A Deadly Turkey Well-Before Thanksgiving

Let’s start with a basic business reality. If you have major assets and business opportunities in a city or state, where government regulation is critical and your investments are rather substantial and obvious, do you think it’s a good idea to be on good terms with the local politicians? History is replete with local politicians looking away when it benefits them and enforcing harassing minutiae when they want to make a point. Or more. Obvious, right?

Let’s raise the stakes a bit. Make it a country where the elected leader has been in power for 17 years, decimating political enemies who had mounted a coup, staged a rather one-sided vote that changed the constitution to give him increased power, and slowly taken apart democratic institutions like a free press that opposed his policies. The former Prime Minister assumed the much more powerful and redefined role of president. In short, a rising autocrat unwilling to be contained by his nation’s own legal system.

I’m obviously talking about Turkey’s President, Recep Erdogan, a devout Sunni Muslim who has slowly moved what had been a secular government into one predicated on old-world, conservative Islamic values above all else. Autocrats often rise to power by picking scapegoats, creating enemies which only they are able to crush, frequently anchoring their repressive brutality under the mantra of political or religious purity. As Erdogan has picked fights with bureaucrats, military officers and journalist, thousands of whom have disappeared into Turkish prisons… or worse… he has likewise fanned the flames of “patriotism” in the multiyear struggle of ethnic Kurds, part of a regional Kurdish population, concentrated in Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey (see map above) dreaming of their own nation someday.

Turkey has fought an on-again-off-again war with Kurdish factions, reached accords, broken accords and has treated this sizeable Kurdish faction as “terrorists,” and indeed there were moments when extremists within the Kurdish factions engaged in heinous acts. Nasties all around. Yet, peace was always possible. Negotiations often produced results. But Erdogan needed to triumph over “enemies.”

In 2018, Turkish forces invaded the Northern Syrian town of Afrin with a substantial ethnic Kurdish population. What followed has been described as “ethnic cleansing” of Kurdish culture, language and even faith. Massacres followed, thousands of Kurds were displaced, some threatened with death unless the converted to Islam. “On 2 August 2018, Amnesty International reported that the Turkish forces are giving Syrian armed groups free rein to commit serious human rights abuses against civilians in the northern city of Afrin. The research had found the Turkish-backed fighters have involved in arbitrary detentions, torture, forced displacement, enforced disappearances, and confiscation of property and looting.” Wikipedia. Ripples of missteps have defined the modern Middle East.

For example, when Iraqi and Syrian farmers living in intensely Sunni regions, lost their agricultural livelihoods to desertification from global climate change, when their own anti-Sunni Shiite governments (in Baghdad and Damascus) refused aid, ISIS reared its ugly head to represent these disenfranchised Sunnis against those governments. Even these farmers, who reluctantly accepted the only offer of support anyone had made, soon learned that repressive ISIS was not good for anyone. The legendary war that followed embroiled Shiite powers, Iran and Iraq, Shiite-led Syria backed by Russia against ISIS and those displaced Sunni farmers-turned-anti-Damascus rebels. 

Ostensibly, Turkey was backing those rebels, seeking regime change in Damascus, and poised against ISIS forces as well… all with American support. So, we shared ISIS as a common enemy with Iran/Iraq/Russia… but that same cabal supported the Shiite-minority government in Damascus (10% of Syrians are Shiites) against its own vastly larger Sunni population. Shared goals with diametrically opposite goals.

If that were not complicated enough, US military aid to Turkey was often deployed to crush Kurdish forces instead of ISIS. Oddly, the only reliable US ally from Turkey, a highly motivated and effective militia (YPG), were the very Kurds that Turkey was attacking. Complicated enough yet? Indeed, US military support for these anti-ISIS Kurdish fighters, combined with US air support, proved amazingly effective. We needed those Kurds, and they needed us.

ISIS as a unitary military force holding major territory may be over, but ISIS fighters are now spread everywhere, raising hell wherever they can. The danger from ISIS is nowhere near over. But as long as US forces were anywhere in this military theater, Turkey was hamstrung against mounting any attack against those Kurdish forces that fought for our cause. Erdogan needed US forces out of the way in order to mount a massive military strike against the Kurds. How could he do that? Screw the ISIS problem; Erdogan wanted dead Kurds!

Seems Donald Trump has a continuing, direct and deep business operation in Turkey, one he did not divest when becoming President: “Trump and his family have long had business ties in and with Turkey, the most visible example being the Trump Towers Istanbul, which licenses the Trump name. The Trump Organization describes the buildings on its website as ‘a landmark in the historic city of Istanbul’ and it is the organization’s first and only office and residential tower in Europe, with offices, apartments and upscale shops. The Washington Post has reported that the organization was paid up to $10 million to put the Trump name on the two buildings.

“Erdogan attended the opening ceremony of the office and residential towers in 2012 and Ivanka Trump tweeted a message thanking him for attending, although a photo of Erdogan at the ribbon cutting has been removed from his Facebook page.

“Thank you Prime Minister Erdogan for joining us yesterday to celebrate the launch of #TrumpTowers Istanbul! — Ivanka Trump (@IvankaTrump) April 20, 2012… According to a review of Trump family social media posts, Ivanka Trump made business trips to Turkey in 2009, 2010 and 2012… In 2015, Trump acknowledged having a potential ‘conflict’ when it came to issues involving Turkey.” NBCNews.com, October 9^th.

On October 6^th, Donald Trump telephoned Erdogan, and that same day Trump announced that all US forces would be withdrawn from Syria and the Syrian theater. Effectively, Trump’s departure of the few remaining American forces was a rather clear signal to Erdogan that the Turkish President could do whatever he wanted in the region. A Turkish government spokes person told the BBC that, Mr. Trump had effectively given Erdogan the greenlight during that call to clear the Kurds from that Turkish/Syrian border area.

Trump’s decision, apparently made without consulting his own top military and diplomatic advisors, was instantly lambasted by Congress people from both sides of the aisle, with the harshest criticisms coming from the most powerful Republicans in the Senate, from Lindsey Graham to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Senate leaders even predicted genocide. Republicans would not castigate the President for sabotaging the constitutional impeachment process, but then criticizing Middle Eastern political decisions was safely far enough away from “base-directed” politics. Suggesting that a Turkish assault on these Kurdish forces would never happen, that he would deal Ankara harshly if they did, Trump seemed to giving a wink-wink nod to Erdogan to do what he wanted to do. 

Visions of thousands imprisoned ISIS fighters, held captive in Kurdish detention facilities, being freed as Turkey’s forces attacked those facilities… thoughts of Kurds being slaughtered by Turkish armored, artillery and air assaults (Kurds have no air force or meaningful armor themselves)… that threated genocide… were discussed in the American press, and scoffed at by Trump himself. Everyone thought that there was time to reverse course, to convince Trump to belay his order. Everyone was wrong.

“Turkey launched a military operation against Kurdish fighters in northeast Syria on Wednesday [10/9] just days after U.S. troops pulled back from the area, with air strikes and artillery hitting YPG militia positions around the border town of Ras al Ain… Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, announcing the start of the action, said the aim was to eliminate what he called a ‘terror corridor’ on Turkey's southern border.

“Turkey had been poised to enter northeast Syria since U.S. troops, who had been fighting with the Kurds against Islamic State, started to leave the area in an abrupt policy shift by U.S. President Donald Trump. The withdrawal was widely criticized in Washington as a betrayal of America's Kurdish allies.

“A Turkish security source told Reuters the military operation into Syria had begun with air strikes… Turkish howitzers also started hitting bases and ammunition depots of the Kurdish YPG militia. The artillery strikes, which also targeted YPG gun and sniper positions, were aimed at sites far from residential areas, the source said.

“Several large explosions rocked Ras al Ain, just across the border across from the Turkish town of Ceylanpinar, a CNN Turk reporter said. The sound of planes could he heard above and smoke was rising from buildings in Ras al Ain, he said.” Thompson-Reuters, October 9^th. Everyone’s worst fears were becoming horribly real. Major European powers were aghast, and a call for an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council was demanded. Even ally Vladimir Putin suggested that Erdogan “think carefully” about his assault on Kurdish forces. 

Sensing hostility from his own party, later, Trump only went so far as to say Erdogan’s military decision was a “bad idea,” and suggested that he might mediate between the factions. In short, the US officially didn’t really care what happened there. Ankara was so committed to rooting out these “Kurdish terrorists” that virtually no one believed Turkey would stop the attack regardless of the global opprobrium. Once started… Trump kept trumpeting how he was getting praise the world over for pulling out American soldiers from “policing actions” far from home. Really. From whom?

Wonder what was really said on the phone call between Donald Trump and Erdogan or what “other arrangements” were made between Trump-business intermediaries and the Trump family. It smells bad… but not nearly as bad as the rotting Kurdish corpses, once our fiercest allies, massacred as we simply abandoned them.

              I’m Peter Dekom, and when inept, unthinking brash, shoot-from-the-hip decisions, laced with deep suggestions of corruption, result in the merciless killing of thousands, it is no longer merely social, political and economic bad acts that define the Trump presidency.