Syria Disintegrating: Part 2

[CountDeMoney]

The Kurds have committed numerous acts of murder and terror against our NATO ally: Turkey. Screw 'em and the PKK.

that probably because that nato-ally has committed many many acts of oppression and murder against the kurds. At some point it's enough and bad stuff starts to happen.

One is our ally and the other isn't.  It would be better to have Turkey as a friend than the Kurds.

I seem to recall one helping out against Saddam Hussein's regime in 2003 despite overwhelming odds, and another refusing to allow the 4th Mechanized ID to disembark to open a northern front for the invasion, despite crossing the border on their own to mix shit up with ethnic groups they didn't like. 

Some fucking ally.

[jimmy olsen]

Turks are getting pissed. Also, the rebels seem to have captured an important town linking Aleppo to Damascus.

www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/10/us-syria-crisis-turkey-military-idUSBRE8990AI20121010

Turkey warns Syria against cross-border shelling

(Reuters) - Turkey's military chief of staff said on Wednesday his troops would respond with greater force if bombardments from Syria keep hitting its territory.

Several mortar bombs landed outside the Syrian border town of Azmarin and heavy machinegun fire could be heard from the Turkish side as clashes between the Syrian army and rebels intensified along the border.

Plumes of smoke rose into the sky and cries of "God is greatest" rang out between the bursts of gunfire.

The Turkish armed forces have bolstered their presence along the 900-km (560-mile) border and have been responding over the past week to gunfire and shelling coming across from northern Syria, where President Bashar al-Assad's forces have been battling rebels who control swathes of territory.

"We responded but if it continues we will respond with greater force," state television TRT quoted Turkey's Chief of Staff, General Necdet Ozel, as saying.

NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said on Tuesday the military alliance had plans in place to defend Turkey. He gave no further details but a senior U.S. defense official said NATO would likely react if Turkey made a request for assistance.

It is not clear whether the shells that have hit Turkish territory were aimed to strike there or were due to Syrian troops overshooting as they attacked rebel positions. Turkey has provided sanctuary for rebel officers and fighters.

General Ozel visited the family of five civilians killed last week by a Syrian mortar strike in the Turkish town of Akcakale before flying by helicopter to military base further east along the frontier.

Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, once an ally of Assad but now one of his harshest critics, said in Istanbul that Turkey's objective was to secure peace and stability in the region, not to interfere in Syria's domestic politics.

"We warned Assad. We reminded him of the reforms he should introduce...unfortunately the Assad regime didn't keep its promises to the world and its own people," Erdogan said.

"Nobody should or can expect us to remain silent in the face of the violent oppression of people's rightful demands."

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 70 people had been killed across the country on Wednesday, including six rebels in the strategic town of Maarat al-Nuaman, on the north-south highway linking Aleppo to the capital Damascus.

Activists and rebels had said on Tuesday that the insurgents seized control of the town after a 48-hour battle but clashes continued in and around Maarataal-Nuaman on Wednesday.

SYRIANS FLEE ACROSS RIVER

Scores of Syrian civilians, many of them women with screaming children clinging to their necks, crossed a narrow river marking the border with Turkey as they fled the fighting in Azmarin and surrounding villages.

Residents from the Turkish village of Hacipasa helped pull them across in small metal boats.

"The firing started getting intense last night. Some people have been killed, some are lying wounded on the road," said a 55-year old woman, Mune, who fled Azmarin and sat with several adults and about 20 children outside a house in Hacipasa.

"People want to escape but they can't. Many have settled in a field outside the town and are trying to come," she said, describing how she had helped ferry the children over another point in the river in a metal bowl used for wheat.

Doctors and volunteers set up makeshift first aid points on both sides of the frontier. A Turkish ambulance and several minibuses and cars waited to take the more seriously wounded to the main city of Antakya or district hospitals.

"Don't take me across, take me back. I want to return and fight," said one man being carried on a stretcher, his T-shirt stained with blood.

A sharp rise in casualties in Syria in the past month indicates the growing intensity of the conflict, which spiraled from peaceful protests against Assad's rule in March 2011 into a full-scale civil war.

The Syrian government said on Wednesday that an appeal by U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon for a ceasefire was only acceptable if the rebel forces agreed to abide by it too.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Jihad Makdissi said two previous attempts at holding a ceasefire had broken down when the rebels carried out attacks. U.N. observers at the time said government forces had also violated the truce.

Ban had asked for a unilateral truce, Makdissi said. Damascus replied that the goal of any truce was to prepare the ground for dialogue, not to seek military advantage.

"We requested the Secretary General to send delegates to the relevant countries, specifically Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey, because those are the countries that finance, shelter, train and arm these armed groups, so that they can show their commitment to stopping these acts," he said.

As well as the combat along the northern border, government and rebel forces are still fighting over districts of Homs in the west, Aleppo in the north, and other towns and cities.

Damascus has been hit by a series of bombings of strategic buildings that have brought the war close to Assad's seat of power but the rebels have been unable to keep a foothold in the center, although clashes are frequent in the suburbs.

The government has made heavy use of airpower and artillery to halt rebel advances, flattening parts of city neighborhoods.

(Additional reporting by Seda Sezer in Istanbul; Writing by Nick Tattersall; Editing by Angus MacSwan)

[DGuller]

I wonder what the plan is for Turks.  Are they trying to ratchet down the tensions, or ratchet them up?  Or are they merely being forced to respond forcefully to avoid losing face?

[jimmy olsen]

Seems like they'd prefer to ratchet it down but the Syrians keep firing on Turkish territory leaving them no choice but to escalate.

Meanwhile, we're ratcheting it up.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/u-s-sends-military-troops-jordan-case-syrian-escalation-panetta-article-1.1179125

U.S. sends military troops to Jordan in case of Syrian escalation, says Defense Secretary Leon Panetta

Panetta's announcement follows several days of shelling between Turkey and Syria, an indication that the civil war could spill across Syria's borders and become a regional conflict.

BRUSSELS — The United States has sent military troops to the Jordan-Syria border to help build a headquarters in Jordan and bolster that country's military capabilities in the event that violence escalates along its border with Syria, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said Wednesday.

Speaking at a NATO conference of defense ministers in Brussels, Panetta said the U.S. has been working with Jordan to monitor chemical and biological weapons sites in Syria and also to help Jordan deal with refugees pouring over the border from Syria.

But the revelation of U.S. military personnel so close to the 19-month-old Syrian conflict suggests an escalation in the U.S. military involvement in the conflict, even as Washington pushes back on any suggestion of a direct intervention in Syria.

It also follows several days of shelling between Turkey and Syria, an indication that the civil war could spill across Syria's borders and become a regional conflict.

"We have a group of our forces there working to help build a headquarters there and to insure that we make the relationship between the United States and Jordan a strong one so that we can deal with all the possible consequences of what's happening in Syria," Panetta said.

The development comes with the U.S. presidential election less than a month away, and at a time when former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee, has been criticizing President Barack Obama's foreign policy, accusing the administration of embracing too passive a stance in the convulsive Mideast region.

The defense secretary and other administration officials have expressed concern about Syrian President Bashar Assad's arsenal of chemical weapons. Panetta said last week that the United States believes that while the weapons are still secure, intelligence suggests the regime might have moved the weapons to protect them. The Obama administration has said that Assad's use of chemical weapons would be a "red line" that would change the U.S. policy of providing only non-lethal aid to the rebels seeking to topple him.

Pentagon press secretary George Little, traveling with Panetta, said the U.S. and Jordan agreed that "increased cooperation and more detailed planning are necessary in order to respond to the severe consequences of the Assad regime's brutality."

He said the U.S. has provided medical kits, water tanks, and other forms of humanitarian aid to help Jordanians assist Syrian refugees fleeing into their country.

Little said the military personnel were there to help Jordan with the flood of Syrian refugees over its borders and the security of Syria's stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons.

"As we've said before, we have been planning for various contingencies, both unilaterally and with our regional partners," Little said in a written statement. "There are various scenarios in which the Assad regime's reprehensible actions could affect our partners in the region. For this reason and many others, we are always working on our contingency planning, for which we consult with our friends."

A U.S. defense official in Washington said the forces are made up of 100 military planners and other personnel who stayed on in Jordan after attending an annual exercise in May, and several dozen more have flown in since, operating from a joint U.S.- Jordanian military center north of Amman that Americans have used for years.

He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk about the mission on the record.

In Jordan, the biggest problem for now seems to be the strain put on the country's meager resources by the estimated 200,000 Syrian refugees who have flooded across the border - the largest fleeing to any country.

Several dozen refugees in Jordan rioted in their desert border camp of Zaatari early this month, destroying tents and medicine and leaving scores of refugee families out in the night cold.

Jordanian men also are moving the other way across the border - joining what intelligence officials have estimated to be around 2,000 foreigners fighting alongside Syrian rebels trying to topple Assad. A Jordanian border guard was wounded after armed men - believed trying to go fight - exchanged gunfire at the northern frontier.

Turkey has reinforced its border with artillery guns and deployed more fighter jets to an air base close to the border region after an errant Syrian mortar shell killed five people in a Turkish border town last week and Turkey retaliated with artillery strikes.

Turkey's military chief Gen. Necdet Ozel vowed Wednesday to respond with more force to any further shelling from Syria, keeping up the pressure on its southern neighbor a day after NATO said it stood ready to defend Turkey.

[Sheilbh]

I wonder what the plan is for Turks.  Are they trying to ratchet down the tensions, or ratchet them up?  Or are they merely being forced to respond forcefully to avoid losing face?

I agree with Tim.  I think they're trying to lower tensions, but they keep on being fired on which requires a response - such as calling emergency NATO meetings to casually remind the Syrians that the Turks have friends, or Parliament authorising the use of force.  All of these seem to be to be about sending a message to the Syrians, not preparing to actually use force.

[Admiral Yi]

I am reminded by the fierce rhetoric employed by Johnny Turk during the Khurdish base kerfluffle in Iraq.

[Viking]

Seems like they'd prefer to ratchet it down but the Syrians keep firing on Turkish territory leaving them no choice but to escalate.

I'm pretty sure Erdogan said some pretty choice things about the same situation in Gaza that he is conveniently forgetting now.

[jimmy olsen]

Lol a paranoid wackjob from Something Awful manage to survive the fighting in Libya and is apparently in Syria right now.

Here's some videos of him from Libya.
http://libyavoices.blogspot.co.uk/

[Tamas]

So, Turkish air force forces a Syrian civilian airliner, flying from Moscow to Syria, to land in Turkey, then Erdogan himself announces that they found Russian arms and supplies on the plane (now there is a shocker). Putin's Turkey visit gets cancelled for "different reasons", and Russians say that the forced landing of the plane was illegal.

I keep telling you guys but you don't listen: the present Middle East is what the 1910s Balkans was.

[Viking]

So, Turkish air force forces a Syrian civilian airliner, flying from Moscow to Syria, to land in Turkey, then Erdogan himself announces that they found Russian arms and supplies on the plane (now there is a shocker). Putin's Turkey visit gets cancelled for "different reasons", and Russians say that the forced landing of the plane was illegal.

I keep telling you guys but you don't listen: the present Middle East is what the 1910s Balkans was.

Does this make the Ottoman Empire the Israel of the 1910s balkans since everybody wants to destroy it?

[Jacob]

I keep telling you guys but you don't listen: the present Middle East is what the 1910s Balkans was.

Is anyone here arguing that the Middle East is not a tinderbox?

[Sheilbh]

I thought this was interesting and I broadly agree - dreadful headline though:

Why Turkey and Syria are Heading toward War
1 OCT 9 2012, 5:21 PM ET 53

Last week my older daughter, who is studying Turkish in college, asked in an email whether I thought there would be a war between Syria and Turkey. I replied, "I don't think so, but it's possible," and then listed some reasons why war could happen. Sometime after clicking "send" I realized that those reasons were so powerful that I should have told her there's at least a fifty-fifty chance of war.

Before explaining what I mean, I should emphasize that I don't think either government really wants war. God knows Bashar Assad has his hands full fighting a civil war, and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan would presumably like to avoid war (particularly what Syria expert Joshua Landis has called the "potential Vietnam" that could result from putting ground troops in Syria). That Erdogan is scrambling to find alternatives to war is evident in his administration's pointedly suggesting this weekend that Syria's vice president would be acceptable as the leader of a transitional government.

But wars are often fought by countries whose leaders didn't really want them. (See World War I.) A common reason is that neither regime feels it can afford to be seen by its people as backing down. But perhaps more important are some other dynamics pushing these countries toward war:

[1] Turkey could decide before long that war is preferable to the alternatives. The Syrian civil war is creating all kinds of problems for Turkey. There's a big influx of refugees, and there's also the Kurdish issue: Many of Syria's Kurds hope to use the civil war as an opportunity to carve out an autonomous or even sovereign Kurdish region in Syria, and Turkey fears that this could prove contagious, emboldening Kurdish separatists in Turkey and energizing longstanding dreams of a new Kurdish nation that comprises parts of Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran. Both of these issues--refugees and Kurdish nationalism--could lead Turkey to conclude that the sooner the Syrian civil war ends, the better. And helping fight it could help end it--especially if Turkey's fellow members of NATO help out.

[2] Speaking of NATO: The fact that a Turkish-Syrian war could draw America into the conflict will make such a war more attractive to some backers of American intervention. That includes some influential Americans (largely, but not entirely, drawn from the crowd that got the U.S. into the Iraq war), but it also includes non-Americans, among them, presumably, the leaders of some Arab states. And the more influential players there are who want a war to happen, the more likely it is to happen.

[3] Syria feels it can't afford to ignore the Turkish border. The casual reader of the news might ask: If Syria doesn't want a war, and Syrian shells that fall on the Turkish side of the border could start a war, why doesn't Syria quit firing shells anywhere near the border? Indeed, why not bow to the Turkish demand for a buffer zone on the Syrian side of the border? The answer is simple: The Syrian regime is fighting for its life, and along the Turkish-Syrian border lies the lifeline of its enemy. The rebels are being supplied with weapons via Turkey and are seizing control of border crossings inside Syria, and their goal is to build, from there, an expanding zone of control. Can you imagine any regime, in the Syrian regime's situation, not fighting to keep control, or retake control, of border crossings, and not trying to disrupt the enemy's supply of arms and ammunition near the point of origin?

[4] Turkey is, in a sense, already at war with the Syrian regime. The rebels aren't just being supplied via Turkey; they're being supplied by Turkey--at least in the sense that Turkey has willingly, even eagerly, turned itself into an arms and ammunition conveyer belt that is stocked by such countries as Saudi Arabia and Qatar. (The US is confining its contribution to "non-lethal" supplies such as communications equipment--which, of course, does in fact help the rebels kill people.) So the Turkish indignation at shells landing on Turkish soil is ironic; Turkey is sending lots more ammo into Syria than Syria is sending into Turkey--the difference is that the ammo Turkey is sending actually kills lots of people. That Turkey's role as a conduit of arms and ammunition isn't a passive one may make Syria even less inclined to keep its fire far from the border.

None of this changes the fact that the Syrian regime doesn't want a war with Turkey or the fact that the Turkish regime can't possibly be sanguine about war with Syria. But in the end these two facts may not matter.

[Darth Wagtaros]

I keep telling you guys but you don't listen: the present Middle East is what the 1910s Balkans was.

You told us a lot about Elemental too. 

The difference between then and now is that nobody is gonna be too quick to start a giant general war over some shithole that most of our semi-literate populations couldn't find on a map.

[Ed Anger]

I keep telling you guys but you don't listen: the present Middle East is what the 1910s Balkans was.

You told us a lot about Elemental too. 

The difference between then and now is that nobody is gonna be too quick to start a giant general war over some shithole that most of our semi-literate populations couldn't find on a map.

And WWI Gold.

IT IS GOOD, YES?

[Crazy_Ivan80]

if Turkey goes to war with Syria I hope it turns into a quagmire for them. they need some bleeding.