Last
summer, I was positioned just across the border from the Syrian town of Afrin
around which Turkish and Kurdish and, possibly, American forces, are now poised
for a head-on clash. It seems crazy to me that anyone would want to fight
over this one-donkey farm town. We were there on a mission to rescue wild
animals trapped in a zoo in war-torn Aleppo, Syria.
Why
on earth are at least 2,000 US troops mixed up in this fracas in darkest
Syria? Because the pro-Israel neocons in Washington, who pretty much run
US foreign policy these days, are determined to have revenge for the defeat of
US-backed rebel forces in Syria. So it’s once more into the breach near
Afrin and the town Manbij though America has zero national interests in Syria.
The US first tried to overthrow Syria’s governments in Damascus in 1948 because
it was too independent and flirting with the Soviets. Today’s
intervention is part of Israel’s plan to fragment Syria and gobble up its water
and fertile land resources.
Worse,
the Pentagon decided to enlist and arm rebellious Kurds in southern Turkey and
Syria, and use them as ‘native troops’ to fight first the rag-tag bands of
ISIS, then the Turkish armed forces. This was a terrible idea –
compounded by US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s incredibly foolish recent
announcement that the US would mobilize, arm and finance a ‘border force’ of
30,000 Kurds that was closely tied to the Kurdish PKK rebel group.
Washington has only a child’s understanding of events in Turkey and the dangers
involved. Washington bills the PKK ‘terrorists.’ Clearly, it can’t
even keep its ‘terrorists’ straight. The neocons under Trump have gutted
the State Department.
The
Turks rightly fear that events in war-torn Syria may enflame demands by
Turkey’s restive Kurdish minority for an independent state. The very likely
involvement of the US in the 2016 failed coup attempt to overthrow Turkey’s
president, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, have deepened Turkish fears of
another US-backed plot to divide Turkey.
Turks
recall post World War I efforts by Britain, France, Greece and Italy in 1918-19
to divide up post-Ottoman Turkey between them.
The
Turks are in a rage. Turkey has been battling a wide-scale Kurdish
insurgency since the 1980’s. I was with the Turkish Army in eastern
Anatolia (just north of Syria), witnessing the brutal, bloody guerilla war
between the Turks and Kurds that left 40,000 dead, mostly civilians.
Turkey’s
democratic leader, President Erdoğan, had almost forged a peace with the
rebellious Kurds and their PKK leadership when the western intervention in
Syria rekindled the war. As often in the past, foreign powers used the
warlike Kurds for their own aims, then abandoned them. Israel has been
particularly active in arming and organizing Kurdish rebels since the 1970’s as
part of its grand strategy to fragment the Arab world and Turkey, and degrade
them into feeble mini-states.
Intervention
by Russia, Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah into Syrian ‘civil-war’ caused the
defeat of US-Saudi-British-Israeli backed rebel Syrian forces.
This, as noted, led the frustrated US war party to directly base US troops in
Syria, an act that flagrantly violated international law. As US troops
prepared to confront the forces from Damascus and their Russian air support,
the Kurds declared all-out war. Involved were not only Syrian Kurds but
large numbers of ethnic Kurds in Turkey, who make up about 17% of the total
population. Iran’s Kurds are next to be stirred up.
All this is a huge, dangerous
mess. US and Russian forces are now at rifle’s shot from one another
while their warplanes buzz the skies overhead. Iranian and US forces are
nearing a confrontation, something that would delight the Trump White
House. US and Turkish forces are nearing confrontation.
Were
it not for the steady hand of Russia’s leader Vladimir Putin, a US-Russian
clash might have already occurred. While this dangerous game of chicken goes
on, US and NATO forces are busy probing Russia’s border in the Baltic, Eastern
Europe and the Black Sea. The hunger for war grows.
Wretched, largely devastated
Syria now faces more fighting. The captive wild animals we rescued from Aleppo,
Syria (see www.ericmargolis.com), are still in large part
in shock from being trapped in the middle of a war zone. One of the
hyenas we saved just died of organ failure. Think of the suffering of Syria’s
people as the great powers and their mercenaries turn this once lovely land
into a giant cemetery.
Eric
Margolis [send him
mail] is the author of War at the Top of the World and the new
book, American Raj: Liberation or Domination?: Resolving the
Conflict Between the West and the Muslim World. See his website.
Copyright © 2017 Eric Margolis
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