As usual, the rebels are running low this month on supplies needed to defeat their enemies.
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“What we are talking about with Turkey is cooperating to support partners on the ground in northern Syria who are countering [ISIS]”, one senior Obama administration official told the Times. “To smooth away the pressure it faced, it now wants to wage the actual war it had planned against Kurds by pretending to be standing against ISIS“. “Turkey is concerned about the Kurds, and the United States is afraid of Daesh coming to attack its own soil – but hundreds of Syrians are killed from barrel bombs, and nobody cares”.
Jarablous is along the last stretch of territory ISIL holds along Turkey’s border with Syria.
“We’re holding ongoing consultations with the Turks”, said Navy Capt. Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman, but now “we have no plans for imposition of a no-fly zone”.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said clashes were continuing in the city’s southern outskirts but that Hasaka itself was now free from Islamic State fighters.
“This is what we have been asking for for years”.
Needless to say, the US couldn’t support an “al-Qaeda safe zone”. Once the U.S. has made a commitment to this zone it could be pulled into the fight against Assad in Syria. Contagion to Turkey and Iraq would thus become a real concern: The mere threat of partitioning these fragile boundaries would probably coincide with violence and ugly ethnic tensions. The Turkish government has also taken part in the shipment of arms to rebels in Syria, Reuters reported earlier this year. The Conquest Army actively coordinates with Turkey and Saudi Arabia, and is also populated with U.S.-trained fighters.
Saudi Arabia’s King Salman Bin Abdulaziz said during a telephone call to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Tuesday that terrorist groups such as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) “constitute a danger to the region and the world’s safety and security, and must be eliminated”.
While ISIS captured large swathes of northern and eastern Syria last summe the group has suffered a number of losses to Kurdish forces fighting alongside the Free Syrian Army, who many consider to be a moderate rebel coalition.
“Now what is going on after ISIS left Hasakah yesterday, the Kurdish fighters say they want to control the areas that were under regime control”, he adds. But in the end, they say, the weapons they receive will be used for one goal. There isn’t one, really. “Assad and his cabal of murderous generals must go.”.
Increased U.S. involvement in Syria risks our involvement in another costly, open-ended civil war.
Since Syria’s uprising broke out in 2011, Turkey has been accused of turning a blind eye as thousands of jihadists from Turkey, the Middle East, Europe and elsewhere slipped over its border to fight the regime of Bashar al-Assad. “There needs to be a major role for religion and local custom in any political arrangement that emerges”, Al Nahhas said.
But now, Abu Mohammed, a leader of Thuwar al-Sham – an alliance of rebel brigades active in Aleppo city and the surrounding countryside that claims to include roughly 3,500 fighters in its ranks – is singing a different tune.
At a teahouse in Karkamis, patrons mocked the fecklessness of the moderate rebels, with two of the customers saying they had seen the rebels flee recently when challenged at the Jarabulus-Karkamis crossing.
Instantly, Erdogan permitted U.S. planes at Incirlik to attack ISIS targets in Syria and launched air strikes himself.
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MOHAMMED (through interpreter): They were telling us, these are the lines which you shouldn’t cross, or the airstrikes will hit you.
