Double dealing tyrant who's sabotaging the West's battle to crush ISIS

[Surya Gayatri]

Turkey's Erdogan seems to be doing almost everything he can to cripple the forces actually fighting ISIS, writes MICHAEL BURLEIGH

.../

To be fair, on the surface, Turkey’s president is fully involved in the fight against ISIS. In October he allowed U.S. jets to use Turkey’s Incirlik air base for operations against ISIS, pledging that his forces, too, would join the fight.

But the truth is that Turkey’s planes have aimed their missiles almost exclusively at the one army which poses a real threat to ISIS, and has won countless battlefield victories against them — the Kurdish PKK forces inside Syria.

The trouble is that Erdogan, who has spent years ruthlessly concentrating power into his own hands, considers the Kurds an even greater threat to his nation than ISIS.
.../

The fact is that ISIS could rapidly be destroyed if Kurdish forces in Syria and Iraq — along with Kurdish guerillas in Turkey — were fully unleashed. They have proved extraordinarily militarily effective and oppose every aspect of Isis’s devilish ideology.



Erdogan’s deep fear is not ISIS, but rather 40 million Kurds in Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran who might coalesce into a single new state.

That’s why he has been bombing the Kurds (and illegally sending his planes into northern Iraq to hit PKK bases) rather than focusing on ISIS.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3335819/Double-dealing-tyrant-s-sabotaging-West-s-battle-crush-ISIS-Turkey-s-Erdogan-doing-cripple-forces-actually-fighting-ISIS-writes-MICHAEL-BURLEIGH.html

________________________

Surprisingly good read, albeit from the Daily Mail.

[pampango]

1. Erdogan certainly should be included in the cast of tyrants

contributing to the success if ISIS. Like the others he thinks he is pursuing 'national interests' which trump a sole focus on ISIS

[notadmblnd]

2. I read an article somewhere yesterday in regards to his son

being involved with arming ISIS. I thought I read that here, but it could have been somewhere else.

[teach1st]

5. Here's the link

Meet The Man Who Funds ISIS: Bilal Erdogan, The Son Of Turkey's President

[olegramps]

7. He is nothing more than a two-bid dicatator and Islamic fundmentalist.

There was an article in our local paper about a person who had lived in the United States and returned to Turkey to teach. He left because he said that it was an intolerable situation in which anyone critical of the government was subject to arrest.

[ancianita]

3. Thanks for this. It's an important reminder of what the Kurds have explained to the West for years.

[FlatBaroque]

4. I recommend Russia send a drone

to target Erdogan's son, the one who is financing ISIS.

[elleng]

6. Some analysis about that:

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2015/11/25/wesley_clark_isis_serving_interests_of_turkey_and_saudi_arabia_someones_buying_the_oil_isis_is_selling.html

Wesley Clark: ISIS "Serving Interests Of Turkey And Saudi Arabia," "Someone's Buying The Oil ISIS Is Selling."

More:

http://www.plenglish.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=4383531&Itemid=1

Former NATO Commander Says Turkey Supports Terrorism PDF Imprimir E-Mail
Washington, Nov 26 (Prensa Latina) Former NATO commander Wesley Clark said that Turkey supports the terrorist Islamic states, according to CNN.

Speaking on television on Wednesday the former soldier said that Islamic extremists serve the interests of the authorities in Ankara.

The retired general statement entered in the context of the Turkish jet that shot down a Russian plane taking part in bombing missions against jihadist group in northern Syria.

Asked whether he agreed with Russian President Vladimir Putin that Turkey helped the EI, Clark said there was always the idea that the Turkish support that terrorist group in some way, including in recruiting men and by buying stolen oil to Syria.

The extremist group is somehow serving the interests of Turkey, and even of Saudi Arabia, as it represents a threat to an eventual axis Iran-Iraq-Syria-Lebanon, because it is believed that can isolate the Turks and remove the Saudis from the game, he said.

This is a power struggle for the future of the Middle East, concluded Clark, for whom it is not a secret the great interests behind the large oil and gas reserves in the region that can be moved in the future through pipelines by Syrian territory, something that many analysts point as one of the backgrounds of the crisis in the region.

According to Western media Ankara acquired nearly 800 million dollars in oil obtained by jihadists in Syria and became routine entry of trucks loaded with this fuel to Turkish soil, something possible with the complicity of the authorities of that country.

Moreover, the New Eastern Outlook publication, reported that Necmettin Bilal Erdogan, the son of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is in the business of oil smuggled from Iraq and Syria by terrorists, which allowed the extremist organization converting million fuel barrels million to the coffers jihadists.

[ensemble]

8. Where is the manpower and money coming from...

to support ISIS? Where are the ISIS oil tankers delivering oil? These are not difficult questions if you want to know the answer.

[pampango]

11. As of last year ISIS was selling its oil to the Turkish and Syrian governments and to the Kurds.

That may have changed.

ISIS is selling cheap oil to its enemies — from Syria's government to the Kurds

ISIS has been described as the world's "richest terrorist group," largely thanks to the oil fields it controls in Iraq and Syria. The militants likely generate more than $1 million in sales each day, and much of that oil is pumped in eastern Syria with the tacit approval of the group's ostensible enemy: the Assad regime. Western trade sanctions block imports of fuel into Syria. Landis says that has made the Assad regime reliant on oil that's either smuggled into the country or pumped inside Syria itself — which means dealing with ISIS.

"The Assad government has to run its war machine, it has to run its cities, it needs power," Landis says, and it can get its power from ISIS "cheaply" because ISIS controls much of the country's oil fields. Syria isn't the only unlikely customer, he says. "Turkey, the Kurds — everybody is buying cheap oil and smuggling it across their border. So the notion that you have clear allies working against ISIS, it's not the case."

There's potential for current American airstrikes to destroy the black market oil trade and cut this important source of income for ISIS. "We can easily take out the oil," Landis says. "We can bomb ISIS tankers, we can bomb the oil wells. This would be very easy. They're sitting out in the desert where everyone could see them."

But that would be a last resort. " may ask the neighbors to stop exporting it first, because it doesn't want to destroy all this infrastructure and the truck drivers are civilians not ISIS", he says. "It will, of course, cause a lot of hardship to the civilian population, and I'm not sure America is there yet."

http://www.pri.org/stories/2014-09-16/isis-selling-cheap-oil-its-enemies-syrias-government-kurds

That was in September of 2014. Now Russia and the US are bombing oil trucks. And the Syrian government's tacit ceasefire with ISIS is over. A lot has changed in the past year.

[roomtomove]

9. An intentional porous border

also allows Daesh black market oil through and of course most of the refugees pass through Turkey because they want nothing to do with them.

[starroute]

10. Here's another good piece along similar but complementary lines

It's too long to do it justice with an excerpt, but here are some opening snippets.

https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/europe-is-harbouring-the-islamic-state-s-backers-d24db3a24a40#.j9wz7qwnp

Syrian passports discovered near the bodies of two of the suspected Paris attackers, according to police sources, were fake, and likely forged in Turkey.

Earlier this year, the Turkish daily Meydan reported citing an Uighur source that more than 100,000 fake Turkish passports had been given to ISIS. The figure, according to the US Army’s Foreign Studies Military Office (FSMO), is likely exaggerated, but corroborated “by Uighurs captured with Turkish passports in Thailand and Malaysia.” . . .

This barely scratches the surface. A senior Western official familiar with a large cache of intelligence obtained this summer from a major raid on an ISIS safehouse told the Guardian that “direct dealings between Turkish officials and ranking ISIS members was now ‘undeniable.’”

The same official confirmed that Turkey, a longstanding member of NATO, is not just supporting ISIS, but also other jihadist groups, including Ahrar al-Sham and Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria. “The distinctions they draw [with other opposition groups] are thin indeed,” said the official. “There is no doubt at all that they militarily cooperate with both.”

[jwirr]

12. Unfortunately each of our so called allies in the ME have

a bunch of factions in their own area that they are also enemies of no matter if they support our allies.

[marmar]

13. All of this is very true, but.....

..... let us not forget the West's role in helping create ISIS.