“Turkey aims to destroy the terror corridor on its border with Syria,” is how the Turkish DoC frames the paused operations.
According to one human rights worker, “Anyone who has lived since 2012 in the region knows this to be true. Whereas it is not exactly black and white, the assertion that a “Syrian Terror-Corridor” exists is unquestionably true, but it’s not about the Kurds, it’s about people who have exploited the Kurds. Those who exploited the Kurds are US allies which makes the USA complicit in exploiting the Kurds.”
Syrian Civil War: Background to help readers understand the coverage.
by Behar Abbasi, in Syria
Team Effort for Peace in Syria. Hassan Rouhani, President of Iran, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Turkey President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Bashar al-Assad, Syria
Photo Credit: Tass
Photo Art/Cropping/Enhancement: Rosa Yamamoto / Feminine-Perspective Magazine
The complexity of the Syrian quagmire is incomprehensible to most ordinary people of the world. The root issues are enormous and then so many outside and internal factions conduct so much interference, it is hard to follow.
FPM.news will serve up the short background explainer version in this article, with help from the various sides’ official statements.
There appears to be a common goal among the interveners Iran, Turkey and Russia in the Syrian Civil War beyond the obvious selfish goals of each. Those individual goals in context show that these leaders are each doing their jobs for their respective countries. There is nothing sinister in that.
Their aim is to restore peace by consolidating fractured territories of Syria under the single existing government of Bashar Hafez al-Assad in Damascus and from there elect or appoint a government that reflects and represents the myriad of interests across the country.
This is a colossal task because like much of the Middle East, the population is made up of dozens if not hundreds of tribes which are inclined to form armed militias in some ancient belief of armed neutrality. This tribalism throughout the Middle East is an epic failure, agree most observers and historians.
The Syrian Civil War
Syrian President Assad more or less inherited governance from his father who passed in 2000. Civil war broke out in the country after years of unrest. The war began as a result of peaceful demonstrations coming under brutal armed attack by the Assad regime. Those attacks continued for some time and were sufficiently inhumane that the global community came to at least morally support the “Opposition” to Assad. The explanation of that is in the details of the brutality.
Bashar Hafez al-Assad was last sworn into office for a seven-year term in mid-July 2014. It was a contested presidential election and the first in his Ba’athist (Syria) Party history. But the election was only polling regions controlled by Assad’s regime and not by the ‘Opposition’ polling regions. Such a poll distribution is unequivocally described by the international community as a controverted election–a biased election, in other words.
Mr. Assad has been accused of an endless list of atrocities. They are so significant and extensive, that list should be left to a charging document before the International Criminal Court and a War Crimes Tribunal of the United Nations Security Council which of course will never agree to such a thing.
American Spin
The CIA says about Syria:
International pressure on the al-Assad regime intensified after late 2011, as the Arab League, the EU, Turkey, and the US expanded economic sanctions against the regime and those entities that support it.
In December 2012, the Syrian National Coalition, was recognized by more than 130 countries as the sole legitimate representative of the Syrian people. In September 2015, Russia launched a military intervention on behalf of the al-Assad regime, and domestic and foreign government-aligned forces recaptured swaths of territory from opposition forces, and eventually the country’s second largest city, Aleppo, in December 2016, shifting the conflict in the regime’s favor.
The regime, with this foreign support, also recaptured opposition strongholds in the Damascus suburbs and the southern province of Dar’a in 2018. The government lacks territorial control over much of the northeastern part of the country, which is dominated by the predominantly Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).
The SDF has expanded its territorial hold over much of the northeast since 2014 as it has captured territory from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. Political negotiations between the government and opposition delegations at UN-sponsored Geneva conferences since 2014 have failed to produce a resolution of the conflict.
Since early 2017, Iran, Russia, and Turkey have held separate political negotiations outside of UN auspices to attempt to reduce violence in Syria. According to an April 2016 UN estimate, the death toll among Syrian Government forces, opposition forces, and civilians was over 400,000, though other estimates placed the number well over 500,000. As of
December 2018, approximately 6.2 million Syrians were internally displaced.
Approximately 13 million people were in need of humanitarian assistance across the country, and an additional 5.7 million Syrians were registered refugees in Turkey, Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, and North Africa.
The conflict in Syria remains one of the largest humanitarian crises worldwide.
American Spin Explained
The CIA’s description of Syria is extremely misleading for the US Government’s own purposes, actually to cover up a crime. The US government has been allied to a non-state terrorist group called PKK / YPG which is an insurrection in Turkey and a criminal organization around the world.
The CIA statement about the Northeast of Syria is a myth. It is a big lie to say that: The [Syrian] government lacks territorial control over much of the northeastern part of the country, which is dominated by the predominantly Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).
RINJ Foundation and a Chinese Infrastructure Corp. Proposed a HealthCare Network in Rojava
After first being driven from Syria along with numerous other humanitarian civil society groups, the RINJ Women proposed a public health network infrastructure for the semi-autonomous region close to the Turkish border. The initial proposal was for a nurse-led (Nurse Practitioner) remote mobile network with an eventual brick and mortar interlinked modern healthcare network across the North.
Katie Alsop of The RINJ Foundation explains that time in this way.
“We quickly realized that the violence levels were increasing dramatically and with the failure of Kobani which was bombed to rubble by the Americans, the violence only picked up. We stuck with the mobile units and shelved the major infrastructure with a Chinese partner on the brick-and-mortar side until such time as governance would return. Once the PKK completely took over, we terminated all talks in February 2016 following an agreement with the Turkish side which was very helpful by sharing intelligence which actually confirmed what we already suspected.”
The region was once a scattering of Syrian Arabs and Kurds but between the Islamic State and the PKK / YPG group, the indigenous tribal communities in the hundreds of thousands were driven out of the area and into Turkey as refugees.
The PKK / YPG which has been armed until 2014 by the proceeds of organized crime and thereafter by the Americans, set up a series of military strongholds interlinked by tunnels and ammunition dumps that over the years stretched from Qamishli to Kobani. That’s almost from the Iraq border to the furthest west part of the border of Syria with Turkey, Manbij.
“Turkey has been very patient and accommodating with allies to try to combat terrorism in Syria. Yet, Turkey can’t wait a minute longer. It’s the Turkish, Kurdish, and Arab lives at stake,” the Turkish Communications Director Fahrettin Altun said in a tweet.
He said Turkey aims to destroy the terror corridor on its border with Syria through military action against the PKK and Daesh terror organizations.
“Syria needs local governance not the PKK‘s occupation. It has been acknowledged by many international human rights organizations that PKK embarked upon an ethnic cleansing in the areas it controlled and eliminated any dissent, especially Kurdish democrats,” he added.
“This was the discussion we had with the Turkish government,” says Alsop, “and the humanitarian effort was to be cooperative and commingled. All sides had humanitarian interests at heart; had unique resources to add; and because the healthcare infrastructure was already so bad, it was going to be easy to make an enormous positive change for the people and the quality of their lives. A stable and productive region along the Turkish border would strengthen the vulnerable mixed tribes, creating basic services for communities to share, and become unified in their management with that unification spreading to other areas, hopefully.”
“But the original inhabitants of about 400 kilometers of space along the Turkish border has become a corridor of terror,” says Alsop, a director of the RINJ Women‘s group.
“The people of Kobane who had fled to Turkey were to be moved to the interior of Turkey to be safe from the new militarization of the border region,” she added.
“The PKK then took over everything. They did not like us as we are anything but Marxists and completely adverse to the enormous human slavery network these malign actors are running. Everything went bad since our first dealings with the PKK which took over Rojava governance and grew its terror network with American weapons and money. The PKK even shelled one of our installations in Shingal after we helped the Yezidi come down the mountain in December 2014. (We were also telling Yezidi families not to let their children go with the PKK/YPG because they would never see their kids again. We were correct in that, save but a few. Thousands have been killed in a PKK/USA crime of the century.)”
“We don’t like each other. PKK are rapists and criminals and we are civil society. There will be no laissez faire agreements. The PKK and their American enablers must eventually be brought to trial. In the meantime, we can make sure the history books gain a helping of truth from the ground in Syria.”—Katie Alsop – The RINJ Foundation
The Northeastern Calamity Was Perpetrated by the United States against Turkey
The widespread MidEast Asia instability created by America’s murderous 2003 invasion of Iraq and 11-year occupation of the country had been predicted from the outset. Every existing conflict and hatred in the Middle East has been exacerbated by the inept foreign policies and warring of the United States.
Extraordinarily, it got worse when America became involved in funding and arming one of the most sinister underworld organizations on Earth, an avowed enemy of Turkey.
The PKK, a non-state crime group with a long history in drug trafficking, human slavery and various extortion, kidnapping and blackmail enterprises all over Europe and the Middle East was helped to flourish on Turkey’s border with Syria.
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- America claims it did this because it wanted to enter Syria without the Syrian government’s approval and kill Daesh.
- Hence the USA created an “ally” called the SDF which is comprised of 20% Arabs and 80% PKK / YPG armed terrorists, many of whom are child-soldiers trained in dozens of kiddie-boot-camps around Europe and the Middle East.
- Turkey protested but when the US President Trump began bragging that he had vanquished the Islamic State in late 2018 and repeatedly through 2019, the Turkish President more and more loudly began to issue notice that the Turkish Army was preparing to enter Syria and clean out the corridor-of-terror.
- On 9 October 2019, Turkey with its very large army began its operation “Peace Spring” with a green light from the US President, and subsequent White House denials and fake backdated letters.
- The US pleaded with Turkey to halt the operation until this coming Tuesday so it could convince the terrorists targeted by the “Peace Spring” movement to leave a swath of land in the Northeast of Syria south to 32 kilometers from the Turkish border.
- Turkey agreed to the operational pause. The fragile pause in the “Peace Spring” operation is holding despite an early dozen or so transgressions on the part of the PKK / YPG which had reacted to the Turkish military blowing up its ammunition dumps and latticework of underground terrorist tunnels.
- On any given day it is next to impossible to detect the difference between the Islamic State fighters and the PKK / YPG militants.
Syria needs nonviolent political compromise, not war.