Loading ...Erdogan, Genocide, and ISIS – The Sultan is Doomed
By Michael Collins
Turkish President Recep Teyyip Erdogan’s attempts to demonize the Syrian Kurd’s YPG army and threaten and bully the United States are having the net effect of creating a powerful movement for his removal based on a rationale that will encourage the public in the United States and Europe to forget the real culprits in the tragic attack on Syria and focus on charges of genocide leveled against ISIS. The genocide charge will be tied to Erdogan as a result of his documented support for ISIS and ultimately doom his increasingly dictatorial rule of Turkey. Rather than divert the attention of Turks from his crimes and massive negligence as a means to preserve his power, Erdogan’s castigation of the Kurds and, more significantly, his public blackmail of the U.S. will spell his doom in the near future.
Erdogan is lashing out in all directions as he experiences the collapse of his allout support for Syrian rebels, including ISIS. The president’s anger at the United States is both surprising and dangerous. For weeks, Erdogan has objected to U.S. support of the YPG, the Syrian Kurdish army that controls nearly the entire Syrian border region with Turkey.
The spark that lit Erdogan’s fuse occurred about ten days before the start of the U.S. – Russia sponsored Munich peace conference on the Syrian conflict. The YPG and the Syrian Arab Army are the only major land forces fighting ISIS. While YPG should have been invited to the Munich conference, the U.S. accommodated Erdogan by leaving them off list of invited parties.
About the same time that YPG was removed from the Munich conference, the White House sent Brett McGurk, “President Barack Obama’s envoy to an international coalition fighting IS in Syria and Iraq” to visit Syrian Kurdish forces in Kobani, Syria. French and British officials made the trip with McGurk. The envoy made clear U.S. admiration and support for the YPG’s efforts. Unlike Erdogan and his foreign minister, the Kurds welcomed the delegation with open arms and muted their concerns about being left out of the Munich affair.
Instead of accepting a partial victory, Erdogan and his foreign minister threatened the U.S. with a harsh choice. The U.S. must show that it is either for Turkey by labeling the YPG as terrorists or against Turkey by continuing to support YPG and its efforts against ISIS.
Bitterness toward the U.S. continued, including implied threats of a Turkish-Saudi land attack on Syria.
The Turks then took direct action by shelling YPG forces that were closing in on the critical Syrian border town of Azas.
Despite the provocation, Washington tried to be even handed. State Department spokesman Mark Toner suggested that the YPG stop its advance on Azaz and, at the same time, asked the Turks to end their daily barrage of YPG and other anti-ISIS forces in Syria. The Turkish army continued the barrage.
After days of threats to the U.S. and rash actions against its Kurdish allies, on February 20 The Saker noted the abject folly of Erdogan’s statements and actions: “If Erdogan and his advisors seriously believe that they can publicly blackmail a superpower like the USA then their days are numbered.“
Unfortunately, for Erdogan, he didn’t get The Saker’s memo. On February 24, the Turkish leader said: “If Daesh (IS/ISIS) and Al-Nusra are kept outside the ceasefire, then the PYD-YPG must similarly be excluded from the ceasefire for it is a terrorist group just as they are,” Erdogan told local officials in Ankara.”
Why is the current Turkish government obsessed with the YPG? There are several reasons, none of them related to terrorism and all of them about the survival of the amazingly corrupt and repellant Erdogan, his family, and cronies in the AKP party.
What do Erdogan and company have to fear?
Jail.
Erdogan and his cronies were caught engaged in the following on publicly released audiotapes: instructing his son on how and where to hide huge sums of cash that neither party wanted found; telling judges how to decide critical cases in his interests; planning a false flag operation in which Turkish troops would fire weapons at the Turkish border from within Syria and assign the blame to Syria; ordering government takeovers of private corporations, media outlets in particular, that simply opposed his government; ordering the release of weapons bound for Syrian rebels held up by local authorities at the Syrian border; and enabling the transit and sale of ISIS oil traveling over the Turkish landmass and shipped from Turkish ports.
These criminal acts are well known in Turkey. Should any government other than one controlled by Erdogan come to power, then Erdogan, his family members, and his cronies will go to trial and likely be sentenced to serious jail time.
continues http://thesaker.is/erdogan-genocide-and-isis-the-sultan-is-doomed/