The Mess in Syria

[Per]

Dozens of dead civilians.
More than 100,000 civilians fleeing.
Several hundred Kurdish soldiers dead.


Thanks a lot, Trump.
WPE. Hands down.

[Cousin Strawberry]

Is that a Chiquita sticker on her banana?

[Topper]

Follow Norway's lead. If Eurpoe would have stopped catering to Turkey, this may not have occured.

Per, you are the pot calling the kettle black.

[5thhorseman]

Aren't the US there illegally anyways. No-one invited them.

[rats19]

Aren't the US there illegally anyways. No-one invited them.

Supposed to have been a 30 day thing not forevermore

[Cousin Strawberry]

Follow Norway's lead. If Eurpoe would have stopped catering to Turkey, this may not have occured.

Per, you are the pot calling the kettle black.

Dont ask him about the swedish Waffen SS units



No wonder hes a big fan of the FOURTH Reich EU!

[Per]

Follow Norway's lead. If Eurpoe would have stopped catering to Turkey, this may not have occured.

Per, you are the pot calling the kettle black.

No, I agree with you that Europe has done too little for the Kurds.

But at least they have strongly urged Erdogan to stay out of Syria, while Trump agreed to remove US troops to facilitate open season on the Kurdish troops. Which by the way is also putting US soldiers at risk:
https://www.newsweek.com/us-troops-syria-turkey-1464727

[Per]

Follow Norway's lead. If Eurpoe would have stopped catering to Turkey, this may not have occured.

Per, you are the pot calling the kettle black.

Dont ask him about the swedish Waffen SS units

Yeah, right... a handful of idiots... 180 in total, I think...

One of them was btw one of the founders of the Sweden Democrats.
I really cannot fathom how anyone can vote for those closet nazis....

In comparisson, 300 Swedes joined the Norwegian resistance to fight the Germans there, some 8,000 Swedish seamen were leased to the British and some 8,000 volunteers fought for the Finnish army.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden_ ... rld_War_II

There were also some 1,500 Swedish volunteers fighting for the USA, not including the more than 3,000 Swedish born US citizens that did so. https://swedesinthestates.com/swedes-jo ... -military/

[Per]

Some good points.

In the week since Donald Trump’s fateful phone conversation with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the US has entirely abandoned the Kurds, its most effective allies in the Middle East, and with them a Syria strategy that was five years in the making.
The Islamic State flag has been raised once more and the last vestige of US credibility as a reliable partner lies crushed under Turkish tank tracks. It has arguably been the worst seven days for US foreign policy since the invasion of Iraq.

Administration officials have been under orders to deny that Trump gave Erdoğan a green light to invade north-eastern Syria, despite all the indications to the contrary. After the Turkish leader announced his intention to invade, Trump invited him to the White House, one of the most coveted rewards a US president can bestow. And even as his aides are instructed to lie on his behalf, Trump continues to flash a green light on Twitter, and not just to the Turks.

While echoing Turkey’s view of the Kurds as terrorists, Trump declared: “Others may want to come in and fight for one side or the other. Let them!”

Those “others” include the Assad regime, and its Iranian and Russian backers, to whom the Kurds have appealed for their own salvation, as their US partners pack their bags and leave. A close, very personal and highly effective partnership between US (as well as British and French) advisers and Kurdish fighters in the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which took nearly five years to forge, has been totally undone in a few days.

Since the US started dropping supplies to besieged Kurdish fighters in Kobane in late 2014, that partnership succeeded in rolling back Isis, rooting it out from one stronghold after another. At the same time, it held the regime at bay across a significant swath of Syria.

These were Washington’s limited objectives in Syria, inherited from the Obama administration. And they were achieved at very little cost to the US. The price was paid almost solely by the SDF, which lost 11,000 fighters.

Regime forces are moving northwards into areas that were in the US sphere of influence just a few days ago, at the invitation of the SDF, desperate for assistance in the face of Turkey’s murderous Syrian proxy militias. At the same time, Isis detainees are escaping from SDF detention facilities and the movement is reconstituting. The speed of the unravelling has been breathtaking.

Trump has played down the Kurdish relationship as purely transactional. They had been given a lot of money and equipment, he pointed out. But it was not transactional for the soldiers who fought at each others’s shoulders, and the civilians killed as a result of the Trump-Erdoğan understanding. The US has let the Kurds down before, but Trump’s sheer callousness has made it hard to imagine that this betrayal will be forgiven in the foreseeable future.

The US military is also unlikely to forget being forced to cut and run, and watch a respected ally being crushed. There is considerable anger being reported from junior officers in the field and the generals back in the Pentagon. The next time US soldiers go looking for local partners to act as ground forces, it will be much harder. Who would fight with America now?

https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... ssion=true

[Topper]

Per, you want the US military to maintain border security.

[Per]

Per, you want the US military to maintain border security.

I just agree with the Pentagon and 354 US congressmen that you don't cut and run before the job is done.

Pulling the troops out the way Donald did has cost hundreds of lives, has destroyed the result of decades of US diplomacy and military operations, has strengthened Bashir Assad's regime and confirmed Russia's position as the new strongman in the Middle East.

Guess Donny can look forward to a hefty xmas bonus from Vlad for a job well done.
Worth every rubel he spent on influencing the outcome of the 2016 election

[Per]

The President's version of events was so divorced from reality that, only moments before he praised Erdogan, his own envoy to Syria, Amb. Jim Jeffrey, told Congress that the US has seen evidence of war crimes in a Turkish invasion he called "a tragic disaster."

Trump lifted all the sanctions the US imposed on Turkey after it launched an invasion of Syrian territory that had been under control of the Kurds with US support -- until Trump agreed to remove US forces following a phone call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan two weeks ago. The Turkish assault that followed Trump's abrupt withdrawal announcement forced hundreds of thousands of Kurds to flee their homes, prompting accusations of ethnic cleansing by Turkey and its allied Arab militias.

Trump lied about the fate of ISIS, saying prisoners who were being guarded by the Kurds, are "under very, very strict lock and key," adding that a few who escaped had been "largely recaptured." Secretary of Defense Mark Esper just told CNN's Christiane Amanpour that more than 100 escaped, and Jeffrey told Congress, "We do not know where they are."

Trump sought to throw sand in the eyes of his audience, pretending the past couple of weeks have been a triumph of US foreign policy. The precise opposite is true. According to the president, "People are saying, "wow, what a great outcome, congratulations.'"

https://edition.cnn.com/2019/10/23/opin ... index.html

I guess by "people" he is specifically referring to Putin, Erdogan and Assad.

And they're not congratulating him, they are congratulating eachother.

[Strangelove]

^ CNN

[Per]

^ CNN

Right, shoot the messenger.

[Topper]

^ CNN

Right, shoot the messenger.

Is that not what you often do?