Syria: Waiting for Someone Named Obama Even as the German foreign minister Guido Westerwelle who was on a visit to China diverted himself to Istanbul in a mission Saturday ostensibly aimed at tamping down Turkish-Syrian tensions, Der Spiegel calmly reported that the information about the «non civilian cargo», which led to the interception of a Syrian aircraft by the Turkish air force the previous Wednesday night, was actually passed on to Ankara by the American intelligence. Furthermore, Der Spiegel disclosed authoritatively, «Ankara only forced the plane to land after close contact with its Western allies»… The question naturally arises: Was it an incident that had been choreographed with a view to change the dynamics of the Syrian situation? Stranger ways have been found to kick-start wars in history.
Tag: Turkey
An anti-war protest was held in the Turkish capital Ankara on October 9, 2012. A recent opinion poll has revealed that more than 75 percent of the Turkish people are against a war with…
Syria banned Turkish passenger flights from its airspace from Sunday in a retaliatory move after Turkey confiscated a cargo of what Russia said was radar equipment en route from Moscow to Damascus last week….
On October 3, 2012 the Turkish military launched repeated mortar shellings inside Syrian territory. The military action, which was used by the Turkish military, conveniently, to establish a ten-kilometer wide no-man’s land “buffer zone” inside Syria, was in response to the alleged killing by Syrian armed forces of several Turkish civilians along the border. There is widespread speculation that the one Syrian mortar that killed five Turkish civilians well might have been fired by Turkish-backed opposition forces intent on giving Turkey a pretext to move militarily, in military intelligence jargon, a ‘false flag’ operation.[1] Turkey’s Muslim Brotherhood-friendly Foreign Minister, the inscrutable Ahmet Davutoglu, is the government’s main architect of Turkey’s self-defeating strategy of toppling its former ally Bashar Al-Assad in Syria.[2]
According to one report since 2006 under the government of Islamist Sunni Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his pro-Brotherhood AKP party, Turkey has become a new center for the Global Muslim Brotherhood.[3]
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin welcomes Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki during their meeting in the Novo-Ogaryovo residence outside Moscow, on 10 October 2012. Putin hosted al-Maliki for talks, hoping to take ties to a…
World leaders urged Turkey to step back from the brink of war with Syria after its parliament voted to attack Bashar al-Assad’s regime at will. Ankara’s forces continued their artillery bombardment of Syrian territory for a…
The mainstream American press has trumpeted for days the claim that Turkey is “retaliating” for artillery fire coming from Syrian government forces on the Syrian-Turkish border near the town of Akçakale. Because Turkey is a member of Nato (for 50 years), a declaration of war by Turkey could well drag Nato into a conflict. The Turkish people don’t like the turn of events … thousands of Turks took to the the streets in Ankara and Istanbul after Turkey’s parliament approved military operations against targets in Syria following the mortar attacks. The New York Times concedes: It was unknown whether the mortar shells were fired by Syrian government forces or rebels fighting to topple the government of President Bashar al-Assad. The Turkish response seemed to assume that the Syrian government was responsible. Many alternative news sources claim that this was a “false flag” attack to justify a Turkish attack on Syria. Indeed, before the mortar attacks, Russia warned of such a possibility: Russia expresses its concerns about the tense situation on the Syria-Turkey border and warns both to avoid tension.
On May 31, 2010, the Israeli right-wing government sent armed military troops to illegally board in international waters Gaza aid ships of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla organized by the Free Gaza Movement and the Turkish…
Turkey’s muscle flexing vis-a-vis Syria provides the newest fuse for the perennially unstable Middle East. While the Syrians rushed to offer a rare apology to Ankara over an errant mortar round that killed five Turkish…
Days of Syrian/Turkish border incidents threaten further escalation into something more serious. Free Syrian Army (FSA) militants fired mortar rounds on Turkish territory from Syrian locations they control. Assad was wrongfully blamed for their provocation….