Tuesday, November 24, 2015

WHO IS FIGHTING WHOM IN SYRIA?


It does not matter whether the Russians had been in the Turkish territory for eighteen seconds, or for two seconds, or not at all. Every knowledgeable person, honest or dishonest, every reasonable human being is well aware of the fact that the Russian jets never posed any threat to the national security of the Turkish Republic. The only reason why one of these jets was shot down was in retaliation of the Russian bombing of the anti-Assad rebels, whom the Russians justifiably call “terrorists” and whom the Turkish Government considers its allies in the war against Assad, and, to pacify the critics, calls “moderate opposition.”

These days it is fashionable to forget, in the Western media, that only recently most Western experts concurred in the opinion that the only combat-capable anti-Assad rebel forces were either ISIL-affiliates, or ISIL-accomplices, and that the so-called “moderate opposition” were a bunch of toothless incompetents, in other words, a chimera.

What happened was that after the Russians had become directly involved in the fight against the Islamic extremists in Syria, the simple fact of life that it is either Assad or the ISIL had become politically inexpedient. Very unfortunately, President Obama and the Russophobic element in the United States Government, plus several other Western leaders, have preferred to see Russia, rather than the international terrorist organizations, as the greater enemy, and that – without a good cause, except for the deep misunderstanding of the fact that Putin’s Russia is no longer Yeltsin’s Russia. (I suspect that Yeltsin’s Russia, with all my revulsion for it, had never really been what the West had thought it to be…)

Turkey must have taken this Russophobic attitude of the West as her cue in her private battles in the region, where Russia was now creating a hindrance, hence the shootdown…

There is no doubt in my mind that sooner or later Daesh will be defeated in Syria. No matter how that may occur, Turkey is not going to be among the winners. The sad irony is that the Turks must have known this all along. But they must have put their bet on the United States, not realizing that Washington was bluffing.

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