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

 

 

 

It's The Liberal Way

"We, under the Conservatives, shipped about 2,000 rifles over there [to Kurdish fighters in Syria]."
"We used to brag to the Americans and the British about how great Canada was to do business in."
"We were going to make them [order for 30,000 rifles and 150,000 pistols for the Peoples Protection Units [YPG] in Canada, but it's just not worth the risk."
"I'm not SNC-Lavalin."
Jeff Hussey, former president, NorthEastern Arms

Canadian special forces soldiers speak with Peshmerga fighters at an observation post, Feb. 20, 2017. Ryan Remiorz/The Canadian Press

Military weapons manufacturing is big business everywhere; all manufacturing nations work hard to increase their sales to other ordering nations to increase their own GDP. The manufacture of weapons of war is not quite the same in terms of civil odour as, for example, manufacturing bathroom tissues; most ordinary civilians think of the trade in weapons with no little amount of distaste. When they're produced and sold to nations at war or pursuing conflict in territorial disputes, it's hard to get beyond the reality that in so doing, the selling party is an accomplice to war, destruction and death.

When, on the other hand, weapons are transferred to another country or to a military entity that is engaged in self-defence, the issue is somewhat altered; becoming one nation aiding and assisting another one against the destructive belligerence of an adversary set on conquest. Canada had a fairly long-standing support arrangement with the Kurdish military in Syria and Iraq, supplying their militias not only with the sage strategic advice of Canadian military trainers, but giving them badly-needed weapons with which to defend themselves against Islamic State, under the former Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Over the past four years of government in Canada with Justin Trudeau as prime minister under the Liberal Party of Canada, there has been a pull-back; no more military trainers intervening on behalf of the Kurds, and a stop to the sale of weapons to erstwhile Kurdish allies. Long-promised military aid meant to be delivered to the Kurds, negotiated under the Harper government was set aside by the Trudeau government. No more training and equipping the Iraqi Peshmerga.

Then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper meets with Kurdish Peshmerga forces, May 2, 2015. Safin Hamed/AFP/Getty Images

Canadian military aircraft gave the Peshmerga cover in Iraq, and private companies exported arms to the Peshmerga in 2015 and 2016. Until it all gradually dried up. The Kurds continued to fight against ISIL strongholds, but Canada's bombing campaign in Syria was abruptly halted, the special forces training Kurdish fighters in Erbil halted in 2018, military resources diverted toward Baghdad's central government.

According to Mr. Hussey, the Kurdish Regional Government placed orders for 18,000 additional rifles which the new Liberal government required they first have approval from Kurdistan and Iraq for. Despite which though both Erbil and Baghdad signed off, Ottawa did not. "They basically slow-played us", he said of the Canadian government choosing not to deny the request for export permits, but failing to approve them.

Aid promised by the Canadian government in 2016 failed to arrive as promised in Kurdistan, despite that Defence Minister Harjit Singh Sajjan having ordered rifles and mortars, then leaving them in a warehouse in Montreal, failing to authorize their shipment to the Kurds. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey considers all Kurds his enemies, calling them 'terrorists', and as a member of NATO lobbied for the West to end military aid and weapons sales to Kurds.

While taking steps to halt new military exports to the Kurds in Iraq, the Trudeua government expanded sales to Turkey of military exports. Since the Turkish invasion of northeast Syria to drive out the Syrian Defense Forces, Canada followed the lead of censuring Western countries in suspending new export permits of weapons to Turkey, even as existing permits for weapons transfers would not be affected.

And then there is the issue of Canadian arms sales to Saudi Arabia. In 2018 alone, Canada sold 1.2 billion of military weapons to Saudi Arabia, engaged in a no-holds-barred conflict in Yemen, one of the world's poorest nations, roiled by sectarian violence and attempting to cope with a proxy war between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

A Canadian LAV (light armoured vehicle   (Bill Graveland/The Canadian Press)

"This morning I sent a formal notice to the minister of foreign affairs [Chrystia Freeland] asking her to annul the export permits that have already been issued and that would allow the export of these LAVs that continue to be produced in London by General Dynamics Land Systems – Canada."
"And I have mentioned in that formal notice that if on Sept. 30 there is no positive answer, I will bring a case and ask courts to order the government to annul these export permits."
University of Montreal law professor Daniel Turp

Break Out the Champagne!

"As far as he [SDF commander, Mazloum Kobani] is concerned the ceasefire is only where there’s active fighting and he totally rejects the idea of any kind of withdrawal, any removal of heavy weapons." 
"So everyone seems to be talking a different language, which can only spell more trouble."
Charles Lister, Syria expert, Middle East Institute

"They’ve [Turkey] had terrorists, they had a lot of people in there that they couldn’t have. They suffered a lot of loss of lives and they had to have it cleaned out."
"This outcome is something they’ve been trying to get for 10 years."
"[The Kurdistan Workers Party -- PKK -- a militant group launching attacks inside Turkey for Kurdish independence] is probably worse at terror and more of a terrorist threat in many ways [than the Islamic State]." 
"So it's a very semi-complicated -- not too complicated if you're smart. But it's a semi-complicated problem, and I think it's a problem that we have very nicely under control."
U.S. President Donald J. Trump

"I worry we will not have allies in the future against radical Islam, ISIS will re-emerge and Iran's rise in Syria will become a nightmare for Israel."
"I fear this is a complete and utter national security disaster in the making and I hope President Trump will adjust his thinking."
Republican Senator Lindsey Graham

Turkey-backed Syrian rebel fighters in the border town of Tal Abyad. The US-Turkey agreement calls for a 120-hour ceasefire in a “safe zone”. Photograph: Khalil Ashawi/Reuters

This very smart man incapable of fully comprehending the complexity of the Middle East, its ancient sectarian rivalries, its ethnic divisions, its tribal animosities and its general penchant toward blistering rhetoric followed by threats and armed invasions mindlessly slaughtering perceived opponents, speaks of the simplicity of solving not very 'complicated' issues by following his simple-minded advice. His intention to extract American military personnel from critical roles in defence of allies and supporting the military-capable among the Middle Eastern players to defeat the forces of psychopathic Islamism is his solution to settling an entirely new threat targeting faithful regional allies is a new low, even for this troglodyte.

Speaking from the Oval Office this man who is president of the great United States of America claims to have had no impact whatever on the new theatre of war playing out in northern Syria with Turkey's Erdogan deciding he will no longer wait for a more opportune moment to send in his troops to decimate the hated Kurds whom his territorial greed has deprived of an agreement to cede to this ancient people their own ancestral land to form the basis of a new independent country to finally establish a homeland for the largest minority group of 40 million people, without a recognized country of their own.

Trump harrumphed that the issue over territory between Turkey and the Kurds was "over land that has nothing to do with us", in defending his decision to abandon a faithful ally in the fight against Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which had successfully recruited support world wide for their jihadist-centrist caliphate whose missionaries were dispatched to capture, torture and murder victims in the most gruesome manner their diseased minds could invent and re-invent. The 'land that had nothing to do with the U.S.' was territory the U.S. had plundered for its oil for almost a hundred years.

The Kurds, asserted this astute philosopher and judge of human merit, were "no angels". This, of a people whose values and comportment set them aside and well above the norms for the Middle East, in their humane treatment and equality views of other ethnic and religious groups, in their recognition of equality between the sexes, in their well-ingrained recognition of human rights and their practise of good governance and concern for peoples' lives, extending protection to those persecuted like themselves by the region's tyrants.

The long-suffering Kurds who know intimately what ethnic cleansing and virulent hatred of themselves by their neighbours was capable of doing to the human spirit, acted in defiance of tribal and religious exclusion of others, extending the courtesy of consideration to those outside their group. "There's a lot of sand they [the protaganists, Turkey and the Kurds] can play with", Trump said dismissively. "It's possibly never going to be very stable."

"History will look upon you favourably if you get this done the right and humane way. It will look upon you forever as the devil if good things don't happen. Don't be a tough guy. Don't be a fool! I will call you later", he wrote companionably to his good friend and trading partner Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Who, it was later reported, deposited this very instructive, well-intentioned advice directly into the nearest trash disposal, and carried on with his intended decimation of the Kurdish Peoples Protection Units.

Trump is complacent in his studied belief that American "didn't need to worry about terrorists 7,000 miles away". His short attention-span and memory deficit was unable to dredge up the thought of the 9/11 conspirator-terrorists who came from that distance for the very particular purpose of informing the United States that there is no distance sufficient to leave that country with the illusion that it will remain an island of security from Medieval Islamist jihad. Trump, in any event, views himself as having engineered the downfall of Islamic State and he gives himself full credit.

His delusional belief in himself persuades him that the sacrifice of the only reliable fighting partner the U.S. had in Syria and Iraq battling the Islamic State terrorists with the assistance of American air cover were merely expendable mercenaries. What he has accomplished in dismissing America's allies so peremptorily with casual disregard for their safety and security, is to have advised his other allies in the Middle East -- Israel and Saudi Arabia come to mind -- that their reliance on U.S. honour under this administration, more egregiously failing than the previous one -- is sadly misplaced.

"[The agreement that pauses Turkey’s military operation will be focused on] those areas where the Turks had penetrated into northeast Syria."
"We use the word ceasefire, the Turks do not because it's not in the agreement. What we mean is, and we define this very carefully, a ceasefire is no forward movement of troops on the ground and no military action other than self-defense."
James Jeffrey, the US Special Envoy for Syria

The great man pronounced his interpretation of the 'spat' between Turkey and America's erstwhile allies in the battle against ISIL: "Sometimes you have to let them fight a little while… right? Sometimes you have to let them fight. It's like two kids in a lot, you got to let them fought [sic] and then you pull them apart." And when you do, lo and behold, an agreement that secures for Turkey its military objectives, ceding a swath of territory within Syrian borders, formerly a majority Kurdish autonomous enclave, "validating what Turkey did and allowing them to annex a portion of Syria and displace the Kurdish population", in the word of an anonymous senior U.S. official.

 

Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump

This is a great day for civilization. I am proud of the United States for sticking by me in following a necessary, but somewhat unconventional, path. People have been trying to make this “Deal” for many years. Millions of lives will be saved. Congratulations to ALL!

123K

2:13 PM - Oct 17, 2019

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

Canada's Responsibilities for its Islamic State Citizens

"Those Canadian citizens who came here, they came to kill us and they came to kill our kids and to destroy our towns."
"And the moment that we arrested them and had them in our prisons or our camps, we were saving the Canadian people in Canada. We were preventing them from doing any terrorist attacks."
“So doing nothing towards those citizens, [Canada refusing to repatriate them to take them off Kurdish hands currently responsible for them], that’s really not respectful for the sacrifice that we have done."
"The Canadian citizens who are here, they are six men and 12 women and some kids so when we talk about Canada … it’s as big as 10 million metres squared. It’s a very big country compared to our country [Kurdistan]."
"I’m just surprised how a big country like Canada cannot take six or 12 citizens to their country."
"The situation is really getting worse. We have those women in our hands, and every day, they are taking care of the kids, how to make them ISIS, how to make them follow ISIS ideology."
Mustafa Bali, spokesman, Syrian Democratic Forces

"I think it was pretty clear from our experience in Al-Hawl that there’s a small subset of women who kind of run the show at the camp, who are very much kind of overpowering a lot of the other women in the camp, policing what they wear, policing what they can say, policing how they act."
Foreign fighter expert Prof. Amarnath Amarasingam, Queens University, Kingston, Ontario

"The reality is that these individuals are Canada’s problem, yesterday, today and tomorrow. If they show up at our consulates or embassies, they will be a very real problem."
"If they help to reconstitute the Islamic State, they will be an even bigger one. And if they conduct terrorist attacks and take more lives, that will be on us."
Former Canadian Security Intelligence Service analyst Jessica Davis

At Al-Hawl camp in northern Syria, children watch as women confront Kurdish guards in a confrontation that quickly turned violent. Stewart Bell

For the past six months and more, since the Islamic State geographic caliphate was fully dissolved, Al-Hawl (Hol) camp in Syrian Kurdistan has housed an estimated 70,000 ISIL family members, women and children. Among them are 40 Canadians. Along with other foreign-sourced women who were pleased and excited to become part of a bold new Islamist enterprise in the creation of a dominating caliphate whose geographic presence was meant to expand, just as its ideology continues to fester in the Middle East and beyond.

The Canadian government -- like most other Western governments whose citizens answered the call to jihad and fled to Turkey to enter Syria and join the Islamic State terrorist group -- has no intention to reclaim its citizens. This is the very same government that overturned the previous Conservative-led government which had legislated a revocation of citizenship to any Canadians of immigrant status who left the country to go abroad to fight in the name of terrorist jihad with Islamic State. Justin Trudeau made it clear that to him, "A Canadian is a Canadian" and he would have no part of a two-tier citizenship system.

So these are still Canadians, their citizenship is intact (unlike Britain which detached their citizens), but the Liberal government sees no need to exert itself to relieve the pressure on the Kurds whose ill fortune it has been not only to be forced to be the only reliable fighting force to counter the malevolent deadly threat of Islamic State, but to imprison and to guard them, at the cost of manpower and treasury, attempting to handle a poisonous situation no other country is willing to undertake, much less assist with.

Al-Hawl Camp,  Associated Press

As for those Canadian Islamic State members who have returned of their own volition to Canada, many are free to roam the streets of the country, (instead of being peremptorily imprisoned) while Canada's security and intelligence agents twist their hands, and bemoan the fact that unless they are able to amass hard evidence directly implicating these ISIL stalwarts, arresting and imprisoning, much less trying them for the crimes they are suspected to have been involved with, won't pass muster under Canadian law.

The Turkish military invasion of southeast Syria enabled by a brain-distracted Trump administration has had the effect of disabling the Kurdish military from its preoccupation with ferreting out ISIL sleeper cells, as they must now respond to the defence of their nation and their people. Moreover, the hundreds of Kurdish YPG fighters deployed as guards over the prison camps housing tens of thousands of ISIL members and those of their families have been hollowed out in numbers, responding to the emergency imposed by Turkish President Erdogan's ambition to annihilate the YPG 'terrorists' and establish a 'safe corridor' between Turkey and Syria.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan's plan is to forcibly dump Syrian refugees, an estimated two million of the three-and-a-half million living in squalid refugee camps inside Turkey, fearful of returning to Syria where the Baathist regime's Alawite President Bashar al-Assad will resume barrel-and-chemical-bombing them once again. In forcing the Syrian Democratic Forces to withdraw their guards for the urgency of the battlefield against Turkish invasion, the fears now focus on Islamic State prisoners being freed from their prison custody, enabled to resume their reign of terror, as a result.

In the Al-Hawl prison camp where the ISIL women and children are incarcerated, a message from ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi called for his supporters to free the women from what he called the "prisons of humiliation", pleasing the women no end. They had, in effect, the hard-core among them, been effectively running the camp along an Islamic State model, in defiance of the Kurdish guards, and even threatening them with knives and cudgels.

The Kurdish guards speak of the camp as a "ticking time bomb". A dismembered body, days ago, was discovered in a septic tank at Al-Hawl. Some time later the body of a 20-year-old women was found as well, with 16 fatal stab wounds, according to a camp official. Last month, a 14-year-old girl had been murdered, her penalty for refusing to wear a niqab. Guards have reportedly been stabbed by these ferociously Islamist-violent woman of Islamic State. Little wonder that the camp has been described as a "mini caliphate".

Somehow, the camp women have been able to take possession of cellphones, of knives and even, it was reported, guns. The 400 guards who were responsible for the camp prior to this week's redeployment, make no pretense that the women haven't taken command of the day-to-day operations of the camp. They have been making efforts to smuggle themselves out of the camp, efforts that increased after they were called on to "rise up" by Baghdadi.

Guards at Al-Hawl camp in northern Syria arrest women accused of gathering to whip a woman for violating their religious code. Stewart Bell

 

Calling Erdogan's Bluff in Afrin

"As observers of Erdogan’s war on the Kurds know, the current attack on Afrin is to be put into the context of Turkey’s longstanding racist hostility towards any prospect of Kurdish self-determination, including democratic rights within existing states. By labelling any attempt at self-determination as ‘separatism’ and ‘terrorism’, Turkey tries to legitimize its war crimes in the eyes of the international community."
"Ever since the peace process between the Turkish state and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) ceased in the summer of 2015, and especially after an attempted coup attempt in July 2016, several massacres on Kurdish civilians have been committed by the state, while tens of thousands of people were arrested, and even more assaulted, sacked, injured or displaced."
New Internationalist In Afrin, northern Syria, Kurds protest Turkey's invasion as YPG (People's Protection Unit) members look on, 24 January 2018. Source: Kurdish Struggle, CC

Robert Fisk of The Independent, Great Britain, writes disparagingly of Afrin's untouched status; that despite the news coming out of the region of Turkey's assault on the YPG and stated determination to wrest Afrin from Kurdish hands, he could see first-hand no indication of any conflict other than in surrounding towns, that all seems normal and calm, commercial establishments open for business and no perturbations to be seen anywhere. There is a discreet presence of Russian soldiers which tends to give the impression of a loose solidarity with the Kurds.

Fisk, an opinionated and fussily critical journalist at the best of times, seems to take a sneering position at anything that belies his impressions. As a nit-picker, he had to point out in his latest entry in his rag that he had to repeatedly correct Kurdish pronunciation of Erdogan's name, impressing on them that the 'r' is pronounced as 'w', as though that salient fact would be of any great moment to a people fearing the loss of their established autonomy in a geographic area in which they can measure Kurdish heritage by millennia.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan feels entitled to invade areas on the border with Syria, considering them to be Turkish in character and historical precedence and thus on the wrong side of the border. Aside from which he has an overweening sense of paranoia at the presence and autonomous territorial control of the YPG whose connection with the Turkish PKK he points out is injurious to Turkey given the Kurdish aspiration of achieving sovereign status on their own historical geography, absorbed by Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran.

Erdogan's fascist hatred for the Kurdish propensity to claim what is historically and morally theirs, restively agitating for the world to finally recognize the injustice done the Kurds when the dominating custodians of the region, colonialist Britain and France were casually marking up borders for posterity, ignoring natural ethnic, tribal and religious minority groups and forcing uneasy pluralism on a population that historically saw no need to acknowledge the other, each living in their geographies, has been brought to a head.

Under Kurdish control, minorities generally were able to live in peace, unlike the kind of persistent persecution suffered by Christians, Yazidis, Kurds, Jews and Druze among others living under Muslim majority domination. During the invasion and caliphate establishment of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, minorities fled for protection from the invaded areas to find haven within wider, autonomously-regulated Kurdish areas.

Kurdish YPG fighter. Source: Kurdish Struggle, CC

Erdogan's purpose in the Afrin area and beyond is to establish a greater presence of Turkmens and Sunni Syrians on the border area between Turkey and Syria to counteract the link between the YPG and the PKK, sundering their alliance and giving 'protection' to Turkey, and just incidentally in the process enabling Turkey to target the fighting Kurds and demoralize their citizenry with the prospect of an invading Turkey. Because Turkey is a member of NATO, Erdogan has become almost exempt from scrutiny in his ambition.

That Turkey remains a member of NATO is one of those realpolitik mysteries. Ankara's realliance with Moscow has shifted his membership even further outside the Western alliance, yet it remains impervious to hard scrutiny. Lip service is paid by Europe and the United States to the plight of the Kurds under Turkish attack. Discreet messages, mild in language beseech Erdogan to refrain from full-out attack. In fact, Fisk did get one thing right; Turkey with its massive military could, if Erdogan willed it so, make quick work of Afrin if it dispatched sufficient numbers and weaponry to confront the YPG with.

Turkey's arrogance in warning the U.S. that it expects the White House to withdraw from ongoing training of the Kurds, to stop arming them and to recall all the weapons it has thus far supplied the YPG with, along with Turkey's intention to extend its invasion to areas like Manbij where American troops are established, calls for a more vigorous response from the Trump administration than merely responding that it has taken note of Turkish demands.

Kurdish YPG fighter, 19 January 2018. Source: Kurdish Struggle, CC