{"id":181903,"date":"2016-02-15T21:17:00","date_gmt":"2016-02-16T02:17:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2016\/02\/15\/this-business-will-get-out-of-control-it-will-get-out-of-control-and-well-be-lucky-to-live-through-it-8\/"},"modified":"2016-02-15T21:17:00","modified_gmt":"2016-02-16T02:17:00","slug":"this-business-will-get-out-of-control-it-will-get-out-of-control-and-well-be-lucky-to-live-through-it-8","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2016\/02\/15\/this-business-will-get-out-of-control-it-will-get-out-of-control-and-well-be-lucky-to-live-through-it-8\/","title":{"rendered":"This Business Will Get out of Control. It Will Get out of Control and We’ll Be Lucky to Live through It."},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>Syria, looks to be going to be going completely pear shaped.<\/p>\n

With advances by the Syrian government and by the Kurdish YPG threatening to cut off Turkey’s Islamist proxies in Syria<\/a>, Ankara is shelling the Kurds<\/a>, attacking what are (for now, at least) US Allies:<\/p>\n

France’s foreign ministry has urged Turkey to end its assault on Kurdish fighters in northern Syria.<\/span>

<\/span> In a statement (in French) it said it was “worried about the continued worsening of the situation”.<\/span>

<\/span> On Saturday, Turkey began shelling the militia, which it says is linked to the banned Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).<\/span>

<\/span> The fighters, the YPG militia based in Syria, have rejected Turkey’s demand to leave areas it has seized, saying Islamists would return if it left.<\/span>

<\/span> Turkey’s assault is a new thread in an already-complex conflict that has drawn in competing regional powers.<\/span>

<\/span> Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu insisted on Sunday that Turkey “will not permit the [Kurdish militia] to carry out aggressive acts”.<\/span>

<\/span> “Our security forces gave the necessary response and will continue to do so,” Mr Davutoglu said.<\/span>

<\/span> Syria has also condemned the Turkish action as a violation of its sovereignty and asked the UN Security Council to intervene.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What’s more, the Turkey machinations in Syria, along with its heavy handed suppression of the Kurds in south east Anatolia has led to a renewed insurgency inside Turkey<\/a>:<\/p>\n

It was midday on a Thursday at the end of December when Rozerin \u00c7ukur left her home, supposedly to pick up class notes from a friend. She never returned.<\/span>

<\/span> Rozerin wandered through the narrow streets of Sur, the tangled old town neighborhood in Diyarbakir, a city of one million in southeastern Turkey. An attractive 17-year-old, Rozerin was wearing her school uniform and carrying a book and a pen in her bag.<\/span>

<\/span> “Just a few hours later,” her father says, “my daughter was inside the war.” She supposedly joined the Patriotic Revolutionary Youth Movement (YDG-H), a group supported by the banned Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and which since September has been fighting against the Turkish army in the streets of Diyarbakir, using Kalashnikovs and booby traps.<\/span>

<\/span> Rozerin was killed by a single shot to the head. Since January 8, her dead body has been lying in the sealed-off old town of Diyarbakir. Listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the city’s ancient heart has also long been the hub of Kurdish resistance. Rozerin’s parents are holding a vigil in a community center in the city together with dozens of other parents whose children have been killed in the most recent civil war in southeastern Turkey. The parents say they only want one thing: to be able to provide a decent burial for their children. But the Turkish state, they say, has made it impossible to recover their children’s bodies.<\/span>

<\/span> State officials view the dead young men and women as terrorists — as violent members of the PKK. Parents say they have been told that they can enter the old town in small groups, but that Turkish officials are demanding that they remove the weapons from the hands of the dead. And the parents do not want to touch the weapons. “The soldiers,” they fear, “would shoot immediately.”<\/span>

<\/span> \u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>

<\/span> The state is using extreme force against the PKK. Indeed, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan recently announced that he intended to annihilate the fighting force and promised to continue the battle “until the area is cleansed of all terrorists.” There is no “Kurdish question,” he said, just a “terror problem.”<\/span>

<\/span> Bitter house-to-house fighting of the kind seen in Diyarbakir is also taking place in other surrounding cities. The PKK focused its earlier attacks primarily on military targets and police stations. But since the state has laid siege to the cities, the radical Kurdish youth movement YDG-H has taken up the fight there as well.<\/span>

<\/span> Until recently, the YDG-H was seen as a collection of disillusioned youth who defended themselves from state violence with rocks and Molotov cocktails. But now that the government has set its sights on ridding the cities of PKK sympathizers, the group has armed and organized itself with the PKK’s help. They are now fighting on the frontlines while experienced PKK fighters are hiding in the Qandil Mountains in Iraqi Kurdistan.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

After nearly 50 years of the “Kurdish problem” Turkey seemed to have come to an accommodation with the Kurds in the late 1990s, and now Erdogan has blown it all up.<\/p>\n

And now the Turks and house of Saud are threatening to invade Syria: <\/p>\n

The Turkish military has hit Kurdish and Syrian regime targets as Ankara considered a ground assault with Saudi troops, further complicating efforts to end the war just days after the US and Russia agreed on a \u201ccessation of hostilities\u201d <\/a>in Syria within a week.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>

In an interview with AFP released on Friday, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad said he \u201cdoesn\u2019t rule out\u201d that Turkey and Saudi Arabia would intervene militarily in Syria<\/a>, but said his armed forces \u201cwill certainly confront it\u201d.<\/p>\n

Saudi Arabia and Turkey both staunchly support rebels seeking to oust Assad, and see his overthrow as essential for ending Syria\u2019s five-year civil war that has cost more than 260,000 lives.<\/p>\n

They fear the west is losing its appetite to overthrow him on the assumption he is \u201cthe lesser of two evils\u201d compared with Isis.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Neither the House of Saud nor Turkey are our allies in Syria.<\/p>\n

Riyadh is interesting in extending repressive Sunni hegemony in Syria, and Turkey is interested in reassembling a a sphere of influence in the area of the former Ottoman Empire.<\/p>\n

The technical term for the governments in Ankara and Saudi Arabia is f%$#ing nuts.<\/p>\n

We should not be on their side in any way shape, or form.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Syria, looks to be going to be going completely pear shaped. With advances by the Syrian government and by the Kurdish YPG threatening to cut off Turkey’s Islamist proxies in Syria, Ankara is shelling the Kurds, attacking what are (for now, at least) US Allies: France’s foreign ministry has urged Turkey to end its assault …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[981,969,964,1031,986,1099,980,1076],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-181903","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-civil-war","category-evil","category-foreign-relations","category-house-of-saud","category-middle-east","category-near-east","category-syria","category-terrorism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181903"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181903"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181903\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181903"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181903"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181903"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}