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October 2019: Turkey into Syria to Deal With Kurds

Brihard said:
That’s the problem with a major power electing a leader who can’t explain or spell ‘hegemony’.
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Sure he can. That's the money you pay the gardener to trim the hedges.
 
US troops leaving Syria will operate out of Iraq.

https://www.stripes.com/news/us/defense-chief-us-troops-leaving-syria-to-go-to-western-iraq-1.603827
 







 
PPCLI Guy said:
I challenge any of the apologists reading this post to provide a cogent and compelling argument as to why this letter is not a complete embarrassment to what used to be a great country.
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Sounds like the former United States Secretary of State has zero f---s left to give,  :)

"Found in the archives",
https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton/status/1186008390926917632
 
tomahawk6 said:
US troops leaving Syria will operate out of Iraq.

https://www.stripes.com/news/us/defense-chief-us-troops-leaving-syria-to-go-to-western-iraq-1.603827
Click to expand...


So Trump pulls troops out of Syria, and leaves the Kurds to now deal with the Turkish military offensive in addition to ISIS.

Reasons stated?  Pulling troops out of the Middle East.  It's not our problem.  They didn't help us in Normandy (Still  :facepalm:)


But now, those same troops are hopping on a plane & popping over to Iraq, to continue the same fight against the same enemy?  Seems like none of the initial reasons he stated are valid anymore...?
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZOUntMtlfo


Perhaps a stroke of accidental genius behind Trump's plan to withdraw from that part of Syria??


In ALL fairness, as much as nobody likes or can even understand Trump - the media does tend to focus 100% on attacking everything he says/does, without looking too broadly at what the underlying big picture may have been.

Whether what Mr. Graham is saying was an intentional "big picture" move from Trump, or perhaps a lucky aftermath, I doubt we will ever know.  Does seem like a prudent strategic move in regards to preventing Iranian influence from growing & directing oil revenues to the Kurds rather than Assad...
 
CBH99 said:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZOUntMtlfo


Perhaps a stroke of accidental genius behind Trump's plan to withdraw from that part of Syria??
Click to expand...

I agree with the Stroke part. 
 
Blackmail IS such a harsh term ...
Turkey is not blackmailing NATO with its rejection of a defence plan for the Baltics and Poland, and has full veto rights within the alliance, a Turkish security source said on Monday ahead of a NATO alliance summit in London.

Reuters reported last week that Turkey was refusing to back a NATO defence plan for the Baltics and Poland until it received more support for its battle with the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia, which it views as a terrorist organisation.

Ankara has said the impasse was caused by the United States withdrawing support from a separate defence plan for Turkey, covering any possible attack from the south where it borders Syria, and that it wanted the issue resolved.

"NATO is an institution where Turkey has full veto rights, politically and militarily, and there are procedures here," the source said. "There is no such thing as Turkey blackmailing - a statement like that is unacceptable."

A diplomatic source told Reuters last week that Turkey was "taking eastern Europeans hostage" by blocking approval of the military planning, and a second source call Ankara's behaviour "disruptive".

NATO envoys need formal approval by all 29 members for the plan to improve the defence of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia against any threat from neighbouring Russia.

A Turkish diplomatic source later said Turkey was "open to offers", and that NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg was trying to find common ground between the allies ...
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More @ link
 
What do they need NATO's assistance for, in regards to their efforts in Syria?


They are the second largest military in NATO.  They have a modern army, and an air force equipped with a large fleet of upgraded & modern F-16's...  surely the ragtag militia's they are supplying to fight the Kurds (now that they can't as easily support ISIS) outta be enough backup, no?

Other than artillery firing from inside of Turkey into Kurdish areas, and possibly air strikes, I haven't seen a ton of professional Turkish military forces in the news clips.  Unprofessional militias being supplied by the Turks, on the other hand, seem to be everywhere. 



Not only that, but the Kurds are by far our preferred ally in the region.  What exactly does Turkey want us to do to support them again?  Bomb and kill the folks who sacrificed tens of thousands of their own to fight ISIS?  Since the Kurds waged that fight mostly between Turkey on one side & ISIS on the other, wouldn't Turkey prefer the Kurds next door over ISIS?  On the "surface" one would think so...


They might not be blackmailing NATO, as I'm not sure that is the correct term here.  But other than a refugee buffer, Turkey really isn't worth the annoyance it causes...  :2c:
 
CBH99 said:
What do they need NATO's assistance for, in regards to their efforts in Syria?


They are the second largest military in NATO.  They have a modern army, and an air force equipped with a large fleet of upgraded & modern F-16's...  surely the ragtag militia's they are supplying to fight the Kurds (now that they can't as easily support ISIS) outta be enough backup, no?

Other than artillery firing from inside of Turkey into Kurdish areas, and possibly air strikes, I haven't seen a ton of professional Turkish military forces in the news clips.  Unprofessional militias being supplied by the Turks, on the other hand, seem to be everywhere. 



Not only that, but the Kurds are by far our preferred ally in the region.  What exactly does Turkey want us to do to support them again?  Bomb and kill the folks who sacrificed tens of thousands of their own to fight ISIS?  Since the Kurds waged that fight mostly between Turkey on one side & ISIS on the other, wouldn't Turkey prefer the Kurds next door over ISIS?  On the "surface" one would think so...


They might not be blackmailing NATO, as I'm not sure that is the correct term here.  But other than a refugee buffer, Turkey really isn't worth the annoyance it causes...  :2c:
Click to expand...

Sadly, we need each other

Despite loveless marriage, NATO to keep Turkey close

'Host to U.S. nuclear warheads at its Incirlik air base and with the second-largest military in the alliance, Turkey gives the alliance a strategic presence, notably on the Black and Mediterranean seas. NATO is also seeking an image of unity when it holds a summit in London on Dec. 4 to celebrate 70 years since its founding in Washington, hoping to shore up confidence shaken by Trump’s portrayal of the alliance in crisis, diplomats said.'

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-nato-turkey/despite-loveless-marriage-nato-to-keep-turkey-close-idUSKBN1X41N9
 
With respect daftandbarmy,

Do we really need each other?  What does Turkey offer NATO (in the real world, not on paper) that we absolutely need?


1.  The US doesn't "need" nuclear weapons there, especially if their primary target is Russia. 

There are plenty of nuclear weapons positioned throughout Europe, not to mention the UK and French have nuclear forces of their own.  This doesn't include submarine launched nuclear weapons, either.

Also, how would that work?  If Turkey and Russia are allies, supporting each other's foreign policies and purchasing/supplying military hardware to each other...only to have a nuclear attack launched from Turkish territory?  The relationship between Turkey and the US has changed enough, the above might need be to considered.  (Most likely already has been.)


2.  Turkey, despite being a large NATO country with a professional military, doesn't seem to offer those forces to NATO operations in any real meaningful way minus naval contributions to task forces.

Even now, militias are being supplied/employed to do a majority of their ground fighting for them.


3.  Other than being a refugee buffer and absorbing a lot of refugees that would otherwise have made it to mainland Europe, what "good-willed" benefit does Turkey offer?

Let's not forget, Turkey - only a month or so ago - threatened to open the gates and allow thousands of refugees into Europe, if the EU didn't "properly word" their position in regards to the Turkish genocide of the Armenians. 

Not to mention the heavy-handed cleansing of Turkish societal institutions after the false-flag coup attempt.


There was a lot of press coverage about soldiers, police officers, news reporters, teachers, judges, etc etc being arrested and detaind after that.  I've tried to google information about those same people being released, and haven't been able to find anything.  Does anybody know?



With all due respect DandB, I don't know if we 'really' need each other all that much.  If they had a similar value system as the west, and could be replied upon to provide professional fighting forces to NATO operations, sure.  But I don't see either of those things happening.
 
CBH99 said:
With respect daftandbarmy,

Do we really need each other?  What does Turkey offer NATO (in the real world, not on paper) that we absolutely need?


1.  The US doesn't "need" nuclear weapons there, especially if their primary target is Russia. 

There are plenty of nuclear weapons positioned throughout Europe, not to mention the UK and French have nuclear forces of their own.  This doesn't include submarine launched nuclear weapons, either.

Also, how would that work?  If Turkey and Russia are allies, supporting each other's foreign policies and purchasing/supplying military hardware to each other...only to have a nuclear attack launched from Turkish territory?  The relationship between Turkey and the US has changed enough, the above might need be to considered.  (Most likely already has been.)


2.  Turkey, despite being a large NATO country with a professional military, doesn't seem to offer those forces to NATO operations in any real meaningful way minus naval contributions to task forces.

Even now, militias are being supplied/employed to do a majority of their ground fighting for them.


3.  Other than being a refugee buffer and absorbing a lot of refugees that would otherwise have made it to mainland Europe, what "good-willed" benefit does Turkey offer?

Let's not forget, Turkey - only a month or so ago - threatened to open the gates and allow thousands of refugees into Europe, if the EU didn't "properly word" their position in regards to the Turkish genocide of the Armenians. 

Not to mention the heavy-handed cleansing of Turkish societal institutions after the false-flag coup attempt.


There was a lot of press coverage about soldiers, police officers, news reporters, teachers, judges, etc etc being arrested and detaind after that.  I've tried to google information about those same people being released, and haven't been able to find anything.  Does anybody know?



With all due respect DandB, I don't know if we 'really' need each other all that much.  If they had a similar value system as the west, and could be replied upon to provide professional fighting forces to NATO operations, sure.  But I don't see either of those things happening.
Click to expand...

Might it be that Turkey firmly in Russia’s orbit would convey substantially greater disadvantage to the alliance? At present Russia is reasonably well separated from the Med. Losing Turkey from NATO would cede a couple useful squares on the chess board. Turkey could be much more useful to Russia than they seem inclined to be to us. Denying Russia that ally could be seen as sufficiently advantageous to keep them around.
 
Brihard said:
Might it be that Turkey firmly in Russia’s orbit would convey substantially greater disadvantage to the alliance? At present Russia is reasonably well separated from the Med. Losing Turkey from NATO would cede a couple useful squares on the chess board. Turkey could be much more useful to Russia than they seem inclined to be to us. Denying Russia that ally could be seen as sufficiently advantageous to keep them around.
Click to expand...

Or as previously said (in 1951);

http://archives.nato.int/uploads/r/null/1/2/120391/SGM-1136-51_ENG_PDP.pdf
The aims and the organization of the Atlantic Pact are purely
defensive, for it is designed to safeguard member states against
the danger of external aggression. . . .

The Italian Government is of the opinion that, in order to
achieve this result, when issues arising from the Pact are examined,
paramount importance should be ascribed to anything that may contribute
to ensure the best possibilities of effective defense in
the event of an aggression. From this point of view there is no
doubt that the bastion represented by Asia Minor (Turkey) has the
same value for the South Mediterranean sector of NATO as the
Scandinavian bastion has for the Northern sector. The loss of the
former bastion would drive Atlantic defense back to the Central
Mediterranean, the same as the loss of the latter would drive it
back to the Channel. In both cases the defense of the Continent
would become extremely difficult and the whole system would be
weakened by the loss of points d'appui of the highest strategic
value.
Click to expand...
 
Some of the latest ...
 
Retired CIA operator on the contradictions inherent in working with YPG Kurds (and in other places too):
The Inevitable Day of Reckoning in Syria

There has been a great deal of international outrage over what quite rightly has been called an abandonment of the Syrian Kurds by the United States. President Donald Trump’s rash actions in late October to remove U.S. special operations forces from Syria, condemned by both our foreign allies and nearly the entire U.S. foreign policy establishment, will go down as a dark point in U.S. unconventional warfare history.

As a former senior CIA official with extensive experience working with indigenous units, I shared such disgust and felt a sense of shame, as I knew firsthand what my U.S. military and intelligence community colleagues must have been feeling as they packed up and left nearly overnight. The bonds of working with indigenous units are formed on the battlefield and in the toughest of conditions. The Syrian Kurds in particular were both exemplary and courageous partners in the counter-ISIS fight. In my view, the precipitous U.S. withdrawal will undoubtedly complicate future efforts where the United States must work on the ground with indigenous forces. Following the recapture of all territory once held by ISIS, what was once defined as one of the most successful unconventional military campaigns in history will now be remembered as a sign of American capitulation and cowardice. How incredibly unfortunate.

That said, there is a stark superficiality to what has been written and discussed about this issue in the U.S. media. First and foremost, our Syrian Kurdish partners—the Syrian Democratic Front (SDF)—largely consisted of members of the People’s Protection Units, or the YPG. As the Turkish government claimed, and many in the U.S. national security community fully grasped as well, the YPG was simply a rebrand of the Syrian branch of the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK), a longtime terrorist group that has killed thousands of innocent Turks, and indeed Americans, in its decades-long struggle against the Turkish state, a NATO ally of the United States. The PKK holds a severe Marxist-Leninist ideology, certainly diametrically opposed with the principles of freedom and democracy espoused by the United States. In fact, colleagues of mine who have served at the U.S. Embassy in Ankara over the years remember all too well the danger they faced from the PKK. So let’s call it like it is — the YPG and the PKK for all essential purposes were one and the same.

War makes strange bedfellows, and as such a conscious and deliberate decision was reached by the U.S. government to partner with the YPG (i.e., the PKK) in the counter-ISIS fight. Make no mistake, the United States knowingly and deliberately threw in our lot with one arm of a terrorist group, albeit a more palatable one, to fight another who was far more deadly and a direct threat to the United States, including U.S. territory.

I was no stranger to dealing with such moral ambiguity, as this is a hallmark of the murky world of intelligence and special operations. In Afghanistan, U.S. relationships with warlords — some with possible ties to international drug networks and pretty lousy human rights records — had long been a part of the strategy in fighting al-Qa’ida and the Taliban. The recent “Afghanistan Papers” published by the Washington Post laid this bare for the world to see. But it was a deliberate strategy of the United States: the assessment after 9/11 was that U.S. operators would go to battle with anyone that could be useful in our fight against al-Qa’ida and the Taliban (within the confines of what the law allows, such as vetting of units receiving U.S. support and seeking to ensure the United States does not support or become complicit in war crimes or human rights abuses). As such, I personally had no moral qualms about our relationship with the YPG, as it was a mission critical requirement to defeat ISIS, which was (and remains) a danger to the United States as well as our interests around the world.

Quite naturally, the U.S. tactical alliance with the YPG was anathema to the government of Turkey, our strategic and often problematic ally of the last 70 years. The Turks viewed YPG senior leader Mazloum Kobani Abdi—the U.S. military’s most public YPG interlocutor—as a hardened terrorist. They charged that he previously had been a senior leader for urban operations in Turkey—that is a dry term for Mazloum’s role in killing scores of Turkish civilians in southeastern Turkey. Of some irony, the U.S. government has long had programs in the military and intelligence arenas to assist the Turkish government in its fight against the PKK. And thus, we were faced with a situation in which U.S. special operations forces and intelligence community personnel were working on the ground with a group that other elements of the U.S. government had traditionally been helping the Turks in trying to destroy.

This was a fundamental contradiction that never was resolved. And that everyone from the White House on down simply wished away to deal with for another day. That day became a reality with President Trump’s precipitous decision to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria, as a result of what appeared was a simple phone call from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who was pleading his case yet again that the U.S. support for the YPG was untenable to Ankara.

In discussing this paradoxical policy situation within U.S. national security circles, there were also potential force protection concerns for U.S. forces working with the YPG. The YPG units on the ground as well as their leadership were well too aware about the contradictions in U.S. policy. An imagined but not impossible scenario was that the United States helped the government of Turkey strike PKK targets, while the U.S. military and intelligence units in Syria were working side by side with the YPG in fighting ISIS. How would the YPG rank and file forces have reacted to such an event? Such questions kept me up at night while at CIA, and we discussed this ad nauseam internally at CIA and within the policy community. A proper solution could never be found, and we were essentially told to “get on with it,” executing a policy with massive contradictions.

The day of reckoning in our policy finally came to fruition in October. Yes, the outrage was justified that we abandoned our Syrian Kurdish partners, who were true heroes in the counter-ISIS fight. But for those of us who followed this issue closely, it was not a surprise that our support to the YPG would be fleeting and unsustainable. While we knew this day would eventually come, I for one always believed this could have been better managed with a gradual and deliberate withdrawal of U.S. support for the YPG as the counter-ISIS fight wound down and victory was at hand. There were actions we could have taken to “take the training wheels off” and slowly disengage with the YPG, enough so perhaps to satisfy the Turks that our alliance with the YPG was to be short-lived, but not disengage so quickly that our counter-ISIS operations were so affected.

In sum, President Trump caused a near calamity by his outrageously rash actions, jeopardizing both our war fighting ability against ISIS, and also causing terrible humanitarian costs that are still not fully known today. But make no mistake: a long-term relationship with the YPG was fundamentally both quixotic and impossible, given the historic grievances held by the government of Turkey against a U.S.-designated terrorist group that had killed thousands of Turks. It is important to understand this policy paradox the U.S. government faced when President Trump made his rash, immoral, yet fundamentally inevitable decision to disengage with the YPG and ultimately side with Turkey.

Marc Polymeropoulos (@Mpolymer) retired in June 2019 from the Senior Intelligence Service ranks at the CIA after a 26 year career in operational headquarters and field management assignments covering the Middle East, Europe, Eurasia, and Counter Terrorism.
https://www.justsecurity.org/67836/the-inevitable-day-of-reckoning-in-syria/
Click to expand...

Mark
Ottawa
 
Thanks for finding & posting that Mark.

I appreciate being exposed to various angles of the long term situation I hadn't thought of, or hadn't recognized the importance of in government policy circles.  Good post! 
 
Not the first, and not the last.  Some will (rightly, I believe) point out that:  Mujahadeen + unresolved conservitization = Taliban.  Passage of time and fate often will make unsavory bedfellows.  Add pragmatism and the fickle nature of the lens of history to regional events of the day as they influence and provoke a response based on a a nation’s interest, and You can see where the cycle will continue on in one form or another.

Regards
G2G
 
Meanwhile things are not looking great for the Turkish Air Force

https://ahvalnews.com/defence/turkeys-air-force-can-barely-fly-its-f-16s-analyst?fbclid=IwAR0NO1DNcJW2nSCqoabzNGt6b_461Fuc-hbiay4Y-eMWxR-gsuLEUVsHivU
 
Interesting sub title for a byline article contained in that link Colin:
"Turkey: How One Country Destroyed Their Own Air Force
Can you guess which?"

Why yes, yes I can guess which ...
 
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