All Hell Breaks Loose

"[The assault against Turkey's Kurdish militia enemies] will not stop ... no matter what anyone says."
"[The intention is to set up a] safe zone [inside Syria where many of the millions of Syrian refugees Turkey has been hosting can be resettled."
"The assault will continue] until all the terrorists go further south than the 32 km border [strip] that Mr. Trump mentioned."
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan

"We did everything we could."
"We have called upon the West [and] the Arab Union but no one is coming to help, so we have no one other than ourselves to defend [Kobani]."
"Kurdish youth should come and defend their homes, and people should not abandon their homes – this is our land."
"It looks like this is the fate of the Kurds, to go through this each time."
Kobani official General Ismet Sheikh Hasan

"We know that we would have to make painful compromises with Moscow and Assad."
"But if we have to choose between compromises and the genocide of our people, we will surely choose life for our people."
SDF commander General Mazlum Abdi

Rojda Felat, who commanded the battle against ISIS in Raqqa, surveys a flank of Tal al-Samam with other SDF commanders. Image: ©Joey L./JoeyL.com

"This deployment occurred through coordination and agreement with the Self-Administration Authority for Northern and Eastern Syria and the Syrian Democratic Forces."
"To counter and prevent this [Turkish] attack, an agreement with the Syrian government, which is responsible for protecting the borders of the country and preserving Syrian sovereignty, has been reached for the Syrian army to enter and be deployed along the Syrian-Turkish border."
Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (NES)

"You have given up on us. You are leaving us to be slaughtered."
"I need to know if you are capable of protecting my people, of stopping these bombs falling on us or not."
"I need to know, because if you're not, I need to make a deal with Russia and the regime now and invite their planes to protect this region."
SDF General Mazloum Kobani Abdi to William Roebuck, Deputy Special Envoy to the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS 

Turkish military vehicles carrying tanks as they are on the way to northern Syria. Sedat Suna/EPA

Desperate times call for desperate decisions, and so it is that people whose back is to the wall are left with little option but to decide which of their deadly enemies is more likely to spare lives than to butcher the vulnerable among them. Which led Kurdish authorities to the decision to call upon the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad which has never been a champion of Kurdish autonomy and security, much less the human right to have sovereignty over their own ancestral lands, to help defend the lives and territory within Syria from the military might of the Turkish army.

The Democratic Administration of North and East Syria, which governs the de facto autonomous area, has confirmed what seemed at first to be but a wild rumour -- that it had reached an agreement with the Baathist Alawite regime that would see Syrian troops deployed along the Syria-Turkey border. That same border corridor that Recep Tayyip Erdogan has marked out for control by Turkey, with the intention to make it impossible for the dominant Kurdish population to continue living there.

In the best of all possible worlds, the situation could conceivably see the Turkish and Syrian militaries confronting one another for dominance in the area -- an area that is, geographically, within Syrian borders, but which Turkey contests, with its unwavering eye on freeing it from the presence of the YPG, the Kurdish Peoples Protection Units whose majority position within the Syrian Democratic Forces Erdogan identifies as 'terrorists'. Just as Syria's Bashar al-Assad identified the Sunni Syrian rebels as 'terrorists' when he set out to destroy them by all means possible inclusive of forbidden chemical weapons.

Turkish-backed Syrian fighters evacuate a wounded comrade near the border town of Ras al-Ain on Oct. 13. NAZEER AL-KHATIB/AFP via Getty Images

Thanks to the decision of U.S. President Donald Trump -- who views the Kurds upon whose fighting spirit the United States leaned heavily to defeat the Islamic State caliphate, now being expendable in the greater interests of catering to the noxiously destructive plans of NATO ally Erdogan whose dictator-qualities Trump obviously admires -- the Kurds have become a liability that Trump is willing to sacrifice for improved relations with Erdogan.

That Donald Trump failed to raise the curtain concealing the future to visualize the ignominy that would fall on his administration with that casual decision to abandon a true ally whose mettle and usefulness had been proven, in an act of absolute disloyalty to honour, is remarkable only if one can readily discount the man's overweening hubris, his egotistical belief that his word is law and it is spelled out as 'j.u.s.t.i.c.e.' Something he believes implicitly and fewer people than ever give credit to.

Thanks to Trump's short-sightedness and utter lack of responsibility, the consequences of his casual opening of the dam is beginning. The horror of the Syrian rebel groups allied with the Turkish military, shouting "Allahu akbar", waving Syrian rebel flags and slaughtering Kurds wherever they find them, with no distinction between civilians or fighters to lend an air of humanity and adherence to the conventions of war has resulted. Just like their counterpart Islamic State, the Syrian rebels have videoed their atrocities for public show-and-tell.

A Turkish-backed Syrian fighter fires during clashes in the border town of Ras al-Ain as Turkey and its allies continue the military operation on Kurdish-held border towns. Nazeer Al-khatib/AFP

And while the Kurdish forces have been sturdily defending their people and their towns from the military might of the second largest standing army in NATO, along with its technically advanced weaponry, intense fighting has mandated that all Kurdish fighters be deployed in defence, leaving the prison camps full of Islamic State terrorists and those devoted to the incarceration of their women and children unguarded, paving the way for escapes and the re-emergence of Islamic State strength of numbers.

A wholly predictable horror show, thanks to the rank stupidity of the world's most powerful imbecile.

Smoke rises from Ras al-Ayn, Syria, during bombardment by Turkish forces on Sunday. Photograph: Erdem Şahin/EPA