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On Oct 10, 2014, at 7:35 AM, Michael Karadjis <mkarad...@gmail.com> wrote: > -----Original Message----- From: Marv Gandall via Marxism > >> Former ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, reveals to FP that such assistance >> has been conditional on the support of the two left-wing Kurdish parties - >> the PYD in Syria and PKK in Turkey - for the joint effort by the US and >> Turkish governments and the Free Syrian Army (FSA) to overthrow the Assad >> regime in Damascus. Despite having designated the PKK as a “terrorist” >> organization, secret talks between the US and the left-wing Kurdish parties >> to this end have been held over the past two years. > > That isn’t the way I read either the FP article or the secret correspondence > at its end. […] > I read nothing about the US conditioning support to the PYD on its support > "for the joint effort by the US and Turkish governments and the Free Syrian > Army (FSA) to overthrow the Assad regime in Damascus." First, that would > require the US to have such a goal. In FP, Ford says "The main thing is we > believed there needed to be a political solution that had to be negotiated > (ie, the eternal and only US view of the Syrian crisis). The Kurds needed to > be involved in that, even if we didn't think the PYD was fully representative > of the Kurds. We wanted to understand why they continued to work with the > regime and why they were hostile to Kurdish activists in the KNC." > > "To know why they continued to work with the regime" is different to > demanding they support the overthrow of the regime. As noted, the PKK/PYD > deny the accusation in any case. Yes, you’re correct, Michael. This morning’s Wall Street Journal supports your view. It reports, probably with some exaggeration, on “harsh criticism from Washington” and a “dangerous rift” between the US and Turkey having opened concerning the overthrow of the Assad regime which is reflected in the Erdogan government’s inaction on Kobani - apart from the long-standing hostility of the Turkish state to the PKK/PYD, of course. Turkey Sits Out Battle in Syrian Border City Ankara Chooses Not to Intervene in Fight Between Islamic State, Kurdish Militia By YAROSLAV TROFIMOV Wall Street Journal October 10 2014 Turkey’s unwillingness to intervene in the battle over a predominantly Kurdish Syrian city on its border has earned the country harsh criticism from Washington, exposing a dangerous rift over how the two allies want to tackle Islamic State’s rise. After more than three weeks of fighting for Kobani and its surroundings, the extremist group edged closer to seizing the city from Syrian Kurdish militia fighters on Thursday. By nighttime, city officials said the militants had managed to gain control of about a quarter of Kobani despite 19 U.S.-led airstrikes in the area in two days. The battle has unfolded within sight of Turkish tanks parked at the border. In an effort to find a common approach on how and against whom the war in Syria should be waged, the Obama administration’s coordinator of the campaign against Islamic State, retired Marine Gen. John Allen, went to Turkey on Thursday to meet with senior officials. But after a first day of talks in Ankara between Gen. Allen and Turkish officials, including Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, the State Department announced no breakthrough on issues dividing the two countries and indicated in a statement that discussions were likely to continue for some time. A joint military planning team will visit Ankara next week, U.S. officials said. The U.S., which started airstrikes on Islamic State following the group’s rapid advances in Iraq this summer, sees the militant organization as the main foe in an unsavory neighborhood. But Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has staked his international standing on ousting Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad, views the Assad regime’s brutality as the root cause of Islamic State’s rise. He is pressing the U.S. and its allies to commit to fighting Mr. Assad with the same vigor as they are fighting Islamic State. “The government is not going to budge on this,” a Turkish official said of Ankara’s demand for a strategy shift. “As long as you have Assad there, with his policies of dropping barrel bombs, chemical weapons, this vicious cycle is going to continue on and on with more groups, different groups, coming in.” Turkey also has little love lost for the Syrian Kurdish militias under attack in Kobani. These militias are affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, the Kurdish separatist movement that the U.S. classifies as a terrorist group. Though PKK is currently engaged in peace talks with Ankara, it battled the Turkish state for more than 30 years, for much of that time with the Syrian regime’s support. “The U.S. and Turkey are fundamentally not on the same page when it comes to the Islamic State’s threat in Syria,” said Frederic Hof, the Obama administration’s former special adviser on Syrian transition who is now a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council think tank. Both U.S. and Turkish officials have warned Kobani’s fall to Islamic State is imminent. Kobani is the smallest of the Kurdish-held enclaves along Turkey’s more than 500-mile-long frontier with Syria, and the Islamic State has been making steady advances on the city in recent days. Kurdish militiamen said recent air raids by the U.S.-led coalition have helped their defense. But street-to-street fighting continued Thursday as the militants renewed efforts to seize the city’s center, said Idres Nassan, an official for the Kobani regional government. Turkey has moved tanks and other armored units to an area just across the border from Kobani, and its parliament recently approved the government’s request for expanded war powers to counter Islamic State. But on Thursday, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said ground operations by Turkish forces to save Kobani wouldn’t stop Islamic State’s advance anyway. “It is not realistic to expect Turkey to conduct a ground operation on its own,” he said, adding that Turkey was in talks with allies and would “play its part” once there was agreement to take action. Part of the reason for this reluctance is fear of how the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, would respond, analysts say. With much of the Turkish-Syrian border controlled by Islamic State, the militant group is capable of orchestrating a string of terrorist attacks that would bring Turkey’s crucial tourism industry to its knees and endanger the economic advances that have given Mr. Erdogan his popular legitimacy. “Terrifying people is ISIS’s way of fighting. People just flee when they hear ISIS is coming,” says Ozgur Korkmaz, a columnist at Turkey’s Hurriyet newspaper. “They can retaliate with car bombs, explosions. We have had terrorism in the past, and it can always happen again. This is a real concern.” Turkey’s Kurdish minority is outraged. At least 26 people have died across the country in three days of protests against Ankara’s inaction in Kobani. Authorities have had to deploy tanks and impose curfew in several cities. Mr. Erdogan expressed “the deepest sorrow” on Thursday over the deaths but cast the unrest as an attempt to undermine Turkish peace and stability rather than a response to the Kobani crisis. The talks Thursday between Gen. Allen and Mr. Davutoglu touched on the formation of the international coalition to fight Islamic State forces and steps to strengthen the moderate rebels opposing the Assad regime in Syria, but U.S. officials did not mention the possible creation of a buffer zone between Turkey and Syria, a key Turkish request. While Turkey is pushing for steps to increase pressure on the Assad regime, the U.S. officials said in the discussions that strengthening the moderate Syrian rebels is essential, while they have estimated that process could take months. Both sides agreed to continue “dynamic and deepening” bilateral conversations to provide military support, counter foreign fighters and financing, and provide humanitarian assistance, in addition to delegitimizing Islamic State’s rhetoric. Gen. Allen and his deputy, Brett McGurk, recognized sacrifices they said Turkey has made in the crisis and emphasized “the historic and unbreakable” partnership between the two allies. Ankara’s reluctance to save Kobani is hardly surprising. The Kurdish militias there are essentially a Syrian branch of the PKK, the traditional enemy of the Turkish state. The group and its leader, Abdullah Ocalan, had been nurtured by the Syrian regime. Back in 1998, this support even caused Turkey to mass troops on the border and threaten war against Damascus. Though Mr. Ocalan—now in Turkish jail—has been holding peace talks with Mr. Erdogan’s administration since last year, the group remains a potent threat. Some Turkish politicians still argue it is a bigger peril than Islamic State. A prominent member of Mr. Erdogan’s party, former deputy prime minister Emrullah Isler, caused a stir this week with a tweet, that he subsequently deleted, asserting that the PKK is more brutal than Islamic State. Considering this history, arming, directly or indirectly, the PKK-affiliated Syrian Kurds in Kobani isn't something that Ankara can do lightly. “Currently, it is not possible for any government to give antitank weapons to a movement that they are fighting. Putting Kobani first, before the peace process, is putting the cart before the horse,” said Hugh Pope, director of the Turkey and Cyprus project at the International Crisis Group think tank and a former correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. Before offering any help, Turkey also seeks to extract from the Syrian Kurds a commitment to join the moderate Syrian opposition against Mr. Assad. “The Kurds have been conspicuously absent from the battlefield against the Assad regime. Turkey wants the Kurds to join the fight because it knows that the PKK guys are pretty good fighters,” said Soner Cagaptay, director of the Turkish research program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. A defeat for the Syrian Kurds in Kobani, however, could come at considerable costs for Turkey—and not just in terms of American outrage. The PKK has threatened to pull out of the peace process if Kobani falls, something that would be a catastrophic setback to Mr. Erdogan’s efforts to resolve his country’s long-standing conflict with the Kurds. The crisis in Kobani has also strained Turkey’s relationship with its main regional ally, the Kurdish regional government in northern Iraq. Though the leftist PKK and the conservative, pro-American Kurdish leaders in Iraq had long been rivals, the two Kurdish movements forged a united front against the Islamic State. Syrian Kurds provided crucial reinforcements that checked the Islamist fighters’ advances into Iraqi Kurdistan this summer. “Even at the street level, Iraqi Kurds now are beginning to see the PKK as protectors of the Kurds, and Turkey as siding with ISIS and wanting Kobani to fall,” says Cale Salih, a Kurdish-Iraqi analyst whose father is the former prime minister of Iraqi Kurdistan. —Ayla Albayrak, Yeliz Candemir, Felicia Schwartz, Asa Fitch, and Adam Entous contributed to this article. Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at yaroslav.trofi...@wsj.com ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
