Monthly Archives: October 2014

Britain, Iraq, Islamic State, NATO, Syria, Turkey, United States

Turkey: why isn’t it doing anything to curb the advances of Islamic State?

THE LACK OF TURKISH ACTION

Almost 200,000 people have been forced to flee and abandon their homes, joining 1.5 million Syrian refugees already in Turkey.

Poorly equipped Kurdish fighters – men, women and children – have tried in vain with AK-47 assault rifles to hold back the maniacal hordes of Islamic State fighters. The terrorists are armed with modern, heavy-grade American weapons.

IS now has a clear grip on at least a third of the Syrian Kurdish stronghold of Kobani on the border with Turkey.

U.S. and Arab warplanes and drones have been targeting IS positions, but to little avail. U.S. General Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, accepts the town could fall, leaving its remaining citizens facing rape, murder and torture at the hands of the barbarians besieging it.

All the while, just a few hundred yards over the border, Turkish troops look on. As IS fighters stalk the deserted streets of the town, Turkish tanks in clear sight of the calamity stand idle.

Turkey’s inaction as Kobani falls has provoked worldwide fury. Kurdish expats have taken to the streets throughout the country, and at least 19 people are known to have died in violent clashes against the government’s troops and police.

Washington has ‘voiced concern’ about Turkey’s reluctance to engage IS, even though it has its own parliament’s approval to do so.

Less diplomatically, a U.S. State Department official reportedly told the New York Times: ‘This isn’t how a NATO ally acts while hell is unfolding a stone’s throw from its border.’

It does, indeed, seem outrageous that Turkey, the second-largest land power in NATO with 290,000 troops, and a candidate for EU membership, is doing nothing to prevent a massacre on its doorstep. Why does it view the prospect of IS’s dreaded black banner fluttering over a town near its border with such apparent equanimity?

The main reason – and it is a very simple one – is that Turkey abhors the 1.3million Syrian Kurds more than it hates IS.

Turkey is home to some 15million Kurds – about 20 per cent of its population – many of who are locked in a violent secessionist battle with the Turkish government.

What Turkey really fears is that the Syrian Kurds will establish their own state on the Turkey/Syria border, which could prove deeply destabilising in a country with such a large Kurdish population. Anything – even IS – that weakens the Syrian Kurds reduces that threat.

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Turkey has, for 30-years, fought a brutal war against the far-Left militant Kurdish Workers Party (PKK), until a fragile ceasefire was declared in 2013. In those blood-soaked decades, 40,000 people were killed in vicious fighting that involved suicide bombers on the terrorist PKK side, the flattening of Kurdish villages on the other – and widespread allegations of torture on both.

What makes Turkey particularly reluctant to defend the Syrian Kurds in Kobani is that they are allied to the PKK, and committed to Kurdish homeland. This explains why Turkish border guards have been stopping PKK militia and other Kurdish fighters from joining their Syrian kinsmen in Kobani to fight IS.

And why, in contrast, they turned a blind eye to foreign jihadis flying into Turkey to take the long bus journey over the border to Syria – not to mention the 3,000 Turks who have joined IS after being recruited in rundown provincial towns.

Turkey’s response to IS was certainly complicated by the terrorists’ seizure of 49 Turkish hostages in Syria. But rather than refuse to negotiate, the Turks exchanged them for 180 imprisoned IS sympathisers.

Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has made it plain he sees no moral difference between the Kurds in Kobani and IS.

In a briefing, Mr Erdogan said: ‘It is wrong to view them differently; we need to deal with them jointly.’

One diplomat who is involved in attempting to build the anti-IS alliance says Erdogan hates the Syrian Kurds. What is more, the diplomat said, is that ‘he thinks they’re worse than IS.’

Elsewhere, the EU’s counter-terrorism co-ordinator, Gilles de Kerchove, said: ‘The Syrian Kurds are a big concern for Erdogan because he is not done with the PKK.’

Both the EU and the U.S. has designated the PKK as a terrorist organisation. The irony is that the West is now implicitly relying on PKK fighters to relieve Kobani. And the fact is that, until IS came along, the Syrian Kurds were getting ever closer to their dreams of an autonomous state.

In the chaos of the Syrian civil war, they had declared their own statelet, calling it ‘Rojava’, which straddled Syria’s northern border with Turkey like a series of cantons.

An embattled President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, locked in a lethal war with IS, tolerated this arrangement, which put Kobani right in the centre of the statelet. Little wonder IS considers the town to be of such strategic significance.

The Syrian Kurds have taken their lead from Kurds in northern Iraq, who have established their own thriving and virtually autonomous regime in an oil-rich region now known as Iraqi Kurdistan.

The difference, however, is that Turkey does not see the Iraqi Kurds – who will have nothing to do with the PKK – as a threat. Ankara invested heavily in the region and has become increasingly dependent on Kurdistan’s oil and gas to fuel its own growth.

In contrast, Turkey fears that any concession to the Syrian Kurds will fuel demands from its own restive Kurdish population for autonomy.

On top of all of this, you have the autocratic and self-determined nature of Erdogan who, in a move reminiscent of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, appointed himself president this summer after serving 12-years as prime minister.

No Turkish leader since the death in 1938 of Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, has invested himself with such power as Erdogan. But whereas Ataturk wanted to distance Turkey from its religious heritage, turning it into a power player in modern Europe, Erdogan has very different ideas.

As part of his general conservative push, Erdogan has been trying to re-orientate the country away from the decadent West and towards the Arab world, which the Ottoman Turks ruled for centuries.

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With his ambition to revive Turkey’s once-great power status, Erdogan has allied the country not only with the conservative Sunni Muslims of Saudi Arabia, but with the Muslim Brotherhood regime of former President Morsi in Egypt, and with the Sunni militant Palestinian group Hamas.

In doing so, he destroyed Turkey’s good relations with Israel, a staunch ally of the Kurds.

Relations with the newly-elected military regime in Egypt are grim, too. Erdogan’s emotional pull towards Sunni Arabs means he is implacably opposed to Syria’s President Assad, who is an ally of Shia Iran, and explains why he is so keen to back Assad’s enemies, even if it means backing IS.

That is why he is telling the U.S. that only if America extends its intervention in Syria to toppling Assad will he then move to help the Kurds in Kobani.

Erdogan will drive a very hard bargain before he contemplates any military action, not least because the Turks realise that while Western intervention comes and goes in the Middle East, Turkish intervention in Syria could involve the country in an intractable war that lasts decades.

Yet, this is a NATO country which the West hopes will put men on the ground to repulse IS. Some hope that is. For as well as supporting the terrorists, Turkey has been allowing British jihadis to cross its borders, while simultaneously claiming its desire to join the anti-IS coalition.

At this terrifying moment and juncture when IS appears to be unstoppable, it’s tragic for the West that Turkey is the country that holds most of the cards.

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Britain, Foreign Affairs, Iraq, Islamic State, Syria, United States

Western intervention in Iraq…

IRAQ

The UK Government, backed by the official opposition, has returned to the scene of one of our worst foreign policy misadventures. British fighter jets are once again dropping bombs on Iraq.

We should remember that the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, which resulted in the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the chaotic dismantling of the Ba’athist state, was meant to be an exercise in enlightened ‘liberal intervention’.

Today, however, Iraq is a broken and corrupt state, and is a country that is ravaged by sectarian conflict. Its border with Syria, fractured by perpetual civil war, no longer exists. A self-declared caliphate has been established by Islamic State (IS), a group of barbarous Sunni supremacists, who are highly motivated and well-trained. Many of the militants are from Europe, and the overarching objective of IS is one of genocide. Air strikes may have halted their advances in northern Iraq and parts of Syria but the militants will inevitably regroup, just as the Taliban has done in Afghanistan.

The Yazidis, a group of ancient religious minorities, along with Christians and Kurds, are being persecuted, murdered or cleansed from their ancestral homes. For these groups this is now an existential struggle for survival.

Throughout the region, too, tensions fester. The conflict between Sunnis and Shias shows no sign of abating, and President Assad and his fellow Alawites, a heterodox Shia sect, are holding onto power in what is largely left of Syria. Assad is holding on largely through the proxy support of Iran and through Lebanon’s Shia militia Hezbollah, which itself has sustained heavy losses fighting rebel groups in Syria.

The convolutions and corrupt autocracies within the Gulf, some of whom have been funding and arming the various anti-Assad groupings but now fear blowback, have joined Barack Obama’s fight against Islamic State. Saudi Arabia, for instance, looks both ways on terrorism: it musters all in its power to promote Wahhabism worldwide while simultaneously posing as an ally of the US and Britain, from which it buys fighter jets and other military hardware. For some, IS became a product of Saudi foreign policy.

We should wonder whether President Obama has a coherent strategy for the Middle East. The President was, after all, deeply reluctant to become embroiled and sucked into another Middle East war. In August last year, the US and British were preparing to intervene in Syria on the side of the rebels after the murderous Assad regime used chemical weapons against his own people in Aleppo. Now, the US-led coalition is bombing IS and the al-Qaeda affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra in Iraq and Syria, while remaining (ostensibly) opposed to President Assad.

Given the disastrous interventionist approach in both Iraq and Afghanistan in 2003, citizens of the Western world should be asking what Mr Obama’s plan is. What stamina does the US have for nation-building in the Middle East? How does it intend to tackle and defeat IS when its hardened fighters are so adept at melting back into the civilian population and when the president steadfastly refuses to countenance the use of US ground troops? What plan does America have for brokering peace between Sunni and Shia factions in Iraq? And what of geopolitical and diplomatic relations with Iran, without which there can be no lasting peace in the Middle East? Turkey, too, a NATO ally, needs to be fully engaged. The ultimate solution to the conflicts in the Middle East must come from within the region itself.

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Without our aerial support, responsibility for containing IS falls on Iraq’s weak army, overstretched and poorly equipped Kurdish peshmerga fighters, the forces of Syrian tyrant Bashar al-Assad, and a ragtag coalition of secular Syrian militias. Whilst the West should continue to support the Kurds diplomatically and arm their fighters, this alone will not be enough to prevent the genocide of the religious minority groups. If IS is allowed to gain strength and momentum, its deadly threats may well soon extend beyond the Middle East.

Following the democratic debate in the House of Commons Britain is right to join the US air strikes in Iraq. The Baghdad government’s plea for help and assistance makes this war legal. The campaign also has broad regional support, and is a last resort, given that you cannot negotiate with a ruthless and barbaric terrorist organisation.

The UK’s involvement is an admission of culpability for the condition of Iraq. Iraq is what it is now because of what has transpired since that ill-judged invasion of 2003. But while the British Parliament has been eager to support the Americans in the most of limited circumstances, i.e. it has backed intervention in Iraq but not in Syria, with the RAF having allocated six GR4 Tornados, based in Cyprus, to deal specifically with IS positions in Iraq, anything beyond this symbolic support would be a profound mistake. No matter how enthusiastic the Prime Minister is to engage IS in Syria, there is no desire or willingness among the British people for British involvement in a regional and intra-Islamic conflict that David Cameron has already said could last 30-years or more.

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Britain, Iraq, Islamic State, NATO, Syria, United States

A bloodbath on Europe’s and NATO’s doorstep…

KOBANI

David Cameron’s vow that Britain and its allies would not allow Islamic State (IS) to form a caliphate on Europe’s doorstep is difficult for the besieged people of Kobani to accept.

Huge plumes of black smoke have billowed over the pivotal border town as jihadi fanatics – some of whom claim to be British – have launched a terrifying onslaught.

Kobani, which lies just inside Syria on the border with NATO member Turkey, has been described as the town the world “cannot afford to lose” to the terrorists.

If they succeed in taking it, IS will control an unbroken 125-mile stretch of frontier with our Turkish allies.

Kobani is barely more than 200 yards from Turkey, which wants to join the EU, and for the past two weeks it has been possible for observers to stand on a Turkish hillside and watch as the jihadis under their black-flag tighten their stranglehold on the Syrian town. A massacre beckons, and nobody seems capable of stopping it.

Inside Kobani, populated by Syrian Kurds, fires rage as artillery shells rein down and thump in to densely-packed neighbourhoods.

On Sunday, at least 25 mortar rounds rained down on a hopelessly outnumbered army of resistance, a Dad’s Army style force that has come to be symbolised by a band of gun-toting grandmothers intent on protecting what they have.

A picture of the women, brandishing Kalashnikov assault rifles, was retweeted around the world by those anxious to raise awareness of the plight of the people of Kobani.

Outgunned, they respond only with occasional rocket-propelled grenades and bursts of rifle fire. They have also converted tractors and other farm equipment into armoured vehicles fitted with ageing Soviet-era guns.

Stopping towns like this falling was the reason the US launched a campaign of airstrikes – backed by the RAF in Iraq.

Yet, they have failed to stem IS’s brutal advance and a bloodbath seems horribly likely.

Seven men and three women from Kobani have already been beheaded by the jihadis, with the women’s heads placed on a macabre display in Jarabulus, a nearby IS stronghold. A gruesome and graphic photograph uploaded to Twitter purported to show a grinning IS fighter clutching the decapitated head of a girl. And there are sickening reports of women and girls being raped.

Over the weekend, too, a British jihadi taunted the people of Kobani by posting another image showing his terror gang was within sight of their homes.

The siege has forced some 160,000 people to flee across the frontier. Some sit weeping on hilltops on the Turkey side of the border, watching helplessly while their homes go up in smoke.

Fleeing families have told of unspeakable horrors. One young father, Mostafa Kader, who fled almost two weeks ago, revealed how the body of his sister-in-law and eight-year-old niece were found in a pool of blood. Mr Kader said that they had been raped and that their hearts had been cut out. He buried them with his own hands.

Islamic State is using captured US-made tanks and other military hardware which had been left in the hands of the Iraqi army, whole regiments of which have simply fled from IS.

The RAF cannot intervene because it has no mandate to bomb in Syria, despite British Tornados flying right overhead to conduct bombing raids in neighbouring Iraq. American warplanes have been bombing around Kobani, and 16 IS militants have been declared dead from airstrikes and ground attacks since Monday. But there are tens of thousands of IS fighters. These terrorist fatalities will hardly be enough.

The Turks have promised to ‘do whatever we can’ – a stray mortar even landed a mile inside Turkey wounding five people in a house near the town of Suruc. Convoys of lorries carrying Turkish tanks have been driven south to the border.

On social media, tech-savvy IS has been crowing that no one can stop it fulfilling its dream of carving out a medieval caliphate, in which anyone not adhering to its arbitrary strictures is beheaded or crucified, or has limbs chopped off.

It has been reported that some British jihadists have found it too much. Up to 100 are believed to have defected and are stranded in Turkey because they fear imprisonment if they return to the UK. Yet an estimated dozen or so would-be holy warriors from Britain are still joining the warped cause every month.

Mr Cameron warned last month of the ‘poisonous’ threat of jihadis returning to the UK, and said the world had to deal with IS.

He said: ‘If it succeeds, we would be facing a terrorist state on the shores of the Mediterranean and bordering a NATO member.’

But the ease with which British and other fanatics slip between Turkey and Syria, under the noses of border guards, makes a mockery of claims Turkey is cracking down on its label as a ‘gateway to jihad’.

People living in the frontier town of Akcakale say they never see the recruits – they cross at night and are smuggled illegally under a fence – but they do see their bags, which the smugglers transport separately. Every two or three days, some 50 or 60 Western rucksacks come through the official border crossing, and their luggage tags are easily identifiable – British Airways, Air France, Turkish Airlines.

What appears to be happening is that the smugglers arrange for their rucksacks to follow them. A Turkish porter might be used to carry them through the Turkish border gate and leave them in ‘no-mans-land’. A Syrian porter then comes from the other side and picks them up. It means the jihadists are reunited with all their belongings.

There are dozens of border towns strung along the 560-mile frontier where potential recruits can simply melt away until it is time to cross into Syria.

In the next few days, if Kobani does fall, Downing Street and the White House will face plenty of questions about whether their strategy to deal with Islamic State is working.

For the people of Kobani, it seems certain it will be too late.

Map of affected region:

Terrorist group Islamic State (IS) have launched attacks against the strategic Kurdish town of Kobani in Syria, forcing thousands of civilians to flee north to Turkey.

Terrorist group Islamic State (IS) have launched attacks against the strategic Kurdish town of Kobani in Syria, forcing thousands of civilians to flee north to Turkey.

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Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has called for a ground offensive to prevent the Syrian border town of Kobani falling under the control of the Islamic State. Such a call implicitly highlights the limitations of the West’s reliance on air power alone to defeat a determined and resilient foe. While US warplanes have carried out several air attacks against IS positions in and around Kobani, IS fighters have nevertheless succeeded in flying their menacing black and white banner from the rooftops of captured buildings. IS’s continuing advance against Kurdish-held positions in Kobani has prompted Turkey to deploy large numbers of tanks to protect its side of the border.

But while Mr Erdogan, like General Lord Richards, a former head of the British Army, is right to argue that air strikes alone are unlikely to defeat IS, the use of ground forces – or ‘boots on the ground’ – remains contentious and deeply problematic. For example, any attempt by Turkey to move its forces into Syrian territory in support of those defending Kobani, would likely be firmly resisted by Damascus. Such a situation developing might even lead to a further escalation in hostilities. The prospect of Western troops being deployed against IS, on the other hand, remains only a remote possibility, as politicians on both sides of the Atlantic remain determined to avoid the use of their ground forces at all costs. The high cost of human sacrifice and enormous sums expended in two recent costly wars will be high on the minds of our politicians. That leaves, then, the poorly equipped Kurdish fighters and their allies to defend the town against the formidable might of IS forces.

Mr Erdogan’s attempts to persuade the West to adopt a more realistic approach to the conflict might carry more weight if Ankara was able to provide more clarity about its own objectives. Turkey’s long-standing refusal to tolerate Kurdish independence has led some to suspect that Ankara has turned a blind eye to IS fighters regularly crossing its open and porous border. Turkey’s recent hostage swap with IS, for instance, in which Ankara reportedly freed a number of IS fighters in return for the release of Turkish diplomats taken hostage during the summer, suggests Turkey’s approach is very different to that of its NATO allies, who refuse to negotiate with terrorists.

Rather than cutting deals with IS, Mr Erdogan would be better to concentrate his efforts on helping the beleaguered Kurds. The Kurds are in desperate need of arms and reinforcements, but these are being denied because Turkey refuses to open its border.

But in supporting the Kurds, the West also needs to raise its game in terms of supporting the Kurds’ ground effort. To date, all Britain has offered the Kurds is a paltry sum of £1.6 million in military aid – miniscule when compared to the vast resources at IS’s disposal. If the West really does want the Kurds to defeat IS, we must give them the proper means to do so.

 

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