Where are the aid agencies? Surely they can provide assistance to the liberated areas now? Let's hear from them.
ISIS in Iraq and Syria
- Thread starter Suli
- Start date
Since I can talk to them from Damascus they can't be inside sieged areas, but you know they have eyes and ears and can hear the screams and the aerial bombardment and they do have families from inside sieged areas either stuck there or dead.
The so called liberated areas have no people, who are they going to aid? Dead bodies? Or fallen stones?
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The people that were, as we were told, desperately in need of aid. They're free now aren't they. Or are you saying they're all dead?
OK. Never mind. I won't press you.
just look at the pictures of Aleppo, the destruction done there flabbergasting, strange way to describe a 'liberated' city.
I'm saying those who aren't dead escaped to western part of Aleppo.
I'm not sure why you think having something to gain is a bad thing? Gaining something doesn't necessarily mean money or power
There's a civil war in your country - you have clearly chosen a side and want that side to win. I didn't exactly excoriate you for it
Well you can't, can you? My sources are from aleppo which makes them the most reliable.
Yeah. OK.
I'm not saying having something to gain is a bad thing, but I'm from a rich family that live in probably the safest area in all Syria right now, actually regime winning would have benifits on my family as the losses suffered by mu famoly money wise is huge, but since I'm human I can sympathise and know who is wrong in this conflict, I can't understand at all the regime sympathisers in this thread, is isis and Al Nusra scare you to the point that moderate rebels and 100k civilians are not important? Even knowing that isis aren't at all involved in the fight in Aleppo?I'm not sure why you think having something to gain is a bad thing? Gaining something doesn't necessarily mean money or power
There's a civil war in your country - you have clearly chosen a side and want that side to win. I didn't exactly excoriate you for it
That is part of the answer. There are many reasons people support the regime. Some are sectarian. Some believe it important to support any perceived target of US imperialism no matter what (these people seem to still believe the US is trying to overthrow Assad). Some are committed to an idea of 'secularism'. But like I said above, the rebels were always likely to lose this war as soon as they came out in support of al Qaeda. In 2012, after the US designated Jabhat al-Nusra a terrorist organization, recognizing it as a faction of the Islamic State in Iraq, all the major Syrian rebel groups including the head of the SNC came out in defence of Jabhat al-Nusra. That was the dumbest thing they could have done. The rebels were still considering ISIS to be one of them until January 2014 when all out war broke out between them. It's only natural that Westerners (I'm talking about average people, not Western governments which have played their own games with al Qaeda) are going to be more concerned about an organization which has declared war on them and launched numerous attacks on them than about Assad.
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices...more-than-one-story-robert-fisk-a7471576.html
There is more than one truth to tell in the terrible story of Aleppo
Robert Fisk
Western politicians, “experts” and journalists are going to have to reboot their stories over the next few days now that Bashar al-Assad’s army has retaken control of eastern Aleppo. We’re going to find out if the 250,000 civilians “trapped” in the city were indeed that numerous. We’re going to hear far more about why they were not able to leave when the Syrian government and Russian air force staged their ferocious bombardment of the eastern part of the city.
And we’re going to learn a lot more about the “rebels” whom we in the West – the US, Britain and our head-chopping mates in the Gulf – have been supporting.
They did, after all, include al-Qaeda (alias Jabhat al-Nusra, alias Jabhat Fateh al-Sham), the “folk” – as George W Bush called them – who committed the crimes against humanity in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania on 11 September 2001. Remember the War on Terror? Remember the “pure evil” of al-Qaeda. Remember all the warnings from our beloved security services in the UK about how al-Qaeda can still strike terror in London?
Not when the rebels, including al-Qaeda, were bravely defending east Aleppo, we didn’t – because a powerful tale of heroism, democracy and suffering was being woven for us, a narrative of good guys versus bad guys as explosive and as dishonest as “weapons of mass destruction”.
In pictures: Aleppo bombing
Back in the days of Saddam Hussein – when a few of us argued that the illegal invasion of Iraq would lead to catastrophe and untold suffering, and that Tony Blair and George Bush were taking us down the path to perdition – it was incumbent upon us, always, to profess our repugnance of Saddam and his regime. We had to remind readers, constantly, that Saddam was one of the Triple Pillars of the Axis of Evil.
So here goes the usual mantra again, which we must repeat ad nauseam to avoid the usual hate mail and abuse that will today be cast at anyone veering away from the approved and deeply flawed version of the Syrian tragedy.
Yes, Bashar al-Assad has brutally destroyed vast tracts of his cities in his battle against those who wish to overthrow his regime. Yes, that regime has a multitude of sins to its name: torture, executions, secret prisons, the killing of civilians, and – if we include the Syrian militia thugs under nominal control of the regime – a frightening version of ethnic cleansing.
Yes, we should fear for the lives of the courageous doctors of eastern Aleppo and the people for whom they have been caring. Anyone who saw the footage of the young man taken out of the line of refugees fleeing Aleppo last week by the regime’s intelligence men should fear for all those who have not been permitted to cross the government lines. And let’s remember how the UN grimly reported it had been told of 82 civilians "massacred" in their homes in the last 24 hours.
But it’s time to tell the other truth: that many of the “rebels” whom we in the West have been supporting – and which our preposterous Prime Minister Therese May indirectly blessed when she grovelled to the Gulf head-choppers last week – are among the cruellest and most ruthless of fighters in the Middle East. And while we have been tut-tutting at the frightfulness of Isis during the siege of Mosul (an event all too similar to Aleppo, although you wouldn’t think so from reading our narrative of the story), we have been wilfully ignoring the behaviour of the rebels of Aleppo.
Only a few weeks ago, I interviewed one of the very first Muslim families to flee eastern Aleppo during a ceasefire. The father had just been told that his brother was to be executed by the rebels because he crossed the frontline with his wife and son. He condemned the rebels for closing the schools and putting weapons close to hospitals. And he was no pro-regime stooge; he even admired Isis for their good behaviour in the early days of the siege.
Around the same time, Syrian soldiers were privately expressing their belief to me that the Americans would allow Isis to leave Mosul to again attack the regime in Syria. An American general had actually expressed his fear that Iraqi Shiite militiamen might prevent Isis from fleeing across the Iraqi border to Syria.
Well, so it came to pass. In three vast columns of suicide trucks and thousands of armed supporters, Isis has just swarmed across the desert from Mosul in Iraq, and from Raqqa and Deir ez-Zour in eastern Syria to seize the beautiful city of Palmyra all over again.
It is highly instructive to look at our reporting of these two parallel events. Almost every headline today speaks of the “fall” of Aleppo to the Syrian army – when in any other circumstances, we would have surely said that the army had “recaptured” it from the “rebels” – while Isis was reported to have “recaptured” Palmyra when (given their own murderous behaviour) we should surely have announced that the Roman city had “fallen” once more under their grotesque rule.
Opposition activists accuse Syrian regime of chlorine attack in Aleppo
Words matter. These are the men – our “chaps”, I suppose, if we keep to the current jihadi narrative – who after their first occupation of the city last year beheaded the 82-year-old scholar who tried to protect the Roman treasures and then placed his spectacles back on his decapitated head.
By their own admission, the Russians flew 64 bombing sorties against the Isis attackers outside Palmyra. But given the huge columns of dust thrown up by the Isis convoys, why didn’t the American air force join in the bombardment of their greatest enemy? But no: for some reason, the US satellites and drones and intelligence just didn’t spot them – any more than they did when Isis drove identical convoys of suicide trucks to seize Palmyra when they first took the city in May 2015.
There’s no doubting what a setback Palmyra represents for both the Syrian army and the Russians – however symbolic rather than military. Syrian officers told me in Palmyra earlier this year that Isis would never be allowed to return. There was a Russian military base in the city. Russian aircraft flew overhead. A Russian orchestra had just played in the Roman ruins to celebrate Palmyra’s liberation.
So what happened? Most likely is that the Syrian military simply didn’t have the manpower to defend Palmyra while closing in on eastern Aleppo.
They will have to take Palmyra back – quickly. But for Bashar al-Assad, the end of the Aleppo siege means that Isis, al-Nusra, al-Qaeda and all the other Salafist groups and their allies can no longer claim a base, or create a capital, in the long line of great cities that form the spine of Syria: Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo.
Back to Aleppo. The familiar and now tired political-journalistic narrative is in need of refreshing. The evidence has been clear for some days. After months of condemning the iniquities of the Syrian regime while obscuring the identity and brutality of its opponents in Aleppo, the human rights organisations – sniffing defeat for the rebels – began only a few days ago to spread their criticism to include the defenders of eastern Aleppo.
Take the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. After last week running through its usual – and perfectly understandable – fears for the civilian population of eastern Aleppo and their medical workers, and for civilians subject to government reprisals and for “hundreds of men” who may have gone missing after crossing the frontlines, the UN suddenly expressed other concerns.
“During the last two weeks, Fatah al-Sham Front [in other words, al-Qaeda] and the Abu Amara Battalion are alleged to have abducted and killed an unknown number of civilians who requested the armed groups to leave their neighbourhoods, to spare the lives of civilians...,” it stated.
“We have also received reports that between 30 November and 1 December, armed opposition groups fired on civilians attempting to leave...” Furthermore, “indiscriminate attacks” had been conducted on heavily civilian areas of government-held western as well as ‘rebel’ eastern Aleppo.
I suspect we shall be hearing more of this in the coming days. Next month, we shall also be reading a frightening new book, Merchants of Men, by Italian journalist Loretta Napoleoni, on the funding of the war in Syria. She catalogues kidnapping-for-cash by both government and rebel forces in Syria, but also has harsh words for our own profession of journalism.
Seven-year-old girl tweeting from Aleppo siege pleads for help
Reporters who were kidnapped by armed guard in eastern Syria, she writes, “fell victim to a sort of Hemingway syndrome: war correspondents supporting the insurgency trust the rebels and place their lives in their hands because they are in league with them.” But, “the insurgency is just a variation of criminal jihadism, a modern phenomenon that has only one loyalty: money.”
Is this too harsh on my profession? Are we really “in league” with the rebels?
Certainly our political masters are – and for the same reason as the rebels kidnap their victims: money. Hence the disgrace of Brexit May and her buffoonerie of ministers who last week prostrated themselves to the Sunni autocrats who fund the jihadis of Syria in the hope of winning billions of pounds in post-Brexit arms sales to the Gulf.
In a few hours, the British parliament is to debate the plight of the doctors, nurses, wounded children and civilians of Aleppo and other areas of Syria. The grotesque behaviour of the UK Government has ensured that neither the Syrians nor the Russians will pay the slightest attention to our pitiful wails. That, too, must become part of the story.
There is more than one truth to tell in the terrible story of Aleppo
Robert Fisk
Western politicians, “experts” and journalists are going to have to reboot their stories over the next few days now that Bashar al-Assad’s army has retaken control of eastern Aleppo. We’re going to find out if the 250,000 civilians “trapped” in the city were indeed that numerous. We’re going to hear far more about why they were not able to leave when the Syrian government and Russian air force staged their ferocious bombardment of the eastern part of the city.
And we’re going to learn a lot more about the “rebels” whom we in the West – the US, Britain and our head-chopping mates in the Gulf – have been supporting.
They did, after all, include al-Qaeda (alias Jabhat al-Nusra, alias Jabhat Fateh al-Sham), the “folk” – as George W Bush called them – who committed the crimes against humanity in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania on 11 September 2001. Remember the War on Terror? Remember the “pure evil” of al-Qaeda. Remember all the warnings from our beloved security services in the UK about how al-Qaeda can still strike terror in London?
Not when the rebels, including al-Qaeda, were bravely defending east Aleppo, we didn’t – because a powerful tale of heroism, democracy and suffering was being woven for us, a narrative of good guys versus bad guys as explosive and as dishonest as “weapons of mass destruction”.
In pictures: Aleppo bombing
Back in the days of Saddam Hussein – when a few of us argued that the illegal invasion of Iraq would lead to catastrophe and untold suffering, and that Tony Blair and George Bush were taking us down the path to perdition – it was incumbent upon us, always, to profess our repugnance of Saddam and his regime. We had to remind readers, constantly, that Saddam was one of the Triple Pillars of the Axis of Evil.
So here goes the usual mantra again, which we must repeat ad nauseam to avoid the usual hate mail and abuse that will today be cast at anyone veering away from the approved and deeply flawed version of the Syrian tragedy.
Yes, Bashar al-Assad has brutally destroyed vast tracts of his cities in his battle against those who wish to overthrow his regime. Yes, that regime has a multitude of sins to its name: torture, executions, secret prisons, the killing of civilians, and – if we include the Syrian militia thugs under nominal control of the regime – a frightening version of ethnic cleansing.
Yes, we should fear for the lives of the courageous doctors of eastern Aleppo and the people for whom they have been caring. Anyone who saw the footage of the young man taken out of the line of refugees fleeing Aleppo last week by the regime’s intelligence men should fear for all those who have not been permitted to cross the government lines. And let’s remember how the UN grimly reported it had been told of 82 civilians "massacred" in their homes in the last 24 hours.
But it’s time to tell the other truth: that many of the “rebels” whom we in the West have been supporting – and which our preposterous Prime Minister Therese May indirectly blessed when she grovelled to the Gulf head-choppers last week – are among the cruellest and most ruthless of fighters in the Middle East. And while we have been tut-tutting at the frightfulness of Isis during the siege of Mosul (an event all too similar to Aleppo, although you wouldn’t think so from reading our narrative of the story), we have been wilfully ignoring the behaviour of the rebels of Aleppo.
Only a few weeks ago, I interviewed one of the very first Muslim families to flee eastern Aleppo during a ceasefire. The father had just been told that his brother was to be executed by the rebels because he crossed the frontline with his wife and son. He condemned the rebels for closing the schools and putting weapons close to hospitals. And he was no pro-regime stooge; he even admired Isis for their good behaviour in the early days of the siege.
Around the same time, Syrian soldiers were privately expressing their belief to me that the Americans would allow Isis to leave Mosul to again attack the regime in Syria. An American general had actually expressed his fear that Iraqi Shiite militiamen might prevent Isis from fleeing across the Iraqi border to Syria.
Well, so it came to pass. In three vast columns of suicide trucks and thousands of armed supporters, Isis has just swarmed across the desert from Mosul in Iraq, and from Raqqa and Deir ez-Zour in eastern Syria to seize the beautiful city of Palmyra all over again.
It is highly instructive to look at our reporting of these two parallel events. Almost every headline today speaks of the “fall” of Aleppo to the Syrian army – when in any other circumstances, we would have surely said that the army had “recaptured” it from the “rebels” – while Isis was reported to have “recaptured” Palmyra when (given their own murderous behaviour) we should surely have announced that the Roman city had “fallen” once more under their grotesque rule.
Opposition activists accuse Syrian regime of chlorine attack in Aleppo
Words matter. These are the men – our “chaps”, I suppose, if we keep to the current jihadi narrative – who after their first occupation of the city last year beheaded the 82-year-old scholar who tried to protect the Roman treasures and then placed his spectacles back on his decapitated head.
By their own admission, the Russians flew 64 bombing sorties against the Isis attackers outside Palmyra. But given the huge columns of dust thrown up by the Isis convoys, why didn’t the American air force join in the bombardment of their greatest enemy? But no: for some reason, the US satellites and drones and intelligence just didn’t spot them – any more than they did when Isis drove identical convoys of suicide trucks to seize Palmyra when they first took the city in May 2015.
There’s no doubting what a setback Palmyra represents for both the Syrian army and the Russians – however symbolic rather than military. Syrian officers told me in Palmyra earlier this year that Isis would never be allowed to return. There was a Russian military base in the city. Russian aircraft flew overhead. A Russian orchestra had just played in the Roman ruins to celebrate Palmyra’s liberation.
So what happened? Most likely is that the Syrian military simply didn’t have the manpower to defend Palmyra while closing in on eastern Aleppo.
They will have to take Palmyra back – quickly. But for Bashar al-Assad, the end of the Aleppo siege means that Isis, al-Nusra, al-Qaeda and all the other Salafist groups and their allies can no longer claim a base, or create a capital, in the long line of great cities that form the spine of Syria: Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo.
Back to Aleppo. The familiar and now tired political-journalistic narrative is in need of refreshing. The evidence has been clear for some days. After months of condemning the iniquities of the Syrian regime while obscuring the identity and brutality of its opponents in Aleppo, the human rights organisations – sniffing defeat for the rebels – began only a few days ago to spread their criticism to include the defenders of eastern Aleppo.
Take the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. After last week running through its usual – and perfectly understandable – fears for the civilian population of eastern Aleppo and their medical workers, and for civilians subject to government reprisals and for “hundreds of men” who may have gone missing after crossing the frontlines, the UN suddenly expressed other concerns.
“During the last two weeks, Fatah al-Sham Front [in other words, al-Qaeda] and the Abu Amara Battalion are alleged to have abducted and killed an unknown number of civilians who requested the armed groups to leave their neighbourhoods, to spare the lives of civilians...,” it stated.
“We have also received reports that between 30 November and 1 December, armed opposition groups fired on civilians attempting to leave...” Furthermore, “indiscriminate attacks” had been conducted on heavily civilian areas of government-held western as well as ‘rebel’ eastern Aleppo.
I suspect we shall be hearing more of this in the coming days. Next month, we shall also be reading a frightening new book, Merchants of Men, by Italian journalist Loretta Napoleoni, on the funding of the war in Syria. She catalogues kidnapping-for-cash by both government and rebel forces in Syria, but also has harsh words for our own profession of journalism.
Seven-year-old girl tweeting from Aleppo siege pleads for help
Reporters who were kidnapped by armed guard in eastern Syria, she writes, “fell victim to a sort of Hemingway syndrome: war correspondents supporting the insurgency trust the rebels and place their lives in their hands because they are in league with them.” But, “the insurgency is just a variation of criminal jihadism, a modern phenomenon that has only one loyalty: money.”
Is this too harsh on my profession? Are we really “in league” with the rebels?
Certainly our political masters are – and for the same reason as the rebels kidnap their victims: money. Hence the disgrace of Brexit May and her buffoonerie of ministers who last week prostrated themselves to the Sunni autocrats who fund the jihadis of Syria in the hope of winning billions of pounds in post-Brexit arms sales to the Gulf.
In a few hours, the British parliament is to debate the plight of the doctors, nurses, wounded children and civilians of Aleppo and other areas of Syria. The grotesque behaviour of the UK Government has ensured that neither the Syrians nor the Russians will pay the slightest attention to our pitiful wails. That, too, must become part of the story.
See you say rebels came out in support of Al Qaeda, but only Al Nusra front did which at the time were such a small portion from the forces fighting the regime, and as for SNC support for them well, tbh Al Nusra has been good to the people of Syria, they don't interfere with social cultures or peoples behaviour, the don't kill civilians or steal their money, they fight regime with brute force, how can they not support them?
I'm saying the rebels all came out in support of Jabhat al-Nusra, which is the official branch of al Qaeda in Syria. That was the dumbest thing they could have done if they wanted to retain the sympathy of the Western public. If Nusra were such a small force back then, why did they feel the need to defend them?
The leadership of Nusra had spent the previous decade laying waste to Iraq as part of an organization made famous in the West initially for beheading charity workers in videos, before moving on to massacring Shi'a pilgrims, Christian worshipers, and any Iraqi Sunnis who opposed them. Why would any Westerner support these people over Assad?
I've been to Syria a couple of times, I don't remember the social culture or behaviour of the people resembling anything like this:
Not sure if Turkey is really fighting their friends because all the news I read is the Kurds defeating ISIS and the Turks bombing the Kurds
Not recently, ISIS have been doing terrorist attacks in Turkey lately, worst one being at the airport a few months back.
To tell you the true anything from Turkey I have problems to believe, Erdogan will be their ruler for life, he's a dictator and some of the so called terrorist attacks are used for him to gain even more power, the coup attempt was a very smart way for him to gain completely control of the country because the coup attempts 101 will tell us we need to take down the head of the state to succeed...and he wasn't in Turkey, he's a lucky guy
But they are gaining the most ground on isis, you just don't want to believe it because they have an islamic leader, the world is that islamophobic nowadays.
I'll go with Jones' take over the Morning Star's on this.
Hah. He's just reading and regurgitating. He knows feck all.
If I oppose Erdogan and think he's a megalomaniac thug who is leading his country to disaster, is that because I'm Islamophobic?
To tell you the true anything from Turkey I have problems to believe, Erdogan will be their ruler for life, he's a dictator and some of the so called terrorist attacks are used for him to gain even more power, the coup attempt was a very smart way for him to gain completely control of the country because the coup attempts 101 will tell us we need to take down the head of the state to succeed...and he wasn't in Turkey, he's a lucky guy
Some say 9/11 was an inside job, all tin foil hats and conspiracies if you ask me.
It's terrible that so many still had to suffer and die when there was only ever going to be one outcome from quite early on. I feel ashamed that the US prolonged it by feigning support to the rebels but not doing enough to actually affect any outcome except insuring the extremists were better armed.
Probably our biggest blunder since the 2nd Iraq war. History will not look kindly on Obama for it.
I'm saying people won't attribute good things he does to him nore believe it because he is an Islamic leader, which is no doubtdly true.
the fact Erdogan wasn't in the country tells me if he wasn't involved at least he knew that was coming, the rest of the military would be behind the coup if he was killed/arrested.
Because he's a dictator dragging modern Turkey to disaster?
I think it was a deliberate ploy to prevent either side winning, draining Iran and the Sunni jihadists in the process. As usual it's backfired, it's reinvigorated the Sunni jihadists and given a new lease of life to Iran, especially since the nuclear deal.
Yes, that's ultimately the realpolitik of the situation. We wanted to have our cake and eat it too. Yemen is another odd one, but it's not a headline grabber.
How? He's invigorated the economy under his tenure.
http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/...ement-on-the-situation-in-Aleppo#.WFADZX2rGpB
Morning Star statement on the situation in Aleppo
Today the Morning Star has come under attack for its use of the term “liberation” referring to the capture of eastern Aleppo by Syrian government forces after years of occupation by insurgent groups.
As has been well documented by the Morning Star and other newspapers, the Syrian opposition is dominated by violent extremist sects, most notably Isis and al-Qaida affiliates.
In East Aleppo these include Nour el-Din el-Zinki, which beheaded a 12-year-old boy earlier this year and posted a video of it online - as reported at the time in many British papers including the Daily Mail (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...nki-behead-boy-accused-al-Quds-spy-Assad.html).
There are no journalists in East Aleppo for the simple reason that Syrian opposition organisations cannot be trusted not to kidnap or behead reporters. As a result, many newspapers are taking at face value statements from the very groups they cannot trust with the lives of their journalists.
These groups have also been responsible for using civilians as human shields and have gunned down residents who try to flee, as has been documented by columnists at other newspapers including Robert Fisk and Patrick Cockburn of the Independent.
The capture of the eastern part of the city by government forces is preferable to its continued occupation by Islamist terrorists and is a step towards ending this terrible war, an ongoing outrage which is claiming thousands of innocent lives.
Morning Star statement on the situation in Aleppo
Today the Morning Star has come under attack for its use of the term “liberation” referring to the capture of eastern Aleppo by Syrian government forces after years of occupation by insurgent groups.
As has been well documented by the Morning Star and other newspapers, the Syrian opposition is dominated by violent extremist sects, most notably Isis and al-Qaida affiliates.
In East Aleppo these include Nour el-Din el-Zinki, which beheaded a 12-year-old boy earlier this year and posted a video of it online - as reported at the time in many British papers including the Daily Mail (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...nki-behead-boy-accused-al-Quds-spy-Assad.html).
There are no journalists in East Aleppo for the simple reason that Syrian opposition organisations cannot be trusted not to kidnap or behead reporters. As a result, many newspapers are taking at face value statements from the very groups they cannot trust with the lives of their journalists.
These groups have also been responsible for using civilians as human shields and have gunned down residents who try to flee, as has been documented by columnists at other newspapers including Robert Fisk and Patrick Cockburn of the Independent.
The capture of the eastern part of the city by government forces is preferable to its continued occupation by Islamist terrorists and is a step towards ending this terrible war, an ongoing outrage which is claiming thousands of innocent lives.
My problem with Erdogan is not really the Islamic aspect of his agenda, it's to do with the fact that he and the Islamist current he represents bear a striking resemblance to the European fascist movements of the early 20th century (and indeed took much inspiration from them).
No doubt he's done some good for the economy - irrigation projects in the east, etc. but by most accounts it has stagnated now and in any case since 2010 he's been trying to snuff out any and all buffers between himself and absolute rule in Turkey, at any cost to personal or public freedoms in Turkey. All the while getting his country embroiled in the dirty wars of the Middle East, something every Turkish leader since WW1 had avoided, and in doing so coming into conflict with almost all of Turkey's neighbors at one point or another.
The claim that many oppose him due to Islamophobia may indeed be true in some cases. However it seems equally true that many (mostly Sunni Muslims) give him blind support for no other reason than his ostensible Islamic agenda.
Not sure about that, highest unemployment since 2011.
http://www.focus-economics.com/countries/turkey
Anyone who thinks Erdogan is in this to fight ISIS knows feck all.
The Kurds have been most effective in countering ISIS in Syria, and Turkey have determined to undermine them every step of the way.
The Kurds have been most effective in countering ISIS in Syria, and Turkey have determined to undermine them every step of the way.
Also the crocodile tears from the British government is nauseating.
Theresa May was all too happy getting on her knees for the Saudis last week while they raze Yemen to the ground, offering them more shiny toys to facility their killing spree. But suddenly they've become humanists in Syria, all while still refusing to take in child refugees.
Theresa May was all too happy getting on her knees for the Saudis last week while they raze Yemen to the ground, offering them more shiny toys to facility their killing spree. But suddenly they've become humanists in Syria, all while still refusing to take in child refugees.
True
So Johnson has just pointed out that aid drops would be difficult because the planes would be sitting ducks for "extremists". Maybe that was a Freudian slip and he really meant "rebels" but then why would those "moderate" rebels be shooting down aid cargo planes?
Presumably so they can stockpile and haul it for themselves, just as they had done with food and medicine in Eastern Aleppo.
It's time for a rant.
Aleppo.
All across Facebook, the rest of the internet, television and in social circles people are shaking their heads, tutting, recoiling in horror and getting downright emotional about the fact that civilians are being killed needlessly and indiscriminately by Russia carpet bombing the city to get rid of the remaining rebels and basically anything else living and breathing there too.
They're claiming the UN, the West, anyone opposed to Russia, Assad's regime and Iran have failed the citizens of Aleppo and should've intervened long ago to stop this needless violence and death.
Have any of those people stopped to think about what it would mean if someone did actually intervene?
It would mean using force to stop Russia.
It would mean potentially risking World War 3, meaning that not only would everyone in Aleppo be dead but millions and perhaps even billions dying in a full scale war effort.
It would mean, again potentially although not likely, risking World War 3 escalating into mutually assured destruction of the entire planet due to the launching of nuclear weapons.
Some people don't see the bigger picture.
As shitty a situation as it is, it's tiny compared to what could really happen.
Aleppo.
All across Facebook, the rest of the internet, television and in social circles people are shaking their heads, tutting, recoiling in horror and getting downright emotional about the fact that civilians are being killed needlessly and indiscriminately by Russia carpet bombing the city to get rid of the remaining rebels and basically anything else living and breathing there too.
They're claiming the UN, the West, anyone opposed to Russia, Assad's regime and Iran have failed the citizens of Aleppo and should've intervened long ago to stop this needless violence and death.
Have any of those people stopped to think about what it would mean if someone did actually intervene?
It would mean using force to stop Russia.
It would mean potentially risking World War 3, meaning that not only would everyone in Aleppo be dead but millions and perhaps even billions dying in a full scale war effort.
It would mean, again potentially although not likely, risking World War 3 escalating into mutually assured destruction of the entire planet due to the launching of nuclear weapons.
Some people don't see the bigger picture.
As shitty a situation as it is, it's tiny compared to what could really happen.