Meanwhile in Turkey...
Posted: Fri Jul 15, 2016 4:56 pm
...a military coup. WTF is going on??
https://apnews.com/1517087f2d3b4f6685fc ... _medium=AP
US to step aside for Turkish assault on Kurds in Syria
By ZEKE MILLER and LOLITA C. BALDOR
today
WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House said Sunday that U.S. forces in northeast Syria will move aside and clear the way for an expected Turkish assault, essentially abandoning Kurdish fighters who fought alongside American forces in the yearslong battle to defeat Islamic State militants.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has threatened for months to launch the military operation across the border. He views the Kurdish forces as a threat to his country. Republicans and Democrats have warned that allowing the Turkish attack could lead to a massacre of the Kurds and send a troubling message to American allies across the globe.
U.S. troops “will not support or be involved in the operation” and “will no longer be in the immediate area,” in northern Syria, White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said in an unusual late-Sunday statement that was silent on the fate of the Kurds. There are about 1,000 U.S. troops in northern Syria, and a senior U.S. official said they will pull back from the area — and potentially depart the country entirely should widespread fighting break out between Turkish and Kurdish forces.
The announcement followed a call between President Donald Trump and Erdogan, the White House said.
The decision is a stark illustration of Trump’s focus on ending American overseas entanglements — one of his key campaign promises. But his goal of swift withdrawals in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan have been stymied by concerns from U.S. officials and American allies about the dangerous voids that would remain. As he faces an impeachment inquiry at home, Trump has appeared more focused on making good on his political pledges, even at the risk of sending a troubling signal to American allies abroad.
Key Republican leaders in Congress appeared taken aback by the move.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., said Monday in an appearance on “Fox & Friends” that he had not spoken with Trump about the decision and had concerns.
“I want to make sure we keep our word for those who fight with us and help us,” he said, adding that, “If you make a commitment and somebody is fighting with you. America should keep their word.”
One of the show’s hosts, Brian Kilmeade, asked McCarthy to try to intervene and “call the president before it’s too late.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., one of Trump’s most vocal backers, also weighed in via tweet, saying that, “If press reports are accurate this is a disaster in the making.”
Trump, meanwhile, tweeted a lengthy defense Monday morning, writing in all-caps that, “WE WILL FIGHT WHERE IT IS TO OUR BENEFIT, AND ONLY FIGHT TO WIN.”
In December, Trump announced he was withdrawing American troops from Syria but was met with widespread condemnation for abandoning Kurdish allies to the Turkish assault. The announcement prompted the resignation in protest of then-Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, and a coordinated effort by then-national security adviser John Bolton to try to protect the Kurds.
Since January, U.S. officials have tried to broker the creation of a “safe zone” in northern Syria to provide a security buffer between the Turkish military and Kurdish forces, but Turkey has repeatedly objected to its slow implementation.
The White House announcement Sunday came a day after Erdogan offered the strongest warning yet of a unilateral military operation into northeastern Syria, as the Turkish military has been dispatching units and defense equipment to its border with the area.
“We have given all kinds of warning regarding the (area) east of the Euphrates to the relevant parties. We have acted with enough patience,” Erdogan said.
The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces threatened to respond forcefully to any Turkish incursion.
“We will not hesitate to turn any unprovoked attack by Turkey into an all-out war on the entire border to DEFEND ourselves and our people,” SDF spokesman Mustafa Bali tweeted Saturday.
A Kurdish official speaking on condition of anonymity because he’s not authorized to brief reporters said Monday they expect a limited Turkish operation and are still working to ascertain what will happen with American forces in the region. The official said the view is that Kurdish-led forces have a legitimate right to self-defense.
Turkey considers the People’s Protection Units, or YPG, an extension of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, which has waged an insurgency against Turkey for 35 years.
A senior U.S. official said Sunday that American troops will pull back from the security zone in northeastern Syria, where they have been working with Turkish troops, to an unspecified out-of-the-way location. There have been U.S. troops around Manbij.
The official added that if Turkey goes ahead with the incursion into Syria, it is expected to trigger a large combat response from the SDF, and U.S. troops will almost certainly withdraw completely from Syria. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
U.S. defense leaders have long known that America would not get into an all-out war with Turkey, a NATO ally. But that has been stalled until now by aggressive negotiations by the U.S., urging Turkey against invading. The official said senior leaders never believed that the U.S. would go to war to save the Kurds, but just hoped to put off that scenario.
The official said U.S. leaders have spoken with the SDF and that the group, which has long fought alongside the U.S. against IS, is disappointed and angry.
Mattis and other Pentagon leaders had worried that withdrawal would lead to a resurgence of IS in the country, particularly if the SDF abandon the prisons holding the fighters to battle Turkey.
The White House statement Sunday said Turkey will take custody of foreign fighters captured in the U.S.-led campaign against the Islamic State group who have been held by the Kurdish forces supported by the U.S.
Ambassador James Jeffrey, the State Department envoy to the international coalition fighting the Islamic State group, and Trump have said the Kurds have custody of thousands of captured Islamic State militants. They include about 2,500 highly dangerous foreign fighters from Europe and elsewhere whose native countries have been reluctant to take them back and another 10,000 or so captured fighters from Syria and Iraq.
Trump has repeatedly demanded that European countries, particularly France and Germany, take back their citizens who joined the militant organization.
Kurdish officials have expressed concerns of a possible breakout by IS prisoners in case of fighting in the area. In a recently released audio recording, IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi called on members of the extremist group to do all they can to free IS detainees and women held in jails and camps.
IS was defeated in Iraq in 2017. In Syria it lost its last territory in March, marking the end of the extremists’ self-declared caliphate. Despite these battlefield defeats, IS sleeper cells have continued to launch attacks in both Iraq and Syria.
Although I am not as old and respect my elders ( ) this is apples and oranges. Also the military, especially the Navy, made attempts to rescue somePandemonium wrote: ↑Wed Oct 09, 2019 4:07 pm
It's funny, but I'm old enough to remember the end of the Vietnam War and I don't recall anyone being upset we left Vietnam to the tender mercy of the Communists. The American public was just happy we were out of there.
Why Turkey Treated Trump’s Letter as Trash
There may be no more vivid illustration of how American leadership has declined in the world.
When Fox News’ Trish Regan first reported President Donald Trump’s October 9 letter to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, some journalists and pundits wondered whether it was a joke or a hoax. But the White House confirmed: It was genuine.
“History will look upon you favorably if you get this done the right and humane way. It will look upon you forever as the devil if good things don’t happen. Don’t be a tough guy. Don’t be a fool!” Trump wrote, signing off incongruously, “I will call you later.”
As it turns out, the Turkish government didn’t stop to puzzle over whether the missive was authentic or a joke: It quickly concluded that it was both.
The letter “was not taken seriously at the time, especially given its lack of diplomatic finesse,” Gülnur Aybet, a senior adviser to Erdoğan, told NPR’s Morning Edition today. The BBC quoted a Turkish source saying that “President Erdoğan received the letter, thoroughly rejected it, and put it in the bin.”
The letter’s language and the puerility of Trump’s attempt at forestalling a Turkish invasion of northern Syria are embarrassing on their own—the language and syntax resembling a tense note exchange in a middle-school classroom far more than the stilted conventions of international relations.
But Trump has long dismissed such critiques of his language as mere tone-policing, another side of the political correctness he decries. His language is, he has contended, “MODERN DAY PRESIDENTIAL”—all caps his, and self-reinforcing. Trump may not sound like a typical president, he and his defenders contend, but his blunt style is more forceful and effective than the mannered language of po-faced diplomats and effete leaders such as Barack Obama.
The fiasco in Syria shows, however, that this style is not only unbecoming—it’s ineffective, too. Faced with a strongly worded missive from the president of the United States—the supposed leader of the free world and the most powerful head of state in NATO, an alliance of which Turkey is a member—Erdoğan snickered and tossed it in the trash. (And not just metaphorically, according to the BBC.) There are perhaps more vivid illustrations of how little respect Washington gets and how American leadership has declined in the world, but none comes to mind at the moment.
The best argument for Trump’s decision to yank American troops out of northern Syria is that Turkey was determined to invade no matter what and the president acted to get U.S. soldiers out of harm’s way. It’s not a very good argument, since Trump successfully held off Erdoğan for two years, but let’s assume for the sake of argument that it is true.
If so, Trump wasted more than a week of precious time. Erdoğan charged forward with the invasion without regard for Trump’s warnings. When the president moved forward with the sanctions he threatened in the letter, it didn’t rattle Erdoğan at all. American troops were fired on in the chaos of withdrawal. American planes are bombing U.S. munitions dumps to prevent them from falling into enemy hands. Independent observers have identified atrocities in the fighting.
Today, Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are in Ankara to attempt old-fashioned diplomacy. By now, it might be too late. “They say, ‘Declare a cease-fire.’ We will never declare a cease-fire,” Erdoğan said Tuesday. If Erdoğan sticks to his guns, literally and metaphorically, it will show how little American leadership is respected overseas. If Pence and Pompeo succeed, it will demonstrate the failure of the president’s personal approach. Not that he seems to care what happens. “They’ve got a lot of sand over there,” Trump said yesterday. “So there’s a lot of sand that they can play with.” It’s hard to believe that world leaders don’t put more stock in his word.
I’m on a bunch of other forums, most which have a political sub-forum and I have to say there’s a lot of really screwed up people on both sides that this shit has totally consumed their every waking moment. There’s a few I wouldn’t be shocked to hear or read about going postal in some fashion. I don’t bother much with Facebook but the rare times I do, it’s like staring through the bars of an asylum.mockbee wrote: ↑Thu Oct 17, 2019 1:41 pm(Snip)
*I know it's hard to sleep at night because of this guy (Trump), but the more I really digest about what has happened the last 3 years, the more I am at least at a little better sense of ease. I know that sounds weird and crazy, but he is actually doing all of this on purpose, his actions are not random. They are a lot of times WRONG, but they are not random. I think we, the CRAZED left , need to get to an okay (normal) place, I mean to take him seriously, he is not a joke, in order to be able to move on. The country is depending on us getting there. Or else it's going to be Trump forever, seriously.
That's just my opinion....
Messy, yes, but everything is speculation so far. There has been bombings and some casualties, but we haven't seen mass slaughter yet. If there has, the news media is doing a terrible, terrible job. I suspect there is just provocations and some deaths so far. There were provocations and some deaths before the withdrawal.Pandemonium wrote: ↑Thu Oct 17, 2019 10:12 pmIt’s not really a cease-fire, it’s essentially a 5 day time frame for Kurds to get out of the 30 mile zone on the Syria land bordering Turkey which has been Turkey’s stated short term goal before they get (more) carpet bombed by Turkey’s military. Even Ergogan thumbed his nose saying it’s not a cease fire and they have the option to start shelling at any time if they feel the Kurds make any provocative actions. Capping that, Trump is halting whatever sanctions he was threatening to impose on Turkey.
Trump basically gave Erdogan everything he wanted. Turkey wanted the Kurds gone and that land. They’re agreeing to a few day pause to get the Kurds out without having to shell them. So now where do the Kurds go, the people we backed to fight ISIS? I guess they give up their land in exchange for not being ethnically cleansed.... this month.
Meanwhile, where are all those formerly jailed ISIS fighters escaping to?
Yeah, whatever movie the extremes on both sides are watching....sucks. Like really sucks. My movie is alright, could be better, sometimes tragic, sometimes thrilling, sometimes funny as hell.....but mostly focus on living my life in my movie.Pandemonium wrote: ↑Thu Oct 17, 2019 10:20 pm
I’m on a bunch of other forums, most which have a political sub-forum and I have to say there’s a lot of really screwed up people on both sides that this shit has totally consumed their every waking moment. There’s a few I wouldn’t be shocked to hear or read about going postal in some fashion. I don’t bother much with Facebook but the rare times I do, it’s like staring through the bars of an asylum.
‘What Is Going to Happen to Us?’ Inside ISIS Prison, Children Ask Their Fate
A rare inside look by New York Times journalists exposes an enormous legal and humanitarian crisis, one that the world has largely chosen to ignore.
NORTHEASTERN SYRIA — The prisoners cover the floor like a carpet of human despair. Many are missing eyes or limbs, some are bone-thin from sickness, and most wear orange jumpsuits similar to what the Islamic State, the terrorist group they once belonged to, dressed its own captives in before it killed them.
Upstairs, jammed into two cells with little sunlight, are more than 150 children — aged roughly 9 to 14 — from a range of countries. Their parents brought them to Syria and ended up dead or detained. The children have been here for months and have no idea where their relatives are or what the future holds.
“I have a question,” said a boy from Suriname inside his cell. “What is going to happen to us? Are the kids going to come out?”
Rare visits to two prisons for former residents of Islamic State-held territory in northeastern Syria by The New York Times this week laid bare the enormity of a growing legal and humanitarian crisis that the world has largely chosen to ignore........
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/23/worl ... e=Homepage