The Mess in Syria

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The Mess in Syria

Post by Per »

Turkey shoots down Russian warplane on Syrian border... :o

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-34907983

First time a NATO country shoots down a Russian Aircraft since 1950. :|
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Re: The Mess in Syria

Post by BurningBeard »

"I gave the order myself"

http://thinkpol.ca/2015/11/25/i-gave-th ... ian-plane/

Guy may have bigger balls then Putin, and he just placed them on his forehead. This could get interesting.
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Re: The Mess in Syria

Post by Strangelove »

"The United States, however, seems to be privately disagreeing with Ankara’s assessment believing that the Russian jet shot down by Turkey on Tuesday was hit inside Syrian airspace after a brief incursion into Turkish airspace, according to top US official who spoke to Reuters on the condition of anonymity."

:look:

*starts stocking bomb shelter with fresh supplies*

Even if that Turkey turkey tells the truth, seventeen seconds is much less than normal protocol.

Methinks Turkey is a lot closer to the anti-Assad Turkmen rebels than folks thought.

It's the anti-Assad Turkmen rebels that the Russkies were bombing....
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Re: The Mess in Syria

Post by Rumsfeld »

Yeah Turkey was quick on the trigger. But if NATO jets were invading Russkie airspace and ignoring warnings, we all know what the Vladster would do.

Russia has been pulling this kind of shit with NATO for a while now, it's about time they got a rolled-up newspaper across the nose.

All that said, I think trying to topple Assad is an epic fail and the Russians seem to be doing some heavy lifting in the campaign against ISIL. Too bad we can't get on the same page against a common foe.
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Re: The Mess in Syria

Post by Strangelove »

Rumsfeld wrote: Yeah Turkey was quick on the trigger. But if NATO jets were invading Russkie airspace and ignoring warnings, we all know what the Vladster would do.
I could be wrong, but pretty sure Russian protocol gives more than 17 seconds of warnings.

Also, if it turns out the bomber was in Syrian airspace when shot down... fuhgeddaboudit!
Rumsfeld wrote: Russia has been pulling this kind of shit with NATO for a while now, it's about time they got a rolled-up newspaper across the nose.

All that said, I think trying to topple Assad is an epic fail and the Russians seem to be doing some heavy lifting in the campaign against ISIL. Too bad we can't get on the same page against a common foe.
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Re: The Mess in Syria

Post by Per »

Strangelove wrote:
"The United States, however, seems to be privately disagreeing with Ankara’s assessment believing that the Russian jet shot down by Turkey on Tuesday was hit inside Syrian airspace after a brief incursion into Turkish airspace, according to top US official who spoke to Reuters on the condition of anonymity."

:look:

*starts stocking bomb shelter with fresh supplies*

Even if that Turkey turkey tells the truth, seventeen seconds is much less than normal protocol.

Methinks Turkey is a lot closer to the anti-Assad Turkmen rebels than folks thought.

It's the anti-Assad Turkmen rebels that the Russkies were bombing....
Yup. The Turks and the Turkmen are tight. And supposedly everyone, including Russia and Turkey, is going after ISIS, but the Russians prefer bombing the so-called Syrian Opposition, and Turkey prefers bombing the Kurds...

In this particular case it also seems the Russians claim there are Caucasian rebels among the Turkmen, who pose a direct threat to Putin's Russia when/if they return home.

It's a sordid game in Syria. Boxes within boxes within boxes. I think I heard some estimate that there are more than a thousand different armed groups fighting it out, with shifting alliances and allegencies. ISIS is mostly fighting other opposition groups, which makes them less of an immediate threat to Assad, and therefor less interesting for the Russians, whose main purpose in this fight is to keep Assad in office.

Turkey's biggest fear is a Kurdish nation on their border. Thus even if they attack ISIS, they drop some bombs on the Kurds too, so they don't get too powerful.

It's a mess. :(
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Re: The Mess in Syria

Post by Rumsfeld »

I like kurds in my turkey, but not TOO many.
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Re: The Mess in Syria

Post by Per »

Strangelove wrote:
Rumsfeld wrote: Yeah Turkey was quick on the trigger. But if NATO jets were invading Russkie airspace and ignoring warnings, we all know what the Vladster would do.
I could be wrong, but pretty sure Russian protocol gives more than 17 seconds of warnings.

Also, if it turns out the bomber was in Syrian airspace when shot down... fuhgeddaboudit!
I would assume they start issuing warnings well before the planes crossed the border. I know that's what we do when the Russians are flying full speed toward Swedish territory. They then tend to turn around just before they enter Swedish airspace.

Now, if they had been warned, but still crossed the border... It's not that weird that the Turks opened fire during the brief period they were on the wrong side of the fence. They don't want another Crimea, now, do they?

It's very unfortunate that the plane was downed, because it may make it harder to create a joint force of NATO and Russian troops with the aim to crush ISIS. :|
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Re: The Mess in Syria

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Rumsfeld wrote:I like kurds in my turkey, but not TOO many.
Well, this thanksgiving, don't forget to set aside a slab of Turkey for the Kurds! :drink:
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Re: The Mess in Syria

Post by Island Nucklehead »

"See, there's three kinds of people: dicks, pussies, and assholes. Pussies think everyone can get along, and dicks just want to fuck all the time without thinking it through. But then you got your assholes, Chuck. And all the assholes want us to shit all over everything! So, pussies may get mad at dicks once in a while, because pussies get fucked by dicks. But dicks also fuck assholes, Chuck. And if they didn't fuck the assholes, you know what you'd get? You'd get your dick and your pussy all covered in shit!"

Assad, like Gaddafi and Saddam before him, is a dick. ISIS is undoubtedly a pack of assholes. Does that make Obama a pussy?
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Re: The Mess in Syria

Post by Per »

It's complicated.

:|
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Re: The Mess in Syria

Post by SKYO »

Assad mistake was using chemical weapons, but that won't topple his regime.
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration plans to impose new sanctions against Russia on Monday to punish it for enabling the Syrian government’s use of chemical weapons in its civil war, the latest in a series of actions by both sides underscoring the deterioration in relations between Moscow and the West.

The sanctions, coming shortly after American-led airstrikes against facilities linked to Syria’s chemical weapons, are meant to signal that the United States holds responsible not just the government of President Bashar al-Assad but also his patrons in Russia and Iran. President Trump has vowed that Syria’s allies will pay a “big price” for facilitating the suspected use of poison gas.

But it remained unclear how far Mr. Trump would go in trying to shape events in Syria, which has been racked by civil war for seven years. President Emmanuel Macron of France, who along with Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain joined in the strike on Syrian targets, said on Sunday night that he had persuaded Mr. Trump to keep a small American ground force in Syria despite the president’s public declaration that he wanted to get out.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/15/us/p ... syria.html

Why No World Power Really Wants To Topple Syria's Assad -

"Given that the Western strikes in Syria were about chemical weapons and nothing more, it is no surprise that Syria's President Assad was reported to be in a good mood," Middle East analyst Robert Danin wrote for the Council on Foreign Relations. "Assad now has further reason to feel confident that the United States will not work to topple his regime."

https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/ ... rias-assad
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Re: The Mess in Syria

Post by Per »

Giving this thread a bump.

So, things that had been looking reasonably stable for a whiole might start to unravel again after Trump's surprise decision to betray America's Kurdish allies by pulling out and basically giving Turkey a heads up to go in and do some ethnic cleanisng.

Rather predictably, the Kurds are now negotiating with Damascus and Russia to see if they can put up a united front against the impending Turkish invasion. Thus strengthening the hand of Russia and Iran in the region. Which I guess is what Trump (or at least his boss Vlad) wanted...

A lot of his foreign policy dealings seem to be specifically aimed at weakening the US position and strengthening Russia and China.
It's weird. You don't really understand why a US president would want that, but I guess it is what it is. Maybe Putin knows?

It also remains to be seen what happens with the 70,000 prisoners the Kurds hold, including some 12,000 ISIS fighters (the rest mainly their wives and children). Will they be set free? Will they be handed over to Assad loyalists? To Russia? To Turkey? :eh:

If the Kurds are busy defending themselves from a Turkish invasion, ISIS might attempt to liberate their foot soldiers from the prison camp.... Cuz, yeah, ISIS has been more or less defeated, but they are not gone. There are still some remnants left in the region, and if the Turks go in, all bets are off. If they can seize the prison camps, they suddenly have a lot more troops again.

This is a mess. :(
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Re: The Mess in Syria

Post by Topper »

Where is the EU?
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Re: The Mess in Syria

Post by Per »

Topper wrote: Wed Oct 09, 2019 9:35 am Where is the EU?
Great question. Sadly, the EU has messed up too here.

There’s been support for the Kurds from Europe too, but not the same military engagement as from the US.

Also, the EU made a pact with the devil to solve the refugee crisis of 2015/2016. Refugees from Syria, heading north, millions of them, are being held in refugee camps in Turkey funded with European money. Erdogan is now using this for leverage. He has on a number of occassions threatened to let the refugees continue on their way to Europe.

This effectively shuts up the EU; if the EU doesn’t play nice, Erdogan can at any time initiate a new European refugee crisis.

I agree that the EU should have done more in Syria, but the weakness of the EU is that it isn’t a country. To be able to act more effectively in situations like this, the union really would have to be transformed into a United States of Europe, with a strong central government. Sadly, this is not very likely to happen any time in the near future, as Europeans still prefer issues like this to be decided on a national basis, and major changes require unanimous support from all member states, ie every single member state can veto this. But exactly in cases like this, it renders the EU rather impotent.

On the other hand, the Kurds have known all along that all they can hope for from the EU is humanitarian aid.
They have however bet the farm on that their loyalty to the USA in the fight against ISIS would be repaid in the form of support for autonomy or eventually even statehood. Instead the Trump administration has abandoned them and left them at the mercy of the Turks, their eternal for. This will make it very hard for the USA to recruit allies in the region in the future.

Guess it’s typical of Trump to refuse to pay his subcontractors though. There’s a long list of companies that have gone belly up after working for him and not getting reimbursed. The Kurds should have known better.
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