Tornado Alley (PROG)

[StephanieVanbryce]

Turkey Is Finally Bombing
Syria, But It’s Not Hitting Who
the U.S. Wants

Ankara has sent tanks and commandos across the border, but its
primary focus isn't ISIS — it's the Kurds trying to seize territory
along its border.

By Paul McLeary, Dan De Luce
August 24, 2016



Turkey has a name for its newly launched military incursion into neighboring Syria: Operation Euphrates Shield. It sums up Ankara’s overriding priority when it comes to the war there: preventing Kurdish forces from seizing a contiguous stretch of territory along its southern flank.

The lightning operation that kicked off before dawn on Wednesday was billed as a way to push the Islamic State out of Jarablus — its last stronghold on the Turkish border. But the timing, and subsequent statements from officials in Ankara, have made clear that Turkey is focused on the threat posed by advancing Kurdish fighters rather than on the Islamic State militants who had held the border town since 2014.

The assault by about a dozen Leopard tanks, a contingent of Turkish special operations forces, and several hundred Syrian rebels — all backed up by American F-16 and A-10 fighter planes — was touted in a brand-new English-language Turkish government Twitter account: @EuphratesShield.

As the Turkish-backed Syrian rebels consolidated their hold on the town, the account posted increasingly anti-Kurd messages, delivering propaganda tying the U.S.-backed Kurdish YPG militia battling the Islamic State inside Syria to the PKK, a Turkish-based Kurdish militant group that has been waging a bloody, decades-long battle with Ankara to gain Kurdish independence.

The PKK, an acronym for the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, was formed in the late 1970s as a Marxist-inspired Kurdish independence movement, and the fighting between the group and the Turkish government has cost about 40,000 lives. The war reached a peak in the 1990s, when Turkish forces destroyed hundreds of Kurdish villages, forcing hundreds of thousands of Kurds to leave the country or flee elsewhere within Turkey.

After years of relative calm, a fragile 2-year-old cease-fire between the PKK and the Turkish government unraveled last year. The PKK has staged attacks on police stations and military bases, employing terrorist tactics with suicide bombings and roadside bombs that have claimed hundreds of lives.

Ankara makes no distinction between the PKK and the People’s Protection Units, or YPG, one of Washington’s most effective battlefield allies in Syria. The United States, though, only designates the PKK as a terrorist group, which has triggered years of tensions between the two countries.

The upshot is that Ankara is concerned about the Islamic State but is far more worried about the threat posed by its Kurdish adversaries. Despite a rash of deadly attacks within Turkey since last year, including a bombing at a wedding party on Saturday that claimed 54 lives, the Islamic State isn’t considered a major threat to the Turkish people, who have suffered terrorist attacks for decades. It sees a successful Kurdish effort to conquer and hold territory along its border as a potentially existential danger to the Turkish state. And no Turkish leader — especially President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a nationalist — wants to be accused of having allowed the Kurds to build an independent state on the country’s southern border.


Much MORE! .. sheesh as IF....
http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/08/24/turkey-is-finally-bombing-syria-but-its-not-hitting-who-the-u-s-wants/