hat tip to Silver Palomino!
silver palominoFebruary 29, 2016 at 2:23 AMHey Penny - Very interesting quote in this story by Patrick Cockburn:.....
So, with a well respected Western MSM reporter saying PYD =PKK its getting harder for the world to deny unless they just ignore him
We're going to get to this statement and a bit more shortly. Mr Cockburn's information makes no difference to myself or my readers. It won't change a thing, I've written and written about the connections between the PYD & PKK. In posts too numerous to recall. However, his acknowledgement of these realities, will be taken seriously by others, who would have previously, foolishly, dismissed the reams of posts, articles, citations posted here, connecting the two groups because it didn't fit their perception managed ideals.There is not one statement of fact in this article of Patrick Cockburn's that I have not written about for longer then a year now. If someone as mainstream as Patrick Cockburn is now informing the masses of these facts, will they finally become accepted as truths? Why is Mr Cockburn writing this type of article at this time? I'll give you a hint, it's really about Turkey and there has been a convergence of alt writers suddenly writing about the destabilization of Turkey. Something written about here for more then a year now. I'll save my thoughts on the situation regarding Turkey for another post, for now let's read the main points, concerning PKK/YPG from Patrick Cockburn/s piece : End Times for the Caliphate
"The Kurds are in a stronger position, benefiting as they do from U.S. support, but that support exists only because they provide some 120,000 ground troops which, in co-operation with the U.S.-led coalition air forces, have proved an effective and politically acceptable counter to IS. The Kurds fear that this support will evaporate if and when IS is defeated and they will be left to the mercy of resurgent central governments in Iraq and Syria as well as Turkey and Saudi Arabia. ‘We don’t want to be used as cannon fodder to take Raqqa,’ a Syrian Kurdish leader in Rojava told me last year. I heard the same thing this month five hundred miles to the east, in KRG territory near Halabja on the Iranian border, from Muhammad Haji Mahmud, a veteran Peshmerga commander and general secretary of the Socialist Party, who led one thousand fighters to defend Kirkuk from IS in 2014. His son Atta was killed in the battle. He said he worried that ‘once Mosul is liberated and IS defeated, the Kurds won’t have the same value internationally.’ Without this support, the KRG would be unable to hold onto its disputed territories.
The rise of the Kurdish states isn’t welcomed by any country in the region, though some – including the governments in Baghdad and Damascus – have found the development to be temporarily in their interest and are in any case too weak to resist it. But Turkey has been appalled to find that the Syrian uprising of 2011, which it hoped would usher in an era of Turkish influence spreading across the Middle East, has instead produced a Kurdish state that controls half of the Syrian side of Turkey’s 550-mile southern border. Worse, the ruling party in Rojava is the Democratic Union Party (PYD), which in all but name is the Syrian branch of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), against which Ankara has been fighting a guerrilla war since 1984.
Reiterating: "Worse, the ruling party in Rojava is the Democratic Union Party (PYD), which in all but name is the Syrian branch of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK)"
The PYD denies the link, but in every PYD office there is a picture on the wall of the PKK’s leader, Abdullah Ocalan, who has been in a Turkish prison since 1999. In the year since IS was finally defeated in the siege of the Syrian Kurdish city of Kobani, Rojava has expanded territorially in every direction as its leaders repeatedly ignore Turkish threats of military action against them.
The PYD/PKK at the Turkish border, safely ensconced in the arms of NATO, can easily ignore the threats of military action from Turkey
Last June, the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) captured Tal Abyad, an important crossing point on the Turkish border north of Raqqa, allowing the PYD to link up two of its three main enclaves, around the cities of Kobani and Qamishli; it is now trying to reach the third enclave, further west, at Afrin. These swift advances are possible only because the Kurdish forces are operating under a US-led air umbrella that vastly multiplies their firepower.
Reiterating: "These swift advances are possible only because the Kurdish forces are operating under a US-led air umbrella that vastly multiplies their firepower"Readers here are well aware of this fact and have been for a good long while
I was just east of Tal Abyad shortly before the final YPG attack and coalition aircraft roared continuously overhead. In both Syria and Iraq, the Kurds identify targets, call in air strikes and then act as a mopping-up force. Where IS stands and fights it suffers heavy casualties. In the siege of Kobani, which lasted for four and half months, 2200 IS fighters were killed, most of them by U.S. air strikes.
The Kurds backed by US airstrikes- acting as a mopping up force. (killing those that remain.... who ever they may really be) 2,200 ISIS fighters killed- an extremely small number considering all the hype.2,200 fighters vs over 120,000 Kurdish ground troops. Backed by airstrikes. Seems a bit like over kill doesn't it? Of course that ground force & those airstrikes serve an entire other purpose, one that is clear in Mr C's article. The same purpose I've written about for so long now. Annexing Syrian and Iraqi territory- with an eye to Turkey.Hopefully readers understand why I say "syrian kurds" is just a meaningless label. A brand you've been sold that has no connection to reality.