The Eternally Apoplectic Erdogan's Unhinged Ire

"We really don’t know what happened. Anything is possible, the militants might have panicked and shot the hostages dead, or they might have died during the aerial bombings."
"But the main point is not who killed them but rather why the Turkish military carried out this operation to bring the hostages back alive in a manner that led to their deaths."

Human Rights Association’s president, Ozturk Turkdogan

 

"If we are together with you [the United States] in NATO, if we are to continue our unity, then you will act sincerely toward us. Then, you will stand with us, not with the terrorists."

"The US statement on the PKK’s execution of Turkish citizens in northern Iraq is ridiculous. They claim they do not support the PKK, but they certainly do."

If you want to continue our alliance globally and within NATO, then you must stop siding with terrorists."  

"We kept trying to figure out how we can rescue our brothers from the hands of the terrorists. We tried very hard, but we failed." 

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan 

 

"If the reports of the death of Turkish civilians at the hands of the PKK, a designated terrorist organization, are confirmed, we condemn this action in the strongest possible terms."

"The secretary expressed condolences for the deaths and affirmed our view that PKK terrorists bear responsibility."

United States State Department

The funeral of three Turkish military personnel killed in action at the Ahmet Hamdi Akseki Mosque in Ankara on 12 February 2021 (AFP)

The Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) is a guerrilla militia which established itself in the 1980s to represent the heritage rights of the tens of millions of Kurds, the world's largest minority ethnic group without an established homeland of their own. Their native territory was divided between Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey when two world powers, Britain and France, occupied that vast area during World War I after the dissolution of Ottoman Turkey the deposed hegemonic power. Although Kurds were promised in the boundaries of the Middle East territories their claim would be honoured, it was not.

Ever since, ethnic Kurds have dreamed bitterly of the betrayal and have agitated for their own recognized sovereign homeland reflecting their historical presence in the geography. Any attempt made to achieve sovereignty earned them physical violence to tamp down their enthusiasm for leaving their state of enforced occupation under which their 'separatist' notions were regarded as criminal, leaving them to live as a people under merciless disciplinary duress.

Iraqi Kurds fear Turkey's drones in PKK mtn.war

A state of being that brings to mind China's crushing of Tibet and Xinjiang and its aspirations toward absorbing Taiwan and shutting down democracy in Hong Kong. Recep Tayyip Erdogan rails against the very concept of a Kurdish nation desirous of and deserving of recognition of their authenticity as the original territorial indigenous peoples.

He sneers at the very concept of Jews returning to their ancestral geography from a forced historical diaspora, championing Arab migrants who began to populate Jewish Palestine in search of economic and settler opportunities. The Turks themselves were migrants into the Mesopotamian plain and the mountainous regions beyond, the historical Kurdish homeland.

Kurds living in south-eastern Turkey have had their villages bombed on the pretense that they harbour members of the PKK. The PKK expanded their presence into Iraq as an operational base, with the Turkish military following them, accusing another Iraqi Kurdish group, the YPG of being their allies. Among the various Kurdish groups there are manifestly different attitudes toward occupation with some choosing diplomacy others violence to achieve eventual aims of freedom from persecution and occupation.

The hunted PKK have taken Turkish members of the military captive from time to time to use as leverage in prisoner exchanges. A group of such Turkish hostages were being kept in Kurdistan, a mountainous area of northern Iraq bordering Turkey, in a cave in the Gara region. There, the Kurdistan YPG the Syrian Kurdish People's Protection Units, are accused by Erdogan of aiding and abetting the PKK, calling them both terrorist groups. The Turkish military under Defense Minister Hulusi Akar, despite knowing that Turkish hostages were being held there, bombed the area repeatedly in a four-day operation.

And after heavily bombing the Gara area for days, the Turkish forces entered the cave complex on day four to discover, they claim, the corpses of thirteen Turks, most members of the Turkish military, several Turkish diplomats and three of them civilians. The PKK had made a public statement on February 11 that Turkish war planes were hitting the camp directly where the hostages were being held.

It was this known fact that the U.S. State Department referred to when they originally voiced skepticism over Turkey's claim the PKK had shot the hostages dead.

The large number of Kurds in Turkey have elected their own to parliament, the largest Kurdish-sympathizing parliamentary group called the HDP had called upon Ankara to negotiate with the PKK for release of the hostages. They had themselves in the past acted in that same role to negotiate for the release of prisoners. President Erdogan spits rage at the very thought of negotiating with "terrorists" though it had bargained with the Islamic State for release of 49 hostages when the Turkish Consulate had been overrun. Turkey freed a number of IS prisoners in exchange for Turkish hostages.

This time Turkey chose to arrest hundreds of people it has identified as linked to the PKK, a revenge move against the killing of the 13 hostages, ostensibly. Likelier, the Turkish military bombing of the area around the cave complex led to the deaths of the hostages, which Turkey pretends to hold the PKK responsible for; the event giving Erdogan the opportunity to arrest and imprison those he considers his enemies. Among them hundreds of members of the HDP. Fully 718 people were detained in 40 cities across Turkey, accused of links to the PKK.

One HDP member of Parliament stated that roughly 150 members of his party were detained overnight. City and district heads belonging to the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) (Democratic Party of the People} supporting Turkey's minorities were also arrested. President Erdogan uses arrest and incarceration as a control mechanism of those Turks who oppose his Islamist agenda and his oppressive authority. Any he believes support the Gulenist movement after an aborted coup in 2016 languish in prison.

These included high-ranking members of the military, journalists, teachers, lawyers in their thousands as well as police and members of the judiciary. Erdogan had a bitter dispute with the United States when he insisted that Fethullah Gulen -- a popular and respected imam, once an ally, more latterly a political adversary with a huge following in Turkey, living in self-exile in the United States but remaining hugely influential in Turkey and whom Erdogan blames for the attempted coup -- be extradited to Turkey to stand trial on charges of treason, a 'terrorist' meriting the death penalty.

Ibrahim Kalin

@ikalin1

PKK executes 13 civilian captives in a cave in #Gara, Iraq. It attacks Turkish & Iraqi security forces & civilians. It continues its terrorist attacks in northern Syria. The world is silent. This silence is a shameful act of complicity. But we will not remain silent.

1:28 AM · Feb 14, 2021