Turks invade "Kurdistan" -- What next?!

And so it begins. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced on Twitter Wednesday that the Turkish offensive into northeast Syria has started. He calls it "#OperationPeaceSpring". The aim of the operation, he tweeted, is to "eradicate the threat of terror against Turkey." And the invasion will be good for Syria too, of course. "We will preserve Syria's territorial integrity," he wrote, "and liberate local communities from terrorists."

What kind of terrorists? Well, "PKK/YPG and Daesh terrorists", of course! You can't tell the players in the Muslim civil war without a programme, Walt will elucidate. "Daesh" is the name the PC media use for ISIS/ISIL, to avoid have to use the word "Islamic" (as in "Islamic terrorists"). "PKK" stands for "Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê" (= Kurdistan Workers' Party‎), a Kurdish far-left militant and political organization based in Turkey and Iraq. The Turkish government has been trying for years to suppress them, often by making them dead. "YPG" is the armed wing of the leftist Kurdish Democratic Union Party, closely allied to the Syriac Military Council, a militia of Assyrians.

The Kurds are an Iranian ethnic group native to Western Asia. Their mountainous "native land", known as Kurdistan, includes southeastern Turkey, northwestern Iran, northern Iraq, and northern Syria. The most widely practiced religion in the region is Islam. According to a 2011 study conducted by the Pew Research Center, nearly all Kurds (98%) in Iraq identified as Sunni Muslim, while the other 2% identified as Shiite Muslims.

The predominant branch of the Religion of Peace in Iran is Shia Islam. In Turkey, Sunni Muslims are in the majority, with about 80% of the populartion. 19% of Turks are Shiites.

So you might think that there should be no friction, in Turkey, between the Sunni Turks and Sunni Kurds. You would be wrong. The problem is that the Kurds of Turkey would prefer to be united with the Kurds of Iran, Iraq and, yes, Syria in an independent Kurdistan. That is what they have been fighting for, allying themselves with whatever other groups or powers may be useful. See "How goes the war against IS/ISIL/ISIS? It's a fiasco!", WWW 27/5/19 (includes video).

The problem for the Kurds is that they just lost their biggest ally, the Excited States of America. Still-President Trump's decision to withdraw American forces from Syria, opens the desert of northeast Syria for Mr Erdogan's "Operation Peace Spring". (Dontcha love how all these invasions -- no matter who leads them -- have names that include "Peace", "Freedom", "Liberation", etc?) A UK-based Syrian war monitoring group, Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, reported today that people were fleeing the border town of Tal Abyad, which Turkey is expected to attack first. And Turkish television reports said Turkish jets had bombed Syrian Kurdish positions across the border from Turkey.

And so it begins. What happens next? Will Shia Iran seize the opportunity to move against the Sunni Kurds in its westerly regions? Will the Arab Iraqis try to oust the ethnically different Kurds from the oil-rich northern party of their alleged country? Where will it all end? God (or maybe Allah?) only knows. But don't forget that south of Syria lies Israel, and within Israel lies... wait for it... Armageddon.

Further reading (and viewing):
"Meanwhile, in the Middle East, something big is on the horizon", WWW 10/11/17 (includes video from Ron Paul Liberty Report)
"Scrapping the Iran deal: another milepost on the road to Armageddon", WWW 10/5/18.