The Arab Spring

The US policy is to bomb the Syrian Kurds and help ISIL?

Blame Erdogan for following his own policy. Leave the US out of it.

edited 8th Feb '16 5:09:00 PM by FFShinra

Final Fantasy, Foreign Policy, and Bollywood. Helluva combo, that...

Erdogan didn't even follow the US policy, he did his damn best to sabotage it so he could screw with the Kurds.

Inter arma enim silent leges

Not all rebel groups were Jihadist. Hell, the reason the US didn't give more than anemic support was because it was more worried about vetting than fighting. Erdogan did not show the same care.

And frankly, advocating mass murder does not make me value your contributions all that much.

EDIT- And further, you as (I presume) a Turkish citizen, should have ousted him when you had the chance with not one, but two elections. This is on him and this is on the Turkish people. The US has many things to fault for vis a vis Syria. What you are saying is not one of them.

edited 8th Feb '16 5:22:07 PM by FFShinra

Final Fantasy, Foreign Policy, and Bollywood. Helluva combo, that...

So far, I've seen the following accusations around certain newspapers, magazines, this forum and other forums:

• Da'esh/ISIS/ISIL is being secretly funded by Turkey;
• Da'esh is secretly being funded by Saudi Arabia;
• Da'esh is secretly being funded by Iran;

Where does the truth lie?

None of the above. At least not without clarification.

Most of the foreigners in Daesh are Tunisian. The money they got is from looting and oil (with seed money from AQ's regular backers, who tend to be private businessmen all throughout the Muslim world, not just the Gulf). Qatar is suspicious in that it helped facilitate their rise by focusing on salafist groups, likewise Saudia, but neither is the same as creating Daesh, which is as dangerous to them as it is to Assad.

Turkey has done business with Daesh at the most local level (oil for food usually), and find them useful against the Kurds, but as for official state support, highly unlikely.

Iran doing it is basically the local version of the 9/11 Truther movement.

Final Fantasy, Foreign Policy, and Bollywood. Helluva combo, that...

The entire reason that there is a civil war is that Assad isn't Sunni, and you're expecting me to believe that people who are willing to kill / die to replace the head of state with someone from their sect aren't jihadists?

And how is it a mass murder to wish that we would take advantage of infighting among terrorists? The civilian people had already escaped to Turkey, and I'd be sorrier for the buildings than those who fought to take the city.

Re:EDIT: We should have, but unfortunately the power of propaganda is strong especially when you control the entire state media.

edited 8th Feb '16 5:29:35 PM by amateur55

No logic for number 3 and 1 and 2 are massive simplification, certain elements of the Saudi government and royalty do have ties to exstream Islamist groups and likely ISIS, however that is individual actors within the state, not the state itself, also often it's more that they've pushed the ideology that spawned ISIS more then actually created or funded it directly.

With Turkey it seems to be a combination of basic corruption (I'm sure ISIS offer a nice cut to anyone who helps them sell their oil), low level sympathy and connections and frankly a desire for some nice oil on the cheep (something Assad himself may have also been doing, buying from ISIS that is). Again it's not the state acting as a unified figure, it's actors and groups within it acting out of line, but out of line of a line that got them petty close anyway.

As for the discussion in the last few posts, Shinra, I know the site is different, but that yellow triangle still works.

"And the Bunny nails it!" ~ Gabrael "If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we." ~ Cyran

The reason the people are fighting Assad (who, at the beginning of the Spring, was actually fairly popular for NOT being his father) is because the man didn't know when to compromise and started shooting people in the streets. Not because he is an Alawite. The sectarianism came about a year later, once the jihadists (most of whom were released from Syrian prisons at the beginning of the war by Assad) had taken hold in positions of leadership and promises of victory.

Honestly didn't realize that was thumpable. Never been involved in such a conversation on this forum before.

edited 8th Feb '16 5:33:13 PM by FFShinra

Final Fantasy, Foreign Policy, and Bollywood. Helluva combo, that...

Shinra and Silas: Thank you.

I've been trying to build a bigger picture (but still fairly complex) of the whole area and its players and their relations, but it seems more and more like a futile task.

I've seen the mention of salafist groups. Are certain wahabbist groups also closely connected (whether from within Qatar or within Saudi Arabia)?

edited 8th Feb '16 5:36:57 PM by Quag15

None. They're all fighting Daesh, and Daesh has responded in kind. However the Turks also sometimes lend indirect aid to Daesh when they're not bombing them or supplying their enemies (e.g. Syrian rebels and Peshmerga), like letting Daesh troops and supplies pass through their areas, or bombing Daesh's enemies, or effectively granting them no-fly-zones in the border areas.

It reminds of Pakistan's left hand vs right hand policies in the North-West War. Does Turkey have a schizophrenic ISI equivalent?

Nitpick. Tunisians are the largest group (along with Saudis and "Russians") besides the Iraqis and Syrians, but not the majority. They're only ~6,000 out of ISIL's ~30,000 foreign volunteers.

Official support for ISIS by any government is effectively impossible. Their entire claim is that every government on Earth is illegitimate. Like 80% of their cash comes from captured Syrian and Iraqi oil infrastructure, the rest comes from looting and black market trade.

edited 8th Feb '16 5:37:56 PM by Nihlus1

Not anymore. Erdogan saw to that.

Final Fantasy, Foreign Policy, and Bollywood. Helluva combo, that...

Don't forget the Russian nationalist/Arab conspirologist version:

• Da'esh used to be secretly funded by the US, but it got out of hand and now they're frantically trying to get rid of it.

edited 8th Feb '16 9:30:13 PM by KnitTie

Is there a conspiracy that says Russia created Daesh in order to bog down Europe with refugees and divert US attention away from Eastern Europe? And it only got out of hand once it spread into Assad's lap.

Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.

Probably, Eastern Europe loves to conspiracy theory about the Russians, it would also allow them to justify not taking refugees so as to foil the 'evil plan'.

Oh also Jews, remember, all conspiracy theories can have Jews added to them, yes that includes Saudi and Iranian ones, after all, I belive there are folks in Saudi Arabia who belive that Iran is a Jewish puppet that's used by Israel and the US to get at Saudi Arabia.

edited 8th Feb '16 9:07:14 PM by Silasw

"And the Bunny nails it!" ~ Gabrael "If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we." ~ Cyran

And now the muslim countries are at it?, Will this ever stop?

Instead of focusing on relatives that divide us, maybe we should try to find the absolutes that tie us.

That notion is so crazy that even the Poles aren't doing that, to say nothing of the rest of Eastern Europe. The Baltics say that Russia is helping Assad because it wants to destabilise Europe with an influx of refugees, but that's pretty much it in terms of how insane it gets.

Silasw - So how close did the Turkish "line" come to actually aiding ISIS? I've seen plenty of accusations but no actual proof.

edited 8th Feb '16 9:31:06 PM by KnitTie

Well bombing the Kurds and for a long time blocking the US's attempts to help the Kurds certainly helped ISIS, but I think that that's as far as the line got. That and the Turks were never particularly carful about who they let cross the border as long as they were fighting someone they didn't like (Assad, the Kurds or both), that certainly helped to, though how much of that was deliberate compared to bring incompetence is anyone's guess.

But obviously once you're that close a few independent elements (who aren't being watched closely because nobody minds that much) going a bit further and buying some ISIS oil, taking ISIS bribes and looking the other way as ISIS recruits stream south isn't surprising.

edited 9th Feb '16 8:19:19 AM by Silasw

"And the Bunny nails it!" ~ Gabrael "If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we." ~ Cyran

And yet people blame Turkey for being actively in bed with ISIS. Figures.

edited 8th Feb '16 10:26:44 PM by KnitTie

LA Times has now confimed what I had reported earlier, of two towns south of Sheikh Makhsin surrendering to the SAA, giving Assad full control of the road from Damascus to Daraa.

Final Fantasy, Foreign Policy, and Bollywood. Helluva combo, that...

For those bleating about Bashar al-Assad's 'legitimacy'.

Schild und Schwert der Partei

It took them this long to figure that out?

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

I'm fairly sure that that's just the latest article in a long chain of similar publications.

And guess what? Not only Assad likes himself a good ol' atrocity to while away the evening. This war is such a miserable trainwreck.

Edit - RT also covers the topic.

edited 9th Feb '16 11:00:59 AM by KnitTie