More Escalation, and More Turkish Machinations
Turkey has the 2nd biggest army in NATO, and much of it is stationed a few miles from ISIS, but, much to the disappointment of the Obama administration they are refusing to take any actions at all:
As fighters with the Islamic State bore down Tuesday on the Syrian town of Kobani on the Turkish border, President Obama’s plan to fight the militant group without being drawn deeper into the Syrian civil war was coming under acute strain.
While Turkish troops watched the fighting in Kobani through a chicken-wire fence, Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said that the town was about to fall and Kurdish fighters warned of an impending blood bath if they were not reinforced — fears the United States shares.
But Mr. Erdogan said Tuesday that Turkey would not get more deeply involved in the conflict with the Islamic State unless the United States agreed to give greater support to rebels trying to unseat the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad. That has deepened tensions with President Obama, who would like Turkey to take stronger action against the Islamic State and to leave the fight against Mr. Assad out of it.
It gets better.
While refusing to take any action, Istanbul is demanding that the US put boots on the ground (see vid).
It’s pretty clear that Erdogan has been aggressively supporting the rebels in Syria, including some of the most extreme Jihadis. (The so-called moderates could not fight their way out of a wet paper bag)
Turkey is reticent about taking action for a number of reasons:
- They want the Kurds in Iraq and Syria to be neutralized as a military force that might ally with their own Kurds.
- Erdogan is obsessed with replacing the secular regime in Syria with a Sunni one.
- The Turks fear that if they go in on any operations against ISIS, their complicity in its formation will be revealed.
I think that the last point is most of their concern wight now.
It’s why they went ape sh%$ over Biden’s comments regarding the Turkish role in the Syrian civil war.
Before ISIS was ISIS, Turkey and the House of Saud were the biggest backers of al Qaeda linked militants in Syria, and now that their little monster has become a potential threat, they are looking for plausible deniability.