I haven’t reviewed these, but this is a pretty good account from what I’ve seen and some people have indicated a desire to know more about the Kurds.

And, assuming these are any good, it’s a cool move.

Google Drive

Happy With Nobody

Michael Weiss links to a piece from August about some of the situation on the ground for civilians; stuff that can get lost in the geopolitics. In particular, it looks at protests in the Deir ez-Zur region against the SDF and how the SDF have (not) addressed the subject, and tensions (exploitation) within the Kurd dominated military and government.

Chatham House: Protests in Deir Ezzor: Causes and Main Demands

On the far western front, in Idlib, the people sound like they fucking hate everybody at this point. They are just so beyond fed up. With good cause; it seems that every force in the region has blown something up in their backyard and they’ve been occupied and had their occupation replaced several times by different forces in the last decade. Like, they went from being under Assad’s Arab Stalinist regime to being conquered by ISIS, and the SDF pushed out ISIS, and then the SNA seizes the area from the SDF, and then even one local al-Qaeda SNA militia lets an ISIS leader hang out so the USA blows the shit that you’d been displaced for these assholes to build their compounds up. Plus they’ve gotten bombed by Russia the whole time. People are living in caves and shit. They’re pissed.

Edit: As I was saying-this just came out:

SOHR: In conjunction with targeting vital facilities in Idlib countryside .. more than 50 airstrikes pound “Putin – Erdogan” area

Edit2: Just to round things out, here’s a piece on the situation on the ground in Turkish (backed forces) occupied Ras al-Ayn.

SOHR: In Ras al-Ayn, factions of the “National Army” continue their violations against civilians and attempts to intimidate the remaining population amid catastrophic bread and water crisis

A Tale of… How Many Policies?

So this is interesting: utterly scathing Jerusalem Post piece shredding the US state department and policy. I double checked to see if I actually had the source right.

Jerusalem Post: U.S. State Dept. hopes Turkey will help with Iran

Turkish President Erdogan to visit Washington on November 13.

A lot of it is clearly accurate factually, and a lot of it really checks out. And it’s a good read.

They build on what others have said in stating that the Iran-hawk faction is also pro-Turkey, and they ultimately want to work with Turkey to stem Iranian influence.

Wanting to work with Turkey, then, is the missing piece to why the US has abandoned the Kurdish dominated SDF, and now is working in a plan to recreate them around the Arab units within SDF, particularly those who are already in the southeast Deir ez-Zur region.

This all makes sense. However, it is inconsistent with some other stuff that makes sense. And nothing seems to explain everything, i.e. the empirical situation of US deployment.

But then the piece also, in great frustration, says this:

The US is trying to secure oil fields but the State Department doesn’t know about or care about this mission. As usual with Syrian policy the State Department conducts one foreign policy and the Pentagon another and the White House a third policy. So the State Department tells reporters to ask the Defense Department what is happening with the oil fields near Rmeilan in northeast Syria. That’s Pentagon territory. But the State Department and James Jeffrey, the Syria envoy and anti-ISIS envoy, does care about the anti-ISIS campaign, so they note that the oil fields might be anchor for the anti-ISIS fight and the “legal basis for our military to be there in northeast Syria in the first place with our local SDF allies.” The SDF needs the oil. The US State Department has no guidance on what to do with the oil though.

Emphasis added.

They’re basically confirming and explaining the factions within the administration with their differing goals, requiring different strategy and tactics.

It’s a really good, highly informed rant in some ways. Highly recommend.

Meanwhile, groups on the ground underneath the SDF continue to appeal to the international community to help. To the extent that the JPost piece is accurate, it’s not hard to understand why.

I still haven’t seen any report that anyone on the Trump administration has anything resembling a plan about what to do with the Kurdish military, which is tens of thousands of people.

Well, not counting Erdogan, I mean.

Back to Business?

Ummmmmmmm…

So the SDF is working with the international coalition again? That’s really, really interesting. That technically means only help fighting ISIS, but close contact with American led forces can only be a good thing for the problems facing SDF/SDC/“the Kurds.”

This is probably a huge new development and a monkey wrench in the best laid plans of some of the actors.

This also furthers the whole no coherent policy thing; it appears a virtual certainty that people within the administration/military are doing what they can to push the limits of their mandate to accomplish objectives that might not totally be what Trump has in his idiot mind.

Nothing yet from the Coalition or Operation Inherent Resolve Twitter accounts as of yet. And OIT was pretty quick to Tweet about sending 4-Battalion 118 Infantry Regiment to Deir ez-Zur, so it’s not like their shy about these things. If anything, for stuff like this they probably prefer that the enemy opposition is aware of their presence and potential for the decisive use of force.

 

Back to Diplomacy?

Looks like we might be trying “diplomacy” again?

US Dept. State: Special Representative Ambassador James Jeffrey Travels to Turkey

Special Representative Ambassador James Jeffrey Travels to Turkey

MEDIA NOTE

OFFICE OF THE SPOKESPERSON

NOVEMBER 6, 2019

Special Representative for Syria Engagement and Special Envoy for the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS Ambassador James Jeffrey will travel to Ankara and Istanbul, Turkey, for meetings with senior Turkish officials and members of the Syrian opposition on November 8-9, 2019.  Ambassador Jeffrey is leading an interagency delegation to discuss issues of mutual concern to include, the current situation in northeast Syria, implementation of UNSCR 2254 on the resolution of the Syrian conflict, and our continued efforts to ensure an enduring defeat of ISIS.

Nobody knows what this means exactly. But it appears to mean two things:

• We’re so not out of Syria.
• We don’t know who’s driving policy.

We kinda already knew those things. But they keep being intensified rather than resolved.

 

Or Not?

Submitted without comment.

 

Israel Wants a Piece

We need one of those side eye emojis in this place.

JPost: Knesset to discuss state of Syrian Kurds for the first time

KNESSET TO DISCUSS STATE OF SYRIAN KURDS FOR THE FIRST TIME

By ANNA BARSKY,MAARIV ONLINE

The Knesset is scheduled to have a discussion on the state of the Kurds in Northeast Syria for the first time since the Turkish invasion, initiated by Blue and White MK Zvi Hauser.

The last time a similar initiative was brought to the floor of the Knesset was in May 2018.

Edit: Yup…

In a rare public dissent with U.S. President Donald Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu offered humanitarian aid to the “gallant Kurdish people” on Oct. 10, saying they faced possible “ethnic cleansing” by Turkey and its Syrian allies.

Tzipi Hotovely, Israel’s deputy foreign minister, told parliament on Wednesday that the offer had been taken up.

“Israel has received many requests for assistance, mainly in the diplomatic and humanitarian realm,” she said. “We identify with the deep distress of the Kurds, and we are assisting them through a range of channels.”

Reuters: Israel aiding Syria’s Kurds, advocating for them with U.S.: official

Edit2: Turkey already positioning itself in relation to Israel in the war of public opinion:

Ahval: Turkey condemns Israel’s plan to expand settlements in West Bank

Where We Are:

So this has shaped up to be a very interesting and potentially very good day for Rojava.

• SDF has been seen working with US troops, with a howling response from pro-Turkish types.
• The SDF and SAA have been kicking the shit out of the Turkish backed militias. Big uptick in videos of combat and morale on the front is reported to be high. Seems ISIS is afraid to fight except when they have Turkish aircraft overhead. Some good trash talking too.*
• The International Coalition announced they were working with the SDF again.
• Gen. Mazloum of the SDF is basically doing a media junket of interviews and stuff.
• Israel wants in.

Reading the tea leaves, I think someone in US command (or the administration?) had a “Finkle is Einhorn,” moment and realized that now that we’ve verified that the Turkish backed militia have been so thoroughly infiltrated by jihadis which they have helpfully announced to the world over social media, well, then, Turkish backed militia is ISIS… and they’re allowed to kill them. And help the SDF kill them.

Considering that also happens to be Turkey’s proxy force, if the US starts really backing the SDF against ISIS again (an easy sell to the public; “Turns out there was some left, so we’re finishing the job.”) they can effectively de facto back them against Turkey without violating their mandate or NATO treaty. See if Turkey wants to get their proper regular troops involved, eh?

Who knows what we’ll actually do, but a new and real threat of force is back in place.

Plus, there’s the added benefit of ISIS consolidating organizationally and geographically, making them much easier for a conventional army to kill. And this far, they are.

It would have been a brilliant month long strategy if anyone had done it on purpose.

Basically, the entire dynamic on the ground may be shifting. But we don’t know because the US is anything clear about our policy. But that might also be because pro-Kurd types have managed to wrest control of policy…

…which isn’t necessarily a good thing, even if one approves of the results. Like, that shouldn’t be able to happen.

But… all told... Gotta say, it was a good day.

*Google translate is obviously limited, and idioms and specific usage often gets distorted… but sometimes you can figure out how the words work. Anyway, not one of the more complicated examples, but one of the more endearing and amusing things to see on Twitter is SDF fighters happily Tweeting things like, “We killed 7 gangs while protecting the Jesus village near Tel Timr.”

Edit: In the last few hours, there’s been a huge proliferation of Tweets about NATO and how they’re fucking this up. There is now at least a plethora. So this is their next appeal to the international community, it would seem.

WOMENZ SPEAKING DEH WERDS!!@!

A bit dated, but some context on our NATO ally and why it can be difficult to discern what is the will of the people and what is the political system.

Her name gets thrown around a lot. As it should.

I mean, the often overlooked key to non-violent protest is to model good behavior in your protest so that lesser informed people can look at it and, not even knowing much about the situation, just know:

That ain’t right.

So Turkey Gave TSFA Tanks?

RedSwarm86

I kind of miss the use of the term Daesh to describe the assholes.  Apparently, saying Daesh inside an ISIS gathering can get you flogged or worse, as they consider it a rather extreme insult.  Or so it is said.

That 1991 video is interesting; thanks for that.  Turkey has been a bit of a mess (if that’s the right word) for quite a while before 1991.  I still believe that there were some missed opportunities where some higher level attention and diplomacy from the US could have made a difference (large or small, I do not know) in Turkish/US relations.  I haven’t been to Turkey (although it still remains relatively high on my bucket list), but I know enough that there is a huge cultural gulf between Istanbul and eastern Turkey that makes the gap between San Francisco and Alabama a crack in the sidewalk in comparison.

If makes you feel better, a lot of the people on the ground still call them Daesh. Like the US military, etc. It’s even on their Twitter accounts, some of them, anyway, like OIR.

Speaking of… Looks like that arms export embargo Germany (and France) put in place was a bit late:

Bad Guys Want You to Recognize Their Venality

OK, so this is so hilariously messed up and yet totally on point:

ISIS is now finally cracking down on their militia members videotaping themselves being assholes.

I can’t stop laughing.

Jerks.

 

Erdogan Wants More than His Inch

It has begun…

RUDAW: ‘Safe zone’ in northern Syria not yet cleared of Kurdish forces: Erdogan

‘Safe zone’ in northern Syria not yet cleared of Kurdish forces: Erdogan

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — Turkey is aware of the presence of Kurdish fighters in the planned “safe zone” in northern Syria, said Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday, adding that his country will continue its cross-border operations against Kurdish “terrorists” to the end.

“We are aware that there are still terrorists in the planned safe zone. They [US and Russia] cannot deceive us by saying that they have driven out the terrorists from these areas,”Erdogan tolddeputies of his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) at the Turkish parliament.

 

Fucking clockwork, I tell ya’…

Erdogan is also questioning our commitment to the war in terror.

The last temptation is the greatest treason,

To do the right thing for the wrong reason.

Not exactly T.S. Elliot here, but Erdogan isn’t wrong about the US failing in the war on terror here, yeah?

New Rojava hype video!!

If you click on the thread, it’s a recut video of a song dedicated to someone killed in a Turkish bombing; the original is in the thread.

Totalitarian propaganda is so severe and swollen with gravitas. Right wing terrorist videos are dedicated to showing how serious and hard they are.

Something about this good attitude in the midst of it all strikes me as making for a truly terrifying opponent.

I would not fuck with these people. But we’ll see.

DukeSox

Rev – is the feeling in your monitoring of local media that this is something that couple spiral (even more) out of control and turn into a real state v state war (or a regional war) or is this all just power positioning now that there is a vacuum?

OK, so: Are states gonna start really shooting at one another?

Damned if I know. But I can lay out the moving pieces—and some of what’s fascinating about this conflict is that, as you point our, we have so much access to people on the ground, local media that we can fact check, and so forth.

Anyway, as per above, a lot of this devolves down to the resolution of the interstate conflict between Syria and Turkey. Which ultimately means the border and border territories.

What happens with c) from above, the border and what happens to the occupied territories and proposed “safe zone” is, for reasons that will become clear, a function of “the Kurdish question” of northern Syria. What’s going to happen to them?

First though: ISIS.

(For simplicity sake, I’m calling all the jihadis ISIS. I really don’t care if phrases like, “the more pragmatic Islamism of al-Qaeda” make philosophical sense. Fuck these guys. ISIS is their fucking fault. So:ISIS.)

ISIS in Syria faces real trouble.

The key here is that, as per a previous post, Turkey’s support for them in the cross border incursion seems to be waning if not being withdrawn altogether. At the same time, as part of their international campaign to tell the world how hey’re actually the biggest terrorism haters in the world and the bestest most committed to fighting terrorism in the world, they have said that obviously they would not allow the re-entry to Turkey if terrorists.

So, if Turkey sells out the ISIS militia they’ve been supporting and then shut down the border and/or arrest ISIS if they try to cross—a task for which their military is already deployed—then they are fucked.

Poor jihadis. Who could have guessed they would be fucked over by the capitalist imperial nation state system which they are dedicated to overthrowing.

If Turkey decides to shut off their borders to ISIS and not support them on the ground, then Turkey becomes the mill stone against which the SAA and SDF can grind the remaining ISIS forces in Syria into dust. The SDF has never had ground support from mechanized units and artillery before.

As per a previous post, this appears to be what’s happening in much of the Turkish occupied territories.

The issues to consider (and I don’t know the answers) stem around:

• What does Turkey want out of this?
• How far does Turkish incursion go (geographically) before Turkey’s safe zone goals are accomplished? (As per below, this is more complicated than just the land.)
• How far will Turkey go with respect to ridding the area of the Kurds?

The Kurds:

So what happens to the Kurds. Well, Turkey wants them gone. Of course, unless Erdogan is going to try (harder) to slaughter them all, he has some problems.

First thing to consider is their evolving relationship with the Assad regime. They’ve been at war for like five years, but have recently agreed to work together to resist Turkey, which means SAA units are now spread across SDF held territory despite their being no political solution as to how they will coexist after the conflict.

Assad obviously wants all the land. The Rojava political wings seem to accept their may need to be a resolution that does not include them getting an independent state, but they also want some degree of autonomy within the state and don’t want to be ground up after the conflict.

In this regard, Assad’s goal is to reassert sovereignty over all of Syrian territory, and if he can do that and they stop fighting with him, fuck it, they can stay. He’s even offered to “allow” former YPG/YPJ members to just joint up with the SAA no questions asked.

Now, the SDF have basically said… no, they don’t want to do that. It’s an obvious attempt to weaken their integrity and abilities, both militarily and politically, by breaking them up. The subtext I’m reading, though, is that Assad covers the SDF for his own. I mean, they’re a elite US SpecOps trained force with extensive combat experience. This is a big concern in much of the security community. Heck, Assad could have them train his army if they were willing. And then we might as well send all our operational manuals directly to Tehran.

But yeah, “the Kurds” don’t want to do that. So it’s a sliding scale of how integrated with Assad’s regime, which affects Turkey getting what they want with respect to the Kurds.

Turkey wants the Kurds gone and/or dead. Which raises two obvious questions:

• Who’s going to help protect them from Turkey (A NATO ally, remember!) to the extent that they stay (or try to) in northern Syria?
• To the extent that they don’t stay, where the fuck are they going to go?

Turkey wants them gone from the safe zone. That’s all well and good, but does that mean just the YPG/YPJ fighters, it all the civilians too? Turkey claims the former (which is their justification for their operations) but is engaging in the practices of pursuing the latter, e.g. seizing homes, refusing reentry to the region, making life generally miserable, pillaging, &tc.

So there is the key tension here between what Turkey wants and what others will let them have. Turkey is a huge threat to Syria if they try to let the Kurds stay roughly where they are with Syrian support; Turkey has already invaded, for that matter. So it becomes a matter of their resolve, and Erdogan is a tyrant.

But then, where the fuck do the Kurds go? Is Erdogan content with just driving them 30km from the border and just leaving them there? Not bloody likely, and even as “phase 2” of their plan was being out into place (the safe zone), he already stated making noise about a safe zone that extended not 30km but 100km from the border. Obviously the rear the area, the less appealing it is to Assad.

Also: People already fucking live there, and to not great land to the south. Also, the US is making noise about training a new proxy army from scratch made up of the Arab tribes in the southeast of Syria to hold the region and work with them instead of the Kurds.

Seriously. Our policy is getting that incoherent.

(This is a good mini thread to read.)

So if there’s no place for the Kurds to go… where do they go? The major entities, being facilitated by no less than the UN in fact, have been dealing with and facilitating the forced migrations of hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people (IDP).

But we’re not talking about just a shit ton of Kurdish refugees, as much of a problem is that is. We’re talking about the aforementioned elite combat tested fighting force fighting for both homeland and ideological cause that also so happens to be taking all of this with remarkably good humor.

Are they just going to disappear after being attacked by Turkey and sold out by the international community? Do they join up with the Kurds in Iraqi Kurdistan? Do they go on the counterattack against Turkey, working with the PKK or not, and become the world’s most sympathetic terrorists? (Which would be horrible optics for the GWOT. Do they become the A-Team, except instead of a small four man crew it’s like six fucking divisions? Do they regroup on COBRA island? Do they dissolve into the land and coordinate over the internet to become the League of Assassins?

Who the fuck knows? I mean, on paper… Erdogan’s only solution appears to be to slaughter them all.

Border/Territory:

So those are the main moving pieces, and it rests on the various negotiations with respect to:

• How the Assad regime and the SDF (and he civilians!) get along.
• Based on the above, what Syria and Turkey negotiate with respect to the territorial outcome and how it affects the Kurds.

Could Syria and Turkey get into a shooting war over this? Two HUGE caveats:

• Russia
• The United States

The above was too simple, right?

Russia is really interesting in that they’ve pledged to police the border. That limits Turkey’s leverage with respect to seizing and holding more territory. That in turn gives Assad and SDF more space and flexibility to come to an arrangement more independently than they might otherwise be able to without Russia blunting Turkish aggression.

And then there is the US.

Even if the US doesn’t do jack shit, they are parked right on Turkey’s strategic Achilles Heel in the northeast.

To hell with the paltry sums of oil in the south. The US has effective control over the border crossing, the airport, a critical area covering border movements with Turkey, and an area where a whole lot of Kurds live and even includes the capital of Rojava.

Are the US gonna let Turkish troops walk in and kill all the Kurds and maybe some Assyrians too while they’re at it right in front of them and then leave? Not bloody likely. So this is a huge wild card in Turkey’s considerations. The US presence makes it incredibly difficult for them to secure entry into Turkish borders, which is a big problem if they disperse the SDF army to the trade winds.

In the background, Turkey has been attacking Kurds within their borders and making targeted strikes and general intimidation toward the Kurds of northern Iraq.

So yeah, make no mistake, this is “the Kurdish question.” And it looks fundamentally unsolvable in complete terms from Turkey’s perspective. So the Russia and US presences kinda force Erdogan to come to some sort of compromise. So the question is how the negotiations will shake out.

But the Russian and US presence holds enormous sway despite having limited footprints. (The have no answer for killing Kurds in US controlled space and he Kurds know this.) And, of course, both are totally unpredictable right now, albeit for different reasons.

But ultimately, the Russian and American presence means that at the most fundamental level, Erdogan cannot completely fulfill his goals. Since compromise is necessary and there are high risks of, uh, failure if they try to go HAM on Russia and the US, full scale conflict seems unlikely because it can’t actually achieve the objectives of either side, offers dubious leverage for negotiations beyond what’s already in place (and could do more damage in moving the parties apart), and there are two unpredictable superpowers that can decide to bring down the hammer of repercussions if they see anything they don’t like.

So, I definitely see likely avenues to avoiding full scale interstate war.

That said: Wild Cards:

Rogue elements. Obviously. And don’t forget we have ISIS assholes who’s short to medium objective is the maintenance of the conflict itself, almost for its own sake. And anonymous terror bombings, as we all know,  in a situation this delicate can have enormous impact. The bombings have already begun, in fact.

I don’t actually see a solution to the Kurdish problem that is satisfactory to Erdogan, so who knows?

This doesn’t even address the NATO issue, but at the end of the day, the possibility of an international response is another damper on the situation.

The reality is that Russia and the US are far more interested in strategic influence in the region than the people.

That influence issue means Iran. There is a 100% chance of Iranian meddling or, stated differently, a 0% chance of them stopping meddling.

Israel may have their “say” before all is said and done. They have no interest in seeing an attempt at a liberal republic in the region squashed by the forces of darkness while the West idly looks on. And they’re not a NATO country.

Oh, also: About that 70,000 person fucked up ISIS Walden in the desert that the Kurds are guarding…? The ones that nobody else in the fucking world will deal with…

This is an Old Thing, Even for US

Old guard foreign policy esyablishment: Ack-shu-ah-lee… this is our war.

The National Interest: Made In America: How the U.S. Government Paid For Turkey’s War in Syria

Foreign Policy:  I Saw the Birth, and Bloody Death, of the Dream of Syrian Democracy

The Syrian revolution was started by patriots—and ended by international jihadis supported by the United States.

Great history of our involvement in the Syrian Civil War and how the US was a big part of the problem before it became part of solution.

tl;dr:

The US started arming Syrian rebels against Assad before figuring out who were good guys and who were bad guys. Mistakes were made.*

*Are there any Tulsi Gabbard fans in the house?

 

Turkish Military Relations

barbed wire Bob

Turkey bought the tanks back in 2005. Fwiw they were used tanks, with low miles, driven by little old ladies who only went on maneuvers on Saturdays.

DefenseIndustryDaily: Germany to Sell 298 Leopard 2 Tanks to Turkey

Reverend

That’s funny. I’ve seen it argued that if you think about the military industrial complex from a supply and demand POV, you start spotting troubling issues that have unintended outcomes—as with surplus inventory.

CNN: US is looking in to miss appropriation of weapons by Turkey. I’m sure Germany is too. What I’m not sure is what they do about it if they find out it’s true.

barbed wire Bob said:

Israel and Turkey have a complex relationship.  Initially it was fairly warm but ever since Erdogan came to power, it’s been getting  frosty. Still, geopolitics basically forces the two together.

Stratfor:  Geopolitics Keeps Pushing Turkey and Israel Back Together

There‘s a part of me that is starting to believe an independent Kurdistan will come out of this mess and I’m thinking the Israelis are think that too since an independent Kurdistan would be a very useful ally.

Reverend

Thanks for the link. That makes a lot of sense.

It also explains in greater detail why now might be a time for Israel to flip, what with the US apparently dedicated to blocking Iran in Syria, which means they don’t need Turkey to mess with Assad anymore.

And yeah. I said weeks ago all his meant the Rojava project was over. But they just won’t die. And it’s not hard to see why, if they stick around, they’re a better ally than Turkey.

Marciano490

Does heavy mean a lot of or armored?

Also, when Israel wants a result in the region, does it have to use reverse psychology  because its stated preferences will usually provoke antagonistic responses from neighbors?

Reverend

The latter. No main battle tanks or anything, but light armor / mechanized infantry stuff. And artillery.

Good question. And I shudder to think what kind of black flag conspiracy theories would emerge because anything hey do would be seen as three levels of statement to different people.

ISIS Doing Bad Guy Things

In other news, it is still very, very important to Daesh that you know that they are still assholes.

SOHR: Jaysh al-Sharqiyyah which is loyal to Turkey cuts off the citizens’ trees in Jendires in Afrin countryside and sell them as firewood for heating

The punishment of members for posting their crimes on social media has to be seen in juxtaposition to what appears to be the Kurds & Friends’ increasingly effective multi-front PR campaign.

I mean, they’re just better at this:

And while I’m at it, @CousinTonyFromPadua found the political cartoon I had been looking for:

DukeSox

Rev – is the feeling in your monitoring of local media that this is something that couple spiral (even more) out of control and turn into a real state v state war (or a regional war) or is this all just power positioning now that there is a vacuum?

Damn good question. A week or two ago, I would have said there was a good chance what with the proximity of so many states. (The people who put together the decollision plans should all get medals from their respective commands.)

But now, I think probably not. Like, it’s a shit storm, but there are a couple paths to an “orderly” equilibrium that doesn’t involve states going to war. But it’s a matter of how ugly things are on the ground.

So there’s two main things that matter here that dictate the other issues—and the SDF fighters are all apparently acutely aware of all of it

1. How will Assad and Erdogan decide to resolve, in no particular order, the problems of: a) the jihadi militias; b) the SDF; and c) the border and currently occupied territories.
2. What the fuck is the United States doing.

It make sure sense to explain the second first, which has not recently come into focus, as that finishes laying the terrain for how Turkey and Syria will approach the other issues.

Stating the strategy is easy:

We’re deploying forces to control eastern Syria and, specifically, the border with Iraq, in order to stem Iranian and to a lesser extent, Russian influence in the region.

As posted about in the ISIS thread, the oil is pretextual bullshit that the Iran hawks came up with to get Trump to redeploy instead of pulling out.

The National Interest: Inside the Iran Hawks’ Hijacking of Trump’s Syria Withdrawal Plan

ForeignPolicy: Inside the Iran Hawks’ Doomed Campaign to Stay in Syria 

Senior U.S. officials fought to reverse Trump’s withdrawal, with disastrous consequences for the Kurds.

Remember in Star Wars where Han just wants to get the fuck off the Death Star and Luke convinces him to help with his mission by leaning in and saying, “She’s got oil,”? Basically, that’s how our policy was made.

The tactical situation this creates on the ground is big fucking insane.

So, there are three ways to get out of eastern Syria to Iraq.

1. Abu Hajar airport at Rmelan, east of Qamishli.
2. Northern border crossing at Semalka.
3. Southern border crossing at Al Qa’im.

So 3 is a for the time being a non-starter. It literally only reopened about a month ago after being closed for five years because of the war with ISIS. It’s in rough land in the middle of nowhere with nowhere to go. Also, destabilization in Iraq could empower western Iraqi militias whom we haven’t always gotten along with. It’s possible the crossing is reliable but who knows? And anyway, the key American military bases are in northern Iraq anyway.

So the crossing closest to Deir ez-Zur, where our oil is stored in the ground, is off the table. The only reason I even know anything about it is because I was curious why the major sources weren’t even mentioning it, and I wanted to know why there was a road there.

This is significant because Deir ez-Zeir only has two major highways, so only two eastern routes to Iraq.

So that leaves 1) and 2), which are conveniently right next to each other in northeastern Iraq. (The airport is a bit to the east of the X because I missed. Sue me.)

And lo and behold, there turns out to be another oil field up by Rmelan that we need to defend. A cursory internet search suggests that… basically, it exists. But barely.

If you’ve watched be video of the American soldier being interviewed who is clearly irritated that he has no coherent mission, that’s where he was.

This guy is a good follow.

So reading the tea leaves, the US’s military mission here is to secure northeastern Syria.

Now look at that border crossing.

It’s literally 1km south of the tripoint border of Turkey-Syria-Iraq (probably why boundaries were drawn that way). There are difficult to police mountains for smuggling. There are persecuted ethnic groups whose populations span the border.

It’s a security nightmare for Turkey, even if Assad decided not to press it.

So that’s the US situation: We’re parking ourselves right in the middle of Iran’s intended northern corridor of influence. And somehow, given all of the above, we’re going to try to find some way to supply them. Again, just one civilian’s opinion, but medals for all the logistics officers who manage to pull his off.

So the situation is currently fluid (Clearly. I mean, we are currently acting completely counter to the Trump administration’s stated policy.), and completely unpredictable to the other players. But kinda stable in a weird way in the short term, as long as everyone is afraid to take a shot at us—as Michael Weiss points out, there is a lot of posturing but at the end of the day, when the US deploys, everyone stands down, even Russia.

Basically, imagine if you couldn’t get your car out of your driveway because there was a bear rooting around in your garbage. You’ll need a plan for dealing with it, but in the more immediate sense, you’re going to try not to bother it.

If you think about it, that “terrain” starts to bring in to focus the Syria-Turkey-SDF-SNA situation on the ground. It’s notable that Rojava and the SNA are both small, officially unrecognized “groups” edged into the middle of three states, two of them with very powerful militaries, and Russia lurking around. And Iranians doing Iran things; they have people in the ground with Assad’s forces doing Lord knows what.

There was a great political cartoon circulating awhile back of a soldier representing the Kurds holding off Assad on one hand, Turkey with the other, stepping on ISIS’s head coming out of a hole, ducking under Russia, with a US knife in its back. But I can’t find t, even though it was all over pro-SDF Twitter. Maybe @CousinTonyFromPadua can find it?

This one is pretty good, though. It’s from Oct 13 for some perspective on how clearly this was unfolding in people’s eyes after Trump pulled us out.

So the question is, how will Syria and Turkey resolve the SNA which Turkey has been backing (they’re gonna get fucked), SDF/Rojava/“the Kurds” (they’ll probably get fucked, but the question is precisely how—and that matters a great deal geopolitically now), and the border/occupied territories.

So, tl;dr, these can be resolved without large scale inter-state conflict.

But a lot of this will depend on what Assad manages to get (which is complicated) and what Turkey tries to do about northeast Syria which now has both SAA and SDF working together (for now) and a new deployment by the US which has been reported to be scouting sites for three new bases.

I can flesh out the mechanics of the Syria-Turkey-SDF-ISIS situation probably after the watching the Enes Kanter All-Stars Celtics.

I… don’t know what’s going on here.

This is over Iraqi Kurdistan

America: Are we on it?

As per previously, nobody has any fucking clue what America is doing.

No clue. But the Turkish-Russian patrols are going swimmingly. As expected.

There’s an entire convoy of journalists following the patrol around watching people throw rocks at the Turkish soldiers.

What the Fuck? Why You Gotta Be Like This?

I should mention again that, while all this has been going on, a few days ago, Turkey stepped up it’s operations against the Kurds within Turkish borders, including air strikes.

So they’re attacking Kurds in three countries: Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. Now, obviously, some of those Kurds especially in their own borders are PKK and enemies of the state and stuff. (Although, as Enes Kanter might point out, there might be good reasons for that.) But Erdogan has been taking the de facto position that all Kurds are terrorists. Moreover, he has publicly announced that the US killing of Baghdadi proves the legitimacy of killing terrorists, so they get to kill terrorists too.

One way or another, Erdogan has a real bug up his ass about the Kurds. Like, all the Kurds. That said, Turkey has a 100 year history of attempting to grind all of their ethnic minorities into dust, so…

I really don’t know what the fuck is up with Turkey. I guess the power of blaming ethnic minorities for all the world’s ills is strong tonic for people under totalitarian rule for keeping their political energies diverted.

It should be a sober reminder of what can happen, considering that Turkey is a pretty fucking advanced country. Totalitarianism can really fuck a people up not just politically but down to the fundamentals of society as it tries to fabricate its cultural history to support the regime. Americans like to believe this is a danger for smaller, weaker states, while conveniently forgetting the exceptions (usually by citing the move towards totalitarianism as occurring before economic development occurs). But Turkey is really fucking up the whole Jihad v. McWorld narrative whereby once people get sufficiently situated into a nice health liberal capitalism then they’ll start behaving well.

Instead of assimilating politically—and they’ve applied for admission to the EU as someone pointed out upthread—they found a way to hold European society hostage against their governments with the threat of unleashing a few million ethnic Muslims refugees on them.

Which, I guess… would be totally legal?

This is like new grounds in entitlement R&D.

Erdogan Pushing the Poor Put Upon Turkey Narrative

Entitlement, or a sense thereof rather, is ultimately about people telling themselves stories of how great they are, how they deserve things.

Fuck this guy. Seriously.

 

WTF Twitter?

People in the ground complaining about Twitter being sketchy with their accounts and content.

<DELETED TWEET>:  https://twitter.com/user/status/1191643365173059584

Here’s a Screen Shot:

Here’s another account of Twitter:

And yet…

Seriously Twitter?

The use by Rojava should be, like, a fucking commercial for Twitter. Do they even understand their product?

I’ve been told, no, they don’t: venture captalists. A friend of mine once described some of their marketing approach in this way:

Public: Have you considered at least telling people when there are new features?

Twitter: Are you mad???

Like, years ago, they didn’t even tell people when they expanded video length allowed and graphics improvements. They don’t know what they’re doing over there, in the best of my limited understanding.

Jerks.

 

Tel Tamr: Impending Activity

The Turkish forces are 2km from Tel Tamr. It doesn’t take much to see why this is strategically important.

RUDAW: Northern Syrian Christians on a mission to protect their villages

Over the course of Operation Peace Spring, Christian villages in Tel Tamr have been pummeled by Turkey and and its aligned forces.

The Syriac Military Council, an Assyrian/Syriac military organization is assigned by Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) to protect the Christian villagers in the area.

“Erdogan-backed terrorists are 2 kilometers away from this village. You can hear their shelling and bombardment. We, as the Syriac Military Council, are spread across the Assyrian villages and are ready to defend our citizens from any attack, together with the People’s Protection Units (YPG) and Syrian army,” explains Syriac Military Council fighter Carlos Ashuri.

Madelin is a local Syriac mother of three. She left her children at home and joined the group to protect their village.

“We Assyrians are 17,000 people spread across the Jazira Region in northeastern Syria. Our villages were paradise on earth. Before ISIS coming to the region, other differently named groups attacked our region. After the situation calmed down, we were living peacefully. Life was somehow good. Now, Turkey is coming and repeating the same history. They want to return the mess and conflicts to northeast Syria”

Most Christians fled the 33 villages they had inhabited in the Tel Tamr region during Islamic State’s onslaught in 2014.

Nabil Warda, spokesperson for Syriac Military Council, provides details for their employment in the area.

“Our forces have been deployed in eight villages. They’ve come to the region to over see the situation. Thanks to God, the situation of the villages is calm. They’ve also welcomed displaced people from Sari Kani who have come to the Assyrian villages.”

Conflicts took place in six Tel Tamr villages on Sunday, November 3. Three people were killed and four injured. One of the dead was Zau Seng, a member of an international humanitarian organization the Free Burma Rangers.

Reporting by Roj Eli Zalla in Tel Tamr

Translation by Sarkawt Mohammed

ICSVE: Winning the Narrative: Historical Combat

ICSVE is not big but seems to check out. They’re dedicated to using video to disrupt the narratives ISIS puts out in videos of their own.

Here’s a neat piece from RAND on how ISIS uses narratives of nostalgia:

Rand: Defeating the ISIS Nostalgia Narrative

It’s remarkable how much right wing narratives are similar and perhaps even resonate with one another, both in content and in form in longing for some glory days before Islamic society invented hospitals and street lights and shit-I mean literally, they invented that good shit.

It’s kinda incredible this kinda Islamo fascism grew out of Marx’s theory of history. I mean, this is their theory of history.

Plus they keep making shit up.

Oh yeah: There have been ISIS bombings. Or some other jihadi group. And they’re accusing SDF of terrorist bombings. Someone’s blowing shit up. Car bombs and the like.

Meanwhile, in Lebanon…

I just wanted to round out this glimpse of the stories people are trying to tell with this clip from the protests in Lebanon. Things are happening.