Was anyone surprised when Turkey bombed Kurdish targets in Iraq and Turkey itself to “fight ISIS”…in Syria? How about using, as a “reason” for the aerial bombings, the attack in Suruç that killed 32 people attending a humanitarian mission’s gathering? Will it surprise anyone to learn, months or years from now, that Suruç was another “false flag” operation conducted by Turkey’s secret services to create an excuse to attack Kurds and Syria? Remember the leaked recordings from spring 2014, of uppermost-level Turkish government discussions planning another such operation? Let’s not forget the Turkey/Saudi Arabia link to al-Nusra’s sarin gas attacks in Syria, attempting to pin the blame on the Syrian government for that?
But, let’s keep it simple and stick to location-location-location. Perhaps Turkey’s place-name changing map-makers (Zeitoun/Süleymanlı, Akhtamar/Akdamar, Dersim/Tunceli, and on ad nauseam) have been so thorough and effective that they have succeeded in creating a country of geographic illiterates who can’t distinguish among neighboring countries, and even between INside and OUTside Turkey!
The absurdity of Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu equating ISIS and the PKK/YPG (armed Kurdish organizations, respectively, in Turkey/Syria) as “terrorists” seems to be lost only on Turkish leaders. On the other hand, the cynicism of this “equation” seems to be lost only on the fools in Washington, D.C., who are so blinded by their thirst for oil and Bashar al-Assad’s blood that they are willing to do anything in service of those twin urges.
The Kurds should not be surprised either, not by Ankara’s perfidy nor by D.C.’s willingness to sell them out. By their own admission, Kurds now recognize how they were used during the Armenian Genocide by the Ottoman murderers of the day. So the actions of the neo-Ottomanists in power today are perfectly consistent. As to the policy makers in the State Department and White House, the track record is also consistent. George Bush, Sr. incited Iraq’s Kurds to rebellion in 1991, then let them get massacred. In the 1970’s, they had a hand in the support Iran and Israel gave Iraq’s Kurds, until Iran extracted what it wanted from Iraq. Going further back, the Kurds were stiffed when the Treaty of Sevres was superseded by Lausanne.
Iraq’s Kurdish leadership, especially the current president whose father was betrayed and played by the Iran/Israel/U.S. troika four decades ago, should be very leery of giving in to Turkish demands to displace PKK bases located on its territory. Turkey, backed by the U.S., is doing everything it can do prevent Kurdish progress in Syria, and even subvert the gains already made.
It is apparent to the world that the most effective force against the expansion of the ISIS fanatics’ range of control are the Kurds. To damage the latter’s capacity is to seriously endanger countless millions of people and even what little stability remains in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia and Israel would do well to be far more circumspect in their anti-Assad crusades. The whackos prevailing in the Syrian deserts today could easily be penetrating the Rub’ al-Khali and Negev deserts in 10 years. Turkey should also be equally wary lest the ISIS monsters, whom they have been (open-secretly) feeding, unleash their religion-based frenzy in Anatolia and the Western part of the Armenian Plateau.
The Kurds are in a simultaneously very enviable and very risky position. Everyone needs them because they are the only practical barrier to ISIS. No one else, not even far militarily superior forces, are in a position, for political reasons, to confront ISIS head-on. Yet, precisely due to their value, Kurds terrify those very same powers, Turkey being the best example of them.
In fact, Turkey is so internally conflicted (largely due to centuries of genocidal and Turkification policies) that its current government (the AK Party), recently having been knocked out of its perch as the majority party in parliament, is now using the mess in Syria as an opportunity to kill and vilify Kurds to shore up chauvinist support for likely snap-elections in November.
Remember that the Kurdish-based HD Party entered the Turkish Parliament for the first time with 80 of its members elected. I have no doubt that much of this support came at the expense of the AKP. So, the AKP is hoping to handle multiple problems all at once: reign in Syria’s Kurds; wallop Turkey’s Kurds by tossing out years of negotiations with the PKK; discredit the political manifestation of Turkey’s Kurds, the HD Party, to regain a parliamentary majority; regain some international prestige lost because of Turkey’s support for ISIS and only recent agreement to let the U.S. use the Incirlik airbase; and all of this in the service of the long-term AKP goal of “re-establishing” a new “Ottoman Empire” in the form of Turkish hegemony over its neighbors.
An energy pipeline, emanating in Azerbaijan and traversing Turkey, was bombed, very possibly in response to Ankara’s attacks on Kurds. Any time fuels are involved, things get even more touchy and dangerous.
This is an incredibly convoluted situation. But ultimately, it behooves us as Armenians, Americans, residents of this planet, and just plain human beings to oppose with all means at our disposal the adventurism and chicanery that Turkey has conducted in Syria. Write and tell your elected representatives and executive leadership, in all countries, to end this dangerous game.
Garen Yegparian
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“Going further back, the Kurds were stiffed when the Treaty of Sevres was superseded by Lausanne.”
Wait. If the Treaty of Lausanne is invalid as far as Armenians are concerned because they never signed it, why isn’t the same argument made for the Kurds? Going off the same logic, I guess we should refer to southeast Turkey as “North Kurdistan” because the Kurds never agreed to the treaty that made the region “southeast Turkey.”
In the treaty of Sevres, and the establishment of Wilsonian Armenia, the Armenians were supposed to help Kurds (since ‘Kurdistan’ was not clear, nor well defined). They never got around to it (besides the fact that the Kurds helped in perpetrating the Genocide). Instead the Turks helped them by giving them all the lands, properties and belongings of the Armenians who were murdered and/or exiled, so long as the Kurds accepted their new settled and property owning status as obedient “Mountain Turks” – and we all know how that turned out.
It’s interesting, I wonder what percentage of independence seeking Kurds today consider Wilsonian Armenia or large chunks of it as ‘Kurdistan’. Under Sevres, certainly there would eventually be a Kurdistan to the southeast of Armenia so southeast Turkey could certainly be north Kurdistan at the Syria border. Incidentally, the USA was never signatory to Lausanne either.
“…adventurism and chicanery that Turkey has conducted in Syria…”
For decades, until early 2004 or so, Assad Sr. had let Syria to be used as a launch pad for PKK terror attacks into Turkey. No amount of diplomatic and political initiative was able to put an end to this travesty. No one cared either, except Turks. Only when the army was moved near the border, Syria forced the PKK leadership out of their country and its leader, Kurdish Osama, was then caught in Africa. Where? In a Greek embassy! What do you think any other country would have done in response to all this?
Now, we have Turkish armed forces taking forceful action against certified terrorists after a long lull, and suddenly there is much whining. No one moved a finger when PKK established itself in Northern Iraq. The big question why was this tolerated by Barzani, by Iraq, by USA and by Turks? The question is why tolerate it at all? In June-July alone, Turkish government reported over 200 terrorist acts by PKK. Who did what?
By the way, Turkish planes are bombing PKK positions in Iraq, not Syria.
Nothing has hurt Turkish Kurds more than PKK.
[Ahmet Davutoglu, who has become the first Turkish foreign minister ever to visit Uighur Autonomous Region in China, toured historical sites in Kashgar city. Davutoglu and an accompanying Turkish delegation arrived early Thursday in Kashgar in the extreme west of China and the extreme southwest of Uighur region. Davutoglu first visited the tomb of Mahmud Kashgari and then they toured the tomb of Yusuf Has Hajib as well the 500-year-old Id Khah Mosque, the largest mosque in China.
“We are visiting the land of our ancestors,” Davutoglu said.] (October 2010)
The original terrorists in these parts are the Turkic tribes from East and Central Asia who invaded and terrorized the lands and peoples of others.
Turks living in Asia Minor are illegal occupiers.
Kurds have been living near these parts a lot longer than Turkic nomads who invaded Asia Minor.
It is no crime to fight invaders: invaders are criminals by definition.
And Turks started terrorizing Kurds long before the founding of PKK: Dersim massacre of Kurds by the terrorist Turk state.
How many 10s of 1000s were murdered, gassed, burnt alive?
More recently, the terrorist Turk state murdered 34 at Uludere, half of them underage youth.
Supposedly it was a mistake, but Turks knew Kurds were smugglers, not PKK: they decided to terrorize them to stop the smuggling.
And if not for the armed struggle of Kurds, including PKK, Kurds would still be called “Mountain Kurds” and would be killed for speaking Kurdish.
Only reason Erdogan agreed to talk “peace” with Kurds is because TSK was unable to defeat Kurds after trying for 30 years.
Edogan miscalculated badly: he never expected Kurds to win 13% at the ballot box.
So he re-started his terror campaign against Kurds, e.g. the terror bombing at Suruc: is there any doubt that the Turkish state was involved ?
He is even trying to have Demirtaş jailed on some fake charges of inciting something or other, the goal being to neuter HDP and become a President for Life.
Then he can terrorize and murder Kurds at will.
And a denialist Turk complaining about terrorists ?
That’s rich.
Your genocidal invadonomad ancestors are the world renowned masters of Terror.
The Turkish mullah-in-chief Erdogan embodies the quintessential character of a tricky Turk: When faced with a dilemma you don’t seem to be able to resolve with cunning schemes and brute force, look and act conciliatory towards your adversary to gain his trust while plotting a much bigger scheme to solve the dilemma but with much bigger and much more brute force to surprise and overwhelm your adversary in order to bring him into submission.
Well, I think all along Erdogan had a plan to soften the Kurds through false promises to make them put down their arms and move their forces away from and beyond the artificial Turkish borders in the east while he plotted a scheme to turn up the heat on them when opportunity presented itself. For the Turkish leadership to do otherwise and to truly act conciliatory towards a people and an organization which the Turkish government, as well as the Turkish public, regard as terroristic amounts to nothing less than political suicide.
Then came the opportunity, most likely preplanned by the Turkish leadership, to tighten the rope around the Kurdish necks through their ISIS mercenaries first and then under the cover of NATO forces while the Turkish forces moved in to put the final nail in the coffin to suffocate the renaming and retreating Kurdish forces through massive bombardments to remove much weaker Kurdish resistance with surprise attacks and overwhelming force.
Erdogan’s loss of votes at the ballot boxes to the Kurdish politicians, as well as his dream of becoming the Turkish Napoleon tarnished, was both the impetus and the excuse he needed to put his secret schemes into action.
“Mountain Turks”