… by Press TV, Tehran
[ Editor’s Note: Turkey demands US withdraw from Manbij and stop arming Kurds, which the story below claims General McMaster agreed to. If that is true Turkey has won the war.
I am still suspicious that this spat with the US and Turkey might be fake, a smokescreen to divert attention from what they both are doing, Balkanizing Syria.
The main point is not whether US or Turkey controls the Kurds, but that Damascus does not. Starving Kurds will be easy to make a deal with to put a Saudi oil pipeline through to the Med, with the last leg through Turkey to the coast.
The Kurdish region has no economy due to the current state of affairs, so the they are totally dependent on outside sponsors. They can’t really say no to anything. The US can even use Assad as a bogeyman as in, “If you don’t do as we say we will boogie out and leave you to fight the SAA by yourself”.
McMaster’s agreeing to not giving the YPG more weapons can be gotten around. They already have all the weapons they need, and McMaster did not say “weapons, ammo, and military supplies. The Saudis can easily step in to supply more weapons, or the CIA.
The Turkish-Merc FSA advance is proceeding very slowly, despite all of its air and artillery power, against a widely dispersed YPG. Erdogan seems deathly afraid of Turkish casualties. But why, if it is really a terror war against a lightly armed adversary, why is Turkey with its huge army not on the constant attack to roll the Kurds over?
My guess is that the slow motion is on purpose, so there is more time to talk, to see what happens next week in Sochi, and if the SAA can continue its advance in Idlib. It is all a game now of who has the momentum brings to the negotiation table… Jim W. Dean ]
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– First published … January, 27, 2018 –
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu says US military forces need to immediately withdraw from Syria’s northern region of Manbij as Turkish troops are engaged in an operation in the Arab country’s Afrin region against militants from the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG).
Speaking to reporters in the capital Ankara on Saturday, Cavusoglu said Turkey wanted to see concrete steps by the United States to end its support for the Syrian Kurdish force.
The remarks came hours after the Turkish presidency announced in a statement that Presidential Spokesman Ibrahim Kalin and US National Security Adviser Herbert Raymond McMaster had discussed Turkey’s ongoing Operation Olive Branch in Syria’s northwestern Afrin region during a telephone conversation the previous night.
McMaster said that Washington would not give more weapons to YPG militants. The two senior officials also agreed to boost mutual coordination and clear up misunderstandings on issues concerning Syria, the statement added.
Also on Saturday, the Turkish General Staff said in a statement that at least 394 YPG militants had been killed since the beginning of Operation Olive Branch in Afrin on January 20. The military said that only terrorists and their positions and shelters were being destroyed, and that “careful attention” was being paid not to harm any civilian.
Meanwhile, more than 10,000 people demonstrated in Cologne, Germany, on Saturday to denounce the Turkish offensive in northern Syria against YPG militants. The demonstrators held placards that read “Freedom for Kurdistan” and “Shame on you, Europe!” in the western German city.
The Syrian government has already condemned the “brutal Turkish aggression” against Afrin, rejecting Ankara’s claim about having informed Damascus of the operation.
Damascus “strongly condemns the brutal Turkish aggression on Afrin, which is an inseparable part of Syrian territory,” Syria’s official news agency, SANA, cited a Syrian Foreign Ministry source as saying last week.
“Syria completely denies claims by the Turkish regime that it was informed of this military operation,” the source added.
Ankara views the YPG as the Syrian branch of the militant Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) that has been fighting for an autonomous region inside Turkey since 1984.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has repeatedly said that Afrin should be cleared of “terrorists,” and demanded the deployment of Turkish troops there during a speech back in November 2016.
This is while US officials regard the YPG as the most effective fighting force against the Daesh Takfiri terrorist group in northern Syria, and have substantially increased their weaponry and technology support to the terrorist group.
The controversy over a possible Syria border force first started on January 14 when a report emerged on Reuters saying that the military coalition led by the United States in Syria was planning to set up a large border force of up to 30,000 personnel with the aid of its militia allies.
Jim W. Dean is VT Editor Emeritus. He was an active editor on VT from 2010-2022. He was involved in operations, development, and writing, plus an active schedule of TV and radio interviews. He now writes and posts periodically for VT.
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Jim, I will remind you once again of Russian-sponsored equivalent of CENTO in Eredogan’s recent face-off. Except, it will be a mega version of CENTO since it will include Syria and the Central Asian Republics, once they are purged (specially Uzbekistan) of Israeli influences. An allied Turkey will be vital to Russia to deepen relations with the Republics. It will also give Russia leverage to launch or revitalize the East Turkestan movement, should China (PRC) decide to carry the Afghan REE project with Eric Prince. [PRC has taken a losing gamble on awarding Eric Prince’s organization the contracts for the operatations centers].
https://www.aol.com/article/news/2018/01/27/trumps-holocaust-remembrance-day-message-is-distinct-from-last-years/23345499/
Ignorant propaganda president Trump was silent in his Holocaust message about the many questions regarding the WWII Holocaust and the very large numbers claimed 6 million, while silent about the very well documented earlier one against the Armenians 1.5 million in 1915 and the moral obscenity that the U.S. and Israel have not recognized this one while at the same time we do business with the successors to these crimes by the Turks who today obstruct the evidence and facts of this well documented holocaust against the Armenians and theft of their property and lands. This omission is a shameful disgrace and a slap in the faces of all peoples of conscience world wide especially the Armenians while we aid the outlaw turks today in a further holocaust in Syria against the Kurds. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Genocide
It is ironic that all this happened near or on Holocaust Remembrance Day, which although applies to the one in Germany in WWII, must remind many of the earlier one in this region in WWI about 103 years ago in 1915 with the Turks clearly and convincingly the international criminals in this massacre of the Armenians as documented in the long and very well documented article linked below. If you read the article you will see documented how Erdogan has been obstructing any acknowledgement or responsibility for that Holocaust and neither the U.S. nor Israel have acknowledged it either. This is a shameful disgrace. And what does it say about the U.S. Government now doing business with the successors in Turkey to these massive crimes against humanity and the Armenians and the theft of their property and lands? Obviously they hope time will erase any mention of it and to some extent this has already happened. All Israel cares about is the sympathy for their selfish benefits not anyone else’s in the history of man’s inhumanity to man since the beginning of time. In fact isn’t this a repeat of those crimes in Syria today?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Genocide
Think about this: The claim is made that successor individuals of a country which earlier committed horrible crimes against humanity, like the Turks did in 1915, or the Nazis allegedly did in WWII, can’t be held responsible for those earlier crimes. Yet isn’t this exactly what Israel has done in Germany today? Haven’t the Israelis basically looted Germany and imposed these draconian laws there to jail anyone for just speaking out and questioning the validity of the Holocaust narrative? Yet here both Israel and the U.S. and the European Union are doing daily business with Turkey just like it is another day at the plant! What happened to conscience and ethics and morality? I guess if any Nazis and Hitler were still in Germany we would be doing business as usual with them too as if nothing ever happened? Isn’t the word hypocrisy far to polite to describe this immoral obscenity assuming the disputed claims are correct for the Nazi Holocaust as they clearly are for the earlier one by the Turks against the 1.5 million Armenians. Many of those earlier Armenians were slaughtered and raped and poisoned and deprived of food and left to die in the deserts of Syria exactly where Erdogan is doing the same crimes today to the Kurds with the aid of the criminals in the U.S.!
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