Turkey and USA cooperate against key ISIS stronghold

[Michael]

Preliminary information is that Turkey rolled into a critical ISIS stronghold in Jarabulus, which was identified as the primary ISIS supply line coming in and oil export going out back in 2014. The new event is reported as being primarily Turkish army with some US airstrikes and Syrian rebel forces coming in to take back the land after ISIS fled without much of a fight.

NT Times: Turkey’s Military Plunges Into Syria, Enabling Rebels to Capture ISIS Stronghold
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/25/world/middleeast/turkey-syria-isis.html

RT: Turkey, Ankara-backed rebels launch op to retake Syrian town from ISIS
https://www.rt.com/news/356911-turkey-syria-rebels-jarabulus-isis/

[Steve James]

Mike, it was a strike in Syria. How is Russia reacting? The rebels are all anti-Assad.

[Michael]

I'm thinking the subtext here is that Erdogan's recent visit to St. Petersburg paved the way for this action because all I've read so far is Russia giving some lip service and not making much of a protest. If that's accurate, still going on initial reports, I would take it to mean there is a consensus between Russia and Turkey that ISIS is a serious threat to both countries, as evidenced by the recent ISIS bombing in Turkey, so cutting off the ISIS new recruit and oil supply line in Jarabulus benefits Turkey and Russia, as well as Turkey getting US to agree to give its Kurds an ultimatum not to cross the Euphrates since Turkey could not tolerate the joining of those two Kurdish groups.

Syria has to suck it on the Turkish invasion and on rebels getting that territory, but benefits from ISIS losing it.

No idea if this is accurate yet, but it could be the kind of compromise that would bring an end to the war, although indications would be at the expense of some Syrian sovereignty, however it's difficult to imagine another way to get this kind of consensus with Turkey, Russia and the USA.

[chud]

Turkey is calling the attack "Operation Euphrates Shield".

Russia says it is deeply worried about the attack hurting relations in Turkey between the Kurds and Arabs.

Both the Kurds and the Syrian government say the Turkish attack is a violation of Syria's sovereignty, and that Turkey is meddling in Syria's internal affairs.

But apparently the Kurds at Manbij said they would withdraw east of the Euphrates.

[Michael]

I think this was all pre-arranged between Russia and Turkey, and probably with concessions from Syria as well, then agreed to by the USA.

[wiesiek]

looks
that Erdogan has the opportunity to close the Kurds case...
I only don`t know is he just using it or made it happen!

[Michael]

Voltaire network said all along that the plan behind the scenes was an agreement with Turkey, Israel, USA and NATO to let there be a Kurdish zone in NW Syria of the Kurds that Erdogan could handle.

[Dajenarit]

Yes, Obama and Clinton Created ISIS – Too Bad Trump Can’t Explain How It Happened

by Glen Ford.

Clinton supporters rejected out of hand Donald Trump’s charge that she and Barack Obama “created” the Islamic State -- and even Trump seemed to retreat from his statement. But, a solid case can be made that Obama and Clinton were, indeed, the "most valuable players" in spawining ISIS. Moreover, it is an historical fact that the U.S. and Saudi Arabia created the international jihadist network from which al Qaida and ISIS sprang, almost four decades ago.

Donald Trump has backtracked -- sort of -- on his assertion that President Obama and Hillary Clinton are “the founders” of ISIS, or the “most valuable players” on the Islamic State team. “Obviously, I’m being sarcastic,” said the self-styled “America-Firster” – quickly adding, “but not that sarcastic, to be honest with you.”

Trump cannot articulate or fully grasp the horrific truth of his original statement because that would require a much more fundamental indictment of U.S. imperial policy in the Muslim world since the last days of 1979, when Zbigniew Brzezinski convinced President Jimmy Carter to set the jihadist dogs loose in Afghanistan. As stated in his memoir From the Shadow, Brzezinski advised Carter to aid the right-wing Muslim resistance to the leftist, secular government in Afghanistan in order to “induce a Soviet military intervention” and thus embroil the USSR in a Vietnam-like quagmire. Brzezinski viewed the so-called Mujahadeen as potential foot soldiers of U.S. global policy. “What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?” Brzezinski asked, rhetorically, decades later.

Having acted in accordance with Brzezinski’s counsel, President Carter can accurately be described as a founding “creator” of al Qaida, along with fellow “most valuable player” Ronald Reagan, whose CIA partnered with Saudi Arabia to spend billions drawing Muslims from around the globe into the war in Afghanistan. Together, the U.S. and the Saudis gave birth to the international Islamic jihadist movement – a phenomenon that had not previously existed in world history. The jihadists would become an essential weapon in the U.S. imperial armory, a ghastly tool for regime change in the Muslim world which also doubled as justification for the never ending American quest for planetary dominance, now that the Soviet boogeyman was gone.

Brzezinski became Barack Obama’s foreign policy guru, with consequences that should have been predictable for U.S. Middle East policy but were largely ignored by liberals and so-called progressives in their euphoria at the exit of George W. Bush.

Clearly, the U.S. public would not tolerate another episode of massive, direct U.S. troop involvement in the region; that was no longer an option. But what force, then, was available to execute Washington’s unfinished agenda for conquest in this part of the world? In 2011, Obama launched the Mother of All Proxy Wars, first against Muammar Gaddafi’s government in Libya, then swiftly mobilizing the totality of the international jihadist network that had been created out of whole cloth under Carter and Reagan nearly 30 years before. Washington and its NATO partners in the Libya aggression, in close concert with Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, turned Syria into a cauldron of death, funneling billions of dollars in weapons to literally hundreds of Salafist and outright mercenary militias, with Al Qaida’s regional affiliate, al Nusra, at the core. This was Obama’s idea of a “smart” war: a frenzied terror offensive cloaked in lies and deception.

The criminal foreign policy pursued by Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is rooted in the same worldview arrogantly articulated by Brzezinski when he derided those who fretted over the blowback that might result from deploying “some stirred-up Moslems” as foot soldiers of imperialism. As the U.S. and its allies literally competed with each other to flood Syria with the weapons, funds, intelligence resources and diplomatic and media cover to bring down the government in Damascus, they collectively created both the material basis and political space for the jihadists to pursue their own ideological objectives. ISIS emerged, to establish a caliphate of its own in Syria and Iraq. No one should have expected otherwise.

Back in July of 2014, we at Black Agenda Report described the rise of ISIS as signaling “the final collapse of U.S. imperial strategy in the Muslim world -- certainly, in the Arab regions of Islam.” We wrote:

“Think of it as a Salafist declaration of independence...from the Arab monarchies and western intelligence agencies that have nurtured the international jihadist network for almost two generations. The Caliphate threatens, not only its immediate adversaries in the Shiite-dominated governments of Syria and Iraq, but the potentates of the Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait and the Mother of All Monarchist Corruption in the Arab Sunni heartland, the Saudi royal family. The threat is not inferential, but literal, against ‘all emirates, groups, states and organizations’ that do not recognize that ISIS in its new incarnation is the embodiment of Islam at war.’”

ISIS did not exist when President Obama took office and put Hillary Clinton in charge at Foggy Bottom. His (and her) regime change in Libya and massive, terroristic pivot to Syria “created” ISIS. And, let’s get the history right, on this score: the U.S. did not reject the jihadist death cult that became ISIS; rather, the Islamic State divorced itself from the U.S. and its European and royal allies. Yet, it still took the Russian intervention in Syria in September of last year to push Washington to mount more than token air assaults against ISIS. Apparently, the U.S. wants to avoid killing too many Islamic State fighters, in hopes that there will be lots of them left to join U.S.-sanctioned jihadist outfits when it gets too hot for ISIS. (Al Nusra has changed its name and resigned from al Qaida -- with the blessing of al Qaida’s leadership in Pakistan -- so as to better blend in with the other jihadist outfits on western payrolls.)

You don’t need to take Donald Trump’s word for it, that Obama and Clinton have been “most valuable players” for ISIS. The U.S. military’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) came to much the same conclusion, back in 2012. The military spooks’ reports, declassified last year, showed the DIA had warned that “the West, Gulf countries, and Turkey [which] support the [Syrian] opposition” believe “there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in eastern Syria (Hasaka and Der Zor), and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime.”

The DIA was alarmed that

“...the deterioration of the situation has dire consequences on the Iraqi situation and are as follows:

“This creates the ideal situation for AQI [al Qaida in Iraq, which became ISIS] to return to its old pockets in Mosul and Ramadi, and will provide a renewed momentum under the presumption of unifying the jihad among Sunni Iraq and Syria, and the rest of the Sunnis in the Arab world against what it considers one enemy, the dissenters [meaning, Shia Muslims]. ISI could also declare an Islamic State through its union with other terrorist organizations in Iraq and Syria, which will create grave danger in regards to unifying Iraq and the protection of its territory.”

Thus, a year after Obama and his European and Arab friends brought down Libya’s Gaddafi and shifted their proxy war of regime change to Syria, U.S. military intelligence saw clearly the imminent rise of ISIS -- and that “this is exactly” what “the West, Gulf countries and Turkey...want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime.”

Yes, Obama created ISIS, with the enthusiastic assistance of Hillary Clinton, and he is still nurturing al Nusra, the erstwhile affiliate of al Qaida, which was mid-wifed into existence by Jimmy Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski. In the intervening years, the jihadists have become indispensable to U.S. imperial policy, but especially so since George W. Bush’s defeat in Iraq, which soured the American public on “dumb” wars – meaning, in Obama-Speak, wars in which large numbers of Americans die. Proxy wars are ideal -- “smart,” because only Arabs and Africans and people that Americans have never heard of, die. Libya wasn’t even a war, according to Obama, since no U.S. personnel perished.

The truth about ISIS and the Obama administration is so obvious that even Donald Trump has a hazy idea of what happened in Syria and Libya. However, the spoiled man-brat white nationalist billionaire from Queens is incapable of putting the Obama/Clinton/ISIS connection in the historical context of U.S. imperial policy. Sadly, most “liberals” and far too many “progressives” (including Black ones) are afflicted with the same disease as Trump: extreme imperial chauvinism -- which is practically inseparable from white supremacism. Extreme imperial chauvinism allows Americans to send to the White House people that should, instead, be sent to the gallows or a firing squad (after a trial, of course). It allows Americans that claim to be on the “left’ side of the spectrum to recoil in horror at Donald Trump (who hasn’t killed anybody that we know of, and who says he will not engage in regime change as president), yet will vote for a woman whose career is soaked in the blood of hundreds of thousands in the Middle East and the northern tier of Africa, and whose husband set in motion a genocide that has killed six million people in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

One candidate, Trump, most resembles the late Alabama governor George Wallace with a “let’s make a deal” foreign policy. The other, Clinton, is a genocidal maniac, whose crimes as president will be Hitlerian in scale.

What is scarier than Clinton or Trump, is that Americans seem to have no visceral aversion to genocide (of non-white peoples). But, unless you’re a Green or some shade of Red, genocide isn’t even an election issue.

[Dajenarit]

With Trump or Hillary, The Crisis in Syria Will Only Worsen

by Joshua Frank.

No-fly zones, American troops on the ground, thousands more dead–that’s the future of Syria if Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have their way. Either will surely make us miss Barack Obama’s subtle restraint, at least when it comes to how he’s handled the brutal regime of Bashar al-Assad, our former ally in torture.

There’s been much rambling on the left about Vlad Putin’s challenge to US empire in Syria, and how he fended off the Yanks and preserved Syria’s Assad dictatorship. All of this, of course, is horse shit. Obama had ample opportunity to topple Assad in the early days of the Syrian uprising in 2011 had he wished to, but he refused to send troops in or raid Damascus. Instead he adopted a more hands-off approach, opting to have the CIA train some 10,000-20,000 rebels with the help of Saudi funds, which surely had little impact on the ground as the insurgency itself was at least ten times that large. In fact, aside from training small contingents of rebel forces, the CIA blocked MANPAD shipments to rebels that could have been used against Assad’s, and later Russia’s, murderous air bombardments. And for those that believe the US was solely responsible for orchestrating the uprising against Assad–I’ll just say you are dead wrong and should pick up a copy of Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War for a solid primer about what was really taking place on the ground.

However, US involvement, in any way, was and is totally unjustifiable. As was Russia’s intervention, of course, despite the rather hollow rationale that Assad seeking Russia’s military aid was legal under international law. Assad’s so-called legitimacy was shattered the moment his armed forces began slaughtering his own people who had assembled in peaceful protest against their government’s oppressive neoliberal policies. You know why many in his military turned on him? It wasn’t because the CIA forced them to, it was because they couldn’t carry out orders to murder their fellow citizens any longer. But for me, Assad’s well-documented starving of Palestinians in a Syrian camp was the last straw. The guy is scum.

There’s been plenty of debate among self-righteous Western lefties about what qualifies as “imperialism” and how such definitions fit the Syrian narrative. Some tend to believe Russia’s actions in Syria don’t qualify because these well-intentioned folks adopt some antiquated neo-colonial Leninist ideology, while others believe the US ought to stop (if they could) Russia’s and Assad’s savage ways at any cost. But for those on the ground that are under assault from all sides, they could care less about our petty debates. Every foreign fucking bomb falling from their sky is imperialistic.

Hopefully most of us can agree that when it comes to the Middle East, the US has seldom been an honest broker. As a result, the US has little to no authority to dictate or attempt to steer the Syrian quagmire in one direction or another, nor do they have the right to. How anybody could plea for the US to intervene, or at the very least supply rebel groups with more weaponry, must be delusional. The US will only make matters worse for civilians on the ground, just as Russia did.

And for all of those who hailed Russian intervention? If those piles of dead kids weren’t enough for you to oppose Putin’s bombs, perhaps what Trump and Hillary are ready to do in response to Putin’s grandstanding may do the trick. If you think Hillary won’t seek NATO action against Russia or show Putin which country really has more military might, you haven’t been paying much attention to the Queen of Chaos lately. Where Obama held back from using military force in Syria, Trump and Hillary are ready to escalate the conflict under the guise of fighting the “War on ISIS”, which would likely create a whole new proxy war. Trump’s little bromance with Putin would be over in no time.

Early on Hillary pressed Obama to overthrow Assad and has more recently flip-flopped on whether or not she would seek boots on the ground in Syria. She has, however, stated that she supports a no-fly zone. For his part, Trump has called for 30,000 ground troops. It’s one big bloody mess, and will only worsen as foreign powers, be they Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, France or the United States, continue to believe that they can kill their way to peace–as if Syrian peace is really what they are after.

So what’s to be done? I have no doubt that the brave Syrian people can navigate their future much better than we can. The left should oppose all military intervention in Syria–be it Russian or American. ISIS, for that matter, will not be eliminated by missiles or foreign armies. It will only be defeated by people that live there–those protecting their family’s land, homes and communities. Let the locals destroy them from the bottom-up. They already have the resources and will to do so. As for Assad? His days are numbered no matter how long Putin’s pit bulls guard the gate. The resilience and tenacity of the rebellion has certainly shown us that much.

[Dajenarit]

[Steve James]

Moreover, it is an historical fact that the U.S. and Saudi Arabia created the international jihadist network from which al Qaida and ISIS sprang, almost four decades ago.

That is a fact.

[chud]

Voltaire network said all along that the plan behind the scenes was an agreement with Turkey, Israel, USA and NATO to let there be a Kurdish zone in NW Syria of the Kurds that Erdogan could handle.

That's an interesting theory, but what I'm hearing is that the Turks are in Syria for one reason: to stop the Syrian Kurdish militias.
Anything else that they do there, like strikes against ISIS, are just incidental.

[Steve James]

Turks are in Syria for one reason: to stop the Syrian Kurdish militias.
Anything else that they do there, like strikes against ISIS, are just incidental.

That's what I've heard, too.

[Steve James]

Turks are in Syria for one reason: to stop the Syrian Kurdish militias.
Anything else that they do there, like strikes against ISIS, are just incidental.

That's what I've heard, too.

[windwalker]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcaI0n4Uypg