypt will not stand idle while a foreign country is threatening its interests. Anyone who approaches the maritime, air and land borders of Egypt should review himself. We will not accept or allow any mess, at or close to our borders.’
The agreement lays out marine jurisdictions that make Turkey and Libya maritime neighbours, placing Turkey’s sea borders in areas east of the island of Crete that are claimed by Greece and Cyprus.
For the first time Turkey is threatening Greece’s sovereignty in the Cretan sea, a move to put an end to a planned pipeline that would deliver gas from the huge undersea reserves in the eastern Mediterranean to Europe.
In addition, Greece is threatening to extend its own territorial sovereignty out into the Mediterranean – a move that would inevitably lead to military confrontation with Turkey, a fellow member of NATO.
The pact also involves Cyprus as it extends Turkey’s claim to maritime rights to the west with Turkish officials vowing to start searching for oil and gas in this region around the island.
Another country that will be drawn into this struggle for domination of natural resources is Israel, which is a part of the so-called Energy Triangle, a natural gas extraction plan agreed between Cyprus, Greece and Israel to exploit the 40 trillion cubic feet of natural gas found under the waters between Cyprus and Israel that would supply the proposed pipeline to Europe.
Adding fuel to the fire is the fact that Turkey’s agreement with the [Tripoli] government of Libya will inevitably see Turkish forces used against Haftar, creating a regional war with NATO powers on opposite sides.
Turkey is intent on extending its grab for oil and gas from the land to the entire eastern Mediterranean and old allegiances count for nothing as it prepares to take on fellow NATO members and the EU.
This fast-developing conflict between the imperialist powers and would-be imperialists threatens to plunge not just the region but the world into war.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced Thursday that Ankara will deploy Turkish troops to Libya, claiming that the Tripoli-based Government of National Accord (GNA) has requested military support: here.
Libyan rebels seize boat with Turkish crew after Ankara backs pact with government: here.
Human rights take a back seat when state leaders try to control the narrative
On a sunny day in March 2016, Turkish forensic physician Şebnem Korur Fincanci drove into Cizre, a town in southeastern Turkey. The government had just lifted a 79-day curfew meant to help the Turkish military rout out members of the separatist PKK, or Kurdistan Workers’ Party. Turkey has long fought to keep insurgents from creating a separate Kurdish country, and has designated the PKK as a terrorist organization.
Like most people outside of Cizre, Fincanci had no idea what had transpired during the lockdown. She arrived to a devastated city.
The air, she says, smelled of burnt flesh. Houses were riddled with bullet holes, the furniture inside burned or bashed with sledgehammers. Residents led her to three bombed-out buildings. Fincanci entered one and saw within the basement rubble a jawbone and a pair of eyeglasses. She could immediately tell that the jawbone was a child’s.
Fincanci had not brought her forensic tools. She had assumed that this visit was preliminary, a time to talk with Cizre residents about their medical needs. So, she snapped pictures of the bone, the glasses and the surrounding debris with her cell phone. Residents later confirmed that the building had been home to a young family.
After a 79-day curfew was lifted in Cizre, Turkey, in March 2016, forensic physician Şebnem Korur Fincanci found demolished buildings (left) and walls filled with bullet holes (center). In one residential building’s basement, she found a burnt jaw (right) from a child thought to have died there.
A few days later, Fincanci wrote a report and posted it on the website of the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey, a volunteer organization she helped found in 1990. She also sent the report to Turkey’s internal affairs office. Fincanci wrote that the military had committed atrocities against innocent civilians. She demanded a full investigation. Instead, in June 2016, the government charged her with spreading terrorist propaganda. “I was arrested and sent to prison,” Fincanci says.
Weak regimes
Across the ages, scientists have come under fire for all manner of offense, often tied to the work they do. Chinese astronomers Hi and Ho were executed over 4,000 years ago, according to lore, for failing to predict a solar eclipse. In 1633, the Roman Catholic Church convicted astronomer Galileo Galilei of heresy for stating that the Earth revolves around the sun — a concept antithetical to the church doctrine that put the Earth at the center of the universe. He spent the remaining nine years of his life under house arrest.
In the United States, during the Red Scare of the 1940s and 1950s, government officials monitored and interrogated academics seen as Communist sympathizers. Princeton University physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, a leader of the Manhattan Project, was accused of being a national security risk and lost his security clearance.
In the aftermath of World War II, on December 10, 1948, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights so that atrocities of the Holocaust would never be replayed. The document stated that every person everywhere has the right to life and liberty, freedom from slavery and torture, the right to work and education, and the freedom of opinion and expression.
The declaration provided a blueprint for how people around the world ought to be treated, yet human rights abuses, against scientists and others, have continued.
The Cold War’s end in 1991 led to a shift from clearly totalitarian regimes where citizens had few personal and political freedoms to countries that appear democratic but exhibit varying levels of authoritarian control, says Andrew Anderson, executive director of Front Line Defenders, a human rights organization based in Dublin.
The blurred line between authoritarianism and democracy in Turkey under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is a case in point, Anderson says. Scientists almost anywhere can find themselves under fire as even [supposedly] staunch democracies, including Greece and the United States, struggle to balance state interests and academic freedoms. Some scientists are attacked for sharing their research and others stumble into dangerous situations while doing their jobs, such as doctors accused of providing medical care to protesters or rebels. Others feel compelled to use their standing as public figures to resist and expose wrongdoing.
Quantifying the number of scientists whose human rights are under threat is challenging, but a November 19 report from Scholars at Risk, a nonprofit organization that helps persecuted academics, provides some context. From September 1, 2018, to August 31, 2019, the organization documented 324 attacks on students and academics, including scientists, from 56 countries, says Scholars at Risk advocacy director Clare Robinson. The report also points to countries with increasing restrictions on academics, including India, China, Sudan, Brazil and for the fourth year in a row, Turkey, where thousands of academics have been charged with disloyalty, treason and terrorism.
Scientists, professional organizations and human rights groups have been mounting international campaigns to help persecuted colleagues. Numerous groups agitated on Fincanci’s behalf, circulating petitions, sending letters and holding demonstrations. But even when advocacy helps free scientists from detention, the accused can find their professional and personal lives upended. Some must live in exile, cut off from their support systems and their work. Others wind up unemployed.
After 10 days in jail, Fincanci and two detained journalists were released to await trial. “Thanks to international solidarity and support, they couldn’t hold us for a long time,” she says. “They had to release us.” The propaganda charges were dropped in July. Fincanci now faces 2.5 years in prison for signing a petition along with more than 1,000 scholars to demand an end to the fighting between Turkish forces and the PKK. …
In Sudan last December, when protestors demonstrated against the government of then-President Omar al-Bashir, the military responded with force against both the protestors and those rushing to their aid. Physicians for Human Rights reported in April that it found support for allegations that police and security forces intentionally attacked at least seven Sudanese medical facilities. The group’s independent assessment of postmortem records supports claims that police shot physician Babiker Abdul Hamid in the chest in January as he tried to explain that doctors were simply treating the injured. “He said he was a doctor, and he was shot point blank,” reported one eyewitness. Sudan has claimed that he was shot by “infiltrators.”
How a government treats people who offer medical care can serve as a litmus test for academic freedom, Sirkin says. “It’s never a crime for a doctor to treat a sick person.” …
Sharing findings with colleagues around the world is central to science. For years, U.S. funding agencies and research universities have encouraged collaboration between Chinese and U.S. scientists, says Xiaoxing Xi, a physicist at Temple University in Philadelphia. But collaborating has become riskier.
Xi, who earned his doctorate in China before emigrating to the United States in 1989, has traveled frequently to China and worked with partners at Peking University, Tsinghua University and Shanghai Jiaotong University. His research involves fabricating pure materials for studying their intrinsic properties. Those materials eventually could wind up in devices such as cell phones. “I do fundamental research,” Xi says. “I do not do research which is classified or restricted.”
In May 2015, Xi was named chair of Temple’s physics department. Two days later, FBI agents burst into his home, pulling Xi, his wife and two daughters from their bedrooms at gunpoint. Xi describes it as a scene out of a movie.
Xi says FBI agents interrogated him for two hours. The agents thought he had shared sensitive information with China, particularly about a device called a pocket heater. Xi quickly realized that the agents had gotten the science wrong. The information he had shared was not sensitive; it was about a different device, not a pocket heater. But clearing his name took months, by which point his reputation was in tatters.
On the same day that Xi was arrested, the Committee of 100, a nonprofit organization based in New York City that supports Chinese Americans in U.S. society, held a news conference to discuss a similar case. Sherry Chen, a hydrologist at the National Weather Service, had been arrested in October 2014 on espionage charges related to allegedly sharing information about the nation’s dams with China. Her case was dropped one week before trial. In December 2014, charges against two Chinese biologists working at Eli Lilly and Company in Indiana were dismissed.
“So you have … four individuals accused of very serious crimes and yet all have their cases dropped. That’s just very unusual,” says Jeremy Wu, a retired U.S. Census Bureau statistician who is on the Committee of 100 board.
To find out what was going on, Wu contacted Andrew Chongseh Kim, a lawyer at Greenberg Traurig LLP in Houston with some statistics expertise. Kim looked at a random sample of 136 cases involving 187 individuals charged under the Economic Espionage Act between 1997 and 2015. Kim recognized that focusing on that one act would not cover all the cases — Xi was charged under a separate statute, for instance — but it was the most straightforward means of quantifying the problem.
Charges against people with Chinese names grew from 17 percent of more than 100 defendants from 1997 to 2008, an 11-year span, to 52 percent of the 80 or so who were charged over the next six years, Kim reported December 2018 in Cardozo Law Review. Concerns about economic espionage have been growing in recent years and seem to be centered on Chinese Americans suspected of sharing trade secrets with businesses in China, Kim says. …
In Xi’s case, the charges were dropped in September 2015, and he returned to work. But his professional career has not recovered. He never did get to serve as chair of his department, his federal grants and contracts have dwindled from nine before his arrest to two today and his lab has shrunk from 15 members to three. Xi says his family remains in a state of perpetual vigilance. “We have to be sure that everything we say cannot be twisted by the government to charge us,” he says.
Rising up in Turkey
While some scientists unwittingly stumble into bad situations, others act as whistle-blowers. A decade ago, hope was mounting that Turkey could emerge as a democratic stronghold in the troubled Middle East. And Erdoğan, who served as prime minister for over a decade before he became president in 2014, appeared moderate. As president, though, Erdoğan has turned toward authoritarianism.
Turkey’s academics have been pushing back. In January 2016, 1,128 Turkish scholars, including Fincanci, signed the Peace Petition. Accusing Erdoğan’s government of the “deliberate massacre and deportation” of civilians, the petitioners demanded an end to the fighting. Turkey responded by suing over 800 signatories and pressuring universities to retaliate against those employees. Almost 500 scholars lost their jobs.
Fincanci was forced to retire from her job at Istanbul University and is appealing the 2.5-year prison sentence she received for signing the document. “I have been banned from public service,” she says.
Food engineer Bülent Şik was already caught up in the country’s criminal justice system when he signed the petition and subsequently lost his job. In 2011, Turkey’s Ministry of Health sought to find out why cancer rates were so high in the country’s northwestern industrial cities. Şik, who served as a team leader for one of the 16 resulting projects, was tasked with looking for contaminants in water and produce in four industrial provinces. His home city of Antalya, where industries are rare, served as a control. Şik ’s team studied 1,440 locations encompassing about 7 million people, including 1.3 million children.
Between 2013 and 2015, the team found that in 52 locations, people’s drinking water was dangerously high in lead, aluminum and arsenic, which have been linked to cancer. Almost a fifth of the food sampled contained pesticides above the legal limit. Şik’s team identified 66 types of pesticide residues, 26 of which are known to disrupt the endocrine systems of infants and children.
The cumulative effect of ingesting those pesticides throughout childhood could be catastrophic, says Şik, speaking through a translator. “I felt that this was my scientific responsibility to explain those results and share [them] with the public.”
In 2015, representatives from all 16 projects and the health ministry pledged to make the findings public. But the Ministry of Health never released the information. So, in April 2018, Şik published a four-part series about his findings in the national newspaper Cumhuriyet. Government officials sued Şik for distributing confidential information. At one of several trials, he defiantly spent an hour and a half describing his findings.
“It is our freedom to say whatever we want during our defense. I used this freedom to explain the rest of the findings,” Şik says. At his latest hearing on September 26, he was sentenced to 15 months in prison, a decision he is appealing.
While the Universal Declaration of Human Rights lays out the fundamental rights of all people, it lacks enforcement teeth. More people need to come to the aid of persecuted scientists, Anderson says. “If we want to secure democracy and human rights, we need to mobilize. We need to support the people that are willing to stick their necks out.”
More than four decades ago, the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine established an advocacy arm for scientists experiencing persecution worldwide. The National Academies’ Committee on Human Rights works behind the scenes to research allegations of persecution against scientists and to advocate on their behalf. …
In October, the American Physical Society awarded Xi a 2020 Andrei Sakharov Prize for his “articulate and steadfast advocacy in support of the U.S. scientific community and open scientific exchange, and especially his efforts to clarify the nature of international scientific collaboration in cases involving allegations of scientific espionage.” And in September, members of 60 scientific societies wrote a letter calling on the U.S. government to find “the appropriate balance between our nation’s security and an open, collaborative scientific environment.”
In Turkey, where most universities are state-run, sustained international pressure has yielded limited success, says Robinson, of Scholars at Risk. “A lot of academics are now being acquitted in Turkey but then they’re being reassigned to [remote] universities or regions where they will be forgotten.”
Turkey accused of supplying arms to Nigerian terrorist group Boko Haram
TURKEY has been branded a “terrorist state” and is under investigation by the Nigerian military over allegations it supplied “sophisticated weapons” to jihadist terror group Boko Haram, according to a senior army official.
In a 2014 audio recording circulating on YouTube, the assistant executive of the Turkish airline, Mehmet Karatas, allegedly told Mustafa Varank, a former adviser to Mr Erdogan, then-Turkish Prime Minister, that he felt guilty over the arms shipment to Nigeria.
“I do not know whether these [weapons] will kill Muslims or Christians. I feel sinful,” Mr Karatas was allegedly heard saying.
Mr Erdogan dismissed the claims at the time as “vile”.
But Nigerian Defence Headquarters spokesman, Brigadier General Onyema Nwachukwu said on Wednesday: “The veracity of the claims in the video cannot be ascertained immediately.
“However, it is a serious national-security issue, and I believe it is receiving the required attention at the national strategic level.”
In May 2017 the Nigerian government claimed to have intercepted an illegal arms shipment from Turkey, seizing 440 illegal pump-action rifles at the port in Lagos.
This came five months after customs officials halted a truck with 661 of the same weapons.
It is alleged that an intercepted phone call confirmed the arms deals, with Egpyt’s Ten TV host Nasha’t al-Deyhi saying: “Today’s leak confirms without a doubt that Erdogan, his state, his government and his party are transferring weapons from Turkey to — this is a shock, to where you may ask — to Nigeria; and to whom? — to the Boko Haram organisation.”
Turkey: Syrian refugees deplore upcoming raids and deportations in Istanbul
Syrian refugees expressed their concern and criticism towards authorities in Istanbul that set a four-week deadline for Syrians with a Temporary Protection Identification Document (TPID) to return to the provinces they are registered in or to face a forced transfer. The August 20 deadline was issued via a statement from the Istanbul Governor’s Office on Monday.
According to that statement, Syrians are required to carry their TPID or passports on them at all times.
A refugee residing in Istanbul shared his fear following the announced deportations: “We reach home terrified. Until we reach home we fear that someone might stop us, talk to us, or so. This is not the way we used to live. Where is the humanity?”
He added that “there is no work except in Istanbul, they are targeting us a lot. We are refugees; I raise my voice to the countries of the world pleading with them to stand with us. Everyone is deporting us, no one is supporting us at all, this is not right. Turkey hosted us for seven years, then finally they are sick of us.”
Another Syrian refugee said that “they capture them on the way, here, and in the streets, whoever does not have a TPID is taken and deported without taking into consideration that they have families and children.”
Istanbul authorities indicated that about 547,479 Syrians are under temporary protection in the Turkish capital.
Some media reported that hundreds of Syrians mainly residing in Istanbul have allegedly been deported back to areas in northern Syria, including the province of Idlib.
Turkish police beat and threatened refugees into signing documents stating they were asking to return to war zones in Syria, the organisation found through interviews.
Others were told that they were signing a registration document which confirmed that they had received a blanket from a detention centre, or a form that expressed their desire to remain in Turkey.
The government has claimed that those who returned to Syria did so voluntarily.
Records from the Turkish authorities claim that 315,000 people have returned to Syria voluntarily.
AI researcher on refugee and migrants’ rights Anna Shea said: “Turkey’s claim that refugees from Syria are choosing to walk straight back into the conflict is dangerous and dishonest.
The Communist volunteers fighting the Turkish invasion of Syria. A foreign fighter in the INTERNATIONAL FREEDOM BATTALION talks about the war to defend Rojava and the role of global solidarity: here.
THE case against Turkey for a chemical weapons attack during its invasion of northern Syria continued to grow today after the testimony of a doctor who treated the victims confirmed the use of white phosphorus: here.
CHEMICAL weapons inspectors have abandoned investigations into the alleged use of white phosphorus by Turkey on Kurds in northern Syria, saying on Saturday it falls outside of their remit. International investigators from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) said they would not examine tissue samples from victims of last month’s attack because white phosphorus injuries are produced by thermal, rather than chemical, properties: here.
Growing tensions between Turkish and Syrian military forces in northwestern Syria’s Idlib province erupted into bloody fighting yesterday. Dozens of Syrian soldiers were killed after Turkish forces blamed forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for shelling Turkish positions, leading to the death of six Turkish soldiers. This violence threatens to escalate into a direct confrontation between Turkey, a NATO member state, and the Syrian regime’s nuclear-armed ally, Russia: here.
Fighting mounts as Washington backs Turkish attack on Syria, Russia: here.
Protesters across the world condemn Erdoğan‘s invasion of northeastern Syria
Thousands of Kurdish residents of Qamishli and Tal Abyad protested against the Turkish invasion of northern Syria. Solidarity protests with Kurds, and against the Turkish invasion were also organized in the UK, Germany, Spain and other countries. Protesters condemned the offensive as yet another attempt by Turkish president Tayyip Erdoğan to suppress the struggles of Kurdish people.
Announced at a press conference convened by US Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at the US embassy in Ankara, the existence of a “cease-fire” was immediately denied by Turkish officials, who asserted that they would never reach such a deal with “terrorist” forces. Ankara regards the YPG, which served as the Pentagon’s main proxy ground forces in the so-called war on the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), as a branch of the PKK, the Kurdish separatist movement in Turkey, against which it has waged a brutal counterinsurgency campaign for the past three decades.
The Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs released a 13-point “Joint Turkey US Statement on Northeast Syria” Thursday afternoon. Nowhere does the document mention a cease-fire, instead stating that Turkey will “pause” its offensive in Syria for 120 hours “to allow the withdrawal of the YPG”. Once the Kurdish militia is driven from the Syrian-Turkish border—the principal objective of the Turkish invasion—the military campaign dubbed Operation Peace Spring will be halted, according to the terms of the agreement.
The document begins by affirming the status of the US and Turkey as NATO allies and goes on to declare Washington’s understanding of Ankara’s “legitimate security concerns on Turkey’s southern border” and to affirm a commitment to “protecting NATO territories and NATO populations against all threats.”
Mevlut Cavusoglu, Turkey’s foreign minister, said after the meeting between Erdogan and the US officials, “We got what we wanted … This means that the US has approved the legitimacy of our operations and aims.”
The deal also promises that no new US sanctions will be imposed against Turkey, and that existing sanctions will be lifted once the military operations in Syria are brought to a halt.
Preening before the cameras in Fort Worth, Texas, Trump described the deal with Turkey—which amounted to Washington’s ceding to all of Ankara’s demands—as historic, “something they’ve been trying to get for 10 years, everybody, and they couldn’t get it.” He asserted that “millions of lives” had been saved, as if the shaky pause in the fighting on Syria’s northern border meant an end to the country’s eight year old conflict. He credited the deal to his “unconventional” approach and “rough love.”
In a rare statement of truth, Trump blamed the Obama administration for having “lost more than half a million lives in a very short period in the same region” during the protracted regime change operation launched in 2011.
The day before the Pence-Erdogan meeting in Ankara, Trump had told a White House press conference that the fighting on the Turkish-Syrian border had “nothing to do with us” and was “not our problem”. He referred dismissively to the YPG, which suffered some 11,000 casualties in the US intervention in Syria, suggesting that they were mercenaries who were “paid a lot of money to fight”, adding that they were “no angels”.
In response to growing bipartisan criticism, the White House also released an October 9 letter to Erdogan in which Trump warned the Turkish president that he would be seen as a “devil” if Turkey continued its offensive, while telling him “Don’t be a tough guy. Don’t be a fool!” Turkish officials reported that Erdogan threw the letter in the trash and responded by stepping up the military assault in Syria.
The joint statement issued Thursday declares US-Turkish agreement on the establishment of a “safe zone in order to address the national security concerns of Turkey”, adding that this 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 statement gives no precise definition of the “safe zone”, nor spells out what role the US will play in its imposition. Pence told the press conference in Ankara that it would extend roughly 20 miles south of the Turkish-Syrian border but gave no indication of what length of the border it would cover. The Erdogan government has indicated its intention to occupy a 200-mile strip covering all of northeastern Syria from the Euphrates River to the Syrian border with Iraq.
Ankara has long advocated the creation of a “safe zone” inside the Syrian border, both to break up the semi-autonomous region carved out by the Kurds, and to create an area for the training and arming of Islamist militias in order to escalate the bloody sectarian civil war launched with the purpose of overthrowing Assad.
The US-Turkish proposal for carving out a “safe zone” is further complicated by the deployment of Syrian government troops along with Russian military units, which have moved into the cities of Kobane and Manbij, taking over bases abandoned by the US Special Forces that Trump ordered to withdraw. Syrian government troops have also moved into Raqqa, the former “capital” of ISIS which was decimated by US airstrikes.
The Kurdish militia forces announced on Sunday that they had invited the Syrian government and Russian forces to fill the vacuum left by the withdrawal of US troops in order to protect the population from the Turkish invasion. According to some reports, YPG militiamen in the border areas have integrated themselves into the government forces.
While Pence claimed at the press conference in Ankara that the Erdogan government had agreed not to engage in any military action in the Syrian city of Kobane, Foreign Minister Cavusoglu directly contradicted the US vice president, saying, “We did not make any promises about Kobane,” and that the issue would be discussed with Russia. …
While condemning the “betrayal” of the Pentagon’s erstwhile Kurdish proxy forces, the principal concern among politicians of both big business parties is that Trump has ceded ground in the Middle East to both Russia and Iran.
Fighting continued in northeastern Turkey in the wake of an agreement struck Thursday between US Vice President Mike Pence and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. At least 14 civilians were reported killed Friday in air strikes and shelling near the bitterly contested Syrian border town of Ras Al-Ain: here.
20,000 on London’s streets say ‘Stop the Turkish invasion’. ‘Rise up for Rojava’ rally opposes Erdogan’s brutal war on Syria’s Kurds: here.
World Peace Council condemns Turkish invasion of Syria: here.
Turkey’s Syrian “rebel” allies, the Islamist Syrian National Army (SNA, formerly the Free Syrian Army), are executing Kurdish civilians in areas they hold, according to multiple reports. Kurdish politician Hevrin Khalaf was executed; her bullet-riddled car appeared in a video surrounded by SNA fighters. Beyond Al Qaeda-linked calls to destroy infidels, the British Daily Telegraph noted, the SNA’s main outlook “is sectarian: they are anti-Kurdish and they are Arab chauvinists” … The Kurdish-led SDF militias in Syria, vastly outgunned by Turkish forces and vulnerable to air strikes, warned US officials in talks leaked by CNN that they would appeal for Russia to attack Turkey and protect SDF and Syrian army forces. As Turkey is legally a NATO ally of Washington and the European powers, such an attack could compel the United States and its European allies to either break the 70-year-old NATO alliance or go to war with Russia to protect Turkey: here.
DEBACLE: HUNDREDS OF ISIS SUPPORTERS ESCAPE Turkish forces approached a key Kurdish-held town in northern Syria, setting off clashes that allowed hundreds of Islamic State supporters to escape from a camp for displaced people and prompted U.S. soldiers to withdraw from a nearby base. [AP]
FIGHTING IN SYRIA HAS ALREADY DISPLACED 130,000 More than 130,000 people have been displaced from rural areas around the northeast Syrian border towns of Tel Abyad and Ras al Ain as a result of fighting between Turkish-led forces and Kurdish militia, the United Nations said. [Reuters]
The Kurdish-Dutch film maker Beri Shalmashi fears a genocide. “Erdogan has announced an attack for which he will receive support from the United States of America, which has given him a free hand.” …
She thinks the Kurds are “almost silly” that they relied on equal cooperation with the US Americans in the fight against ISIS. “You can almost call them disposable heroes. If it comes in handy, then everyone likes to work with them. When they have finished, they are on their own again.”
Used
The Kurdish-Dutch PhD student Yusuf Çelik recognizes the pattern. “The Kurds are almost getting used to being abandoned. There is a saying among the Kurds: ‘the mountains are our only friends’, that applies now.”
The demonstration starts in front of The Hague Central Station, after which the demonstrators will march to the Malieveld.
The campaigners have Kurdish flags with them. Some also carry flags of the Kurdish armed groups YPG and PKK. The latter organization is seen by … [many NATO] countries, including the Netherlands, as a terror group because of attacks in the struggle against the Turkish authorities.
It is not illegal to carry a PKK flag in the Netherlands. The public prosecuting service says it is “a difficult matter”. “The pursuit of a Kurdish state is not illegal. Their ultimate goal is not a state in which committing violence is part of the state’s ideas. That is why we believe that showing the flag is not automatically punishable”.
Dear Kitty. Some blog 