Obama Places the US on a Collision Course With the Kurds

Tweet

And now we have the Obama administration begetting yet another international calamity, this time involving the Middle East's 30 million stateless Kurds, who have long befriended the United States.

In a New York Times article entitled "Turkey and U.S. Agree on Plan to Clear ISIS From Strip of Syria’s North" by Anne Barnard, Michael R. Gordon and Eric Schmitt, we are told of a plan to clear "Islamic State militants from a 60-mile-long strip of northern Syria along the Turkish border." However, we are also informed that this plan comes at the expense of Syria's Kurds:

"In another complication, gains for such insurgents would come at the expense of Kurdish militias that are already fighting the Islamic State farther east with American air support and that have been eyeing the same territory.

. . . .

Syrian Arab insurgents would gain at the expense of the People’s Protection Units, a Kurdish militia known by the initials Y.P.G. that is seeking to take the same territory from the east. While the United States views the group as one of its best partners on the ground, Turkey sees it as a threat; it is affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, a militant group whose longstanding conflict with Turkey has flared anew in recent days."

Syrian Arab insurgents would gain at the expense of the Kurds? Oh really. As noted by this article:

"[O]nly 60 Syrian insurgents having been formally vetted and trained by the United States under a Pentagon program, questions also remain about which Syrian insurgents and how many will be involved in the new operation. A larger number of rebels that American officials deem relatively moderate have been trained in a covert C.I.A. program, but on the battlefield they are often enmeshed or working in concert with more hard-line Islamist insurgents."

In fact the primary beneficiary of this operation is Syrian mass murderer Bashar al-Assad, who is allied with Iran, and who, it was recently revealed, has not destroyed all of his chemical weapons stockpiles.

Moreover, it is no coincidence that Turkey has taken advantage of this opportunity to launch renewed air strikes against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K., which in the past has sought autonomy for Turkey's 14 million oppressed Kurds, comprising almost 20 percent of Turkey's population.

Yup, the US is again being suckered, this time by Obama's best friend, Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan.