Iran's President Hassan Rouhani, Russia's Vladimir Putin and Turkey's Tayyip Erdogan meet in Sochi, Russia November 22, 2017. (photo credit: SPUTNIK/MIKHAIL METZEL/KREMLIN VIA REUTERS) The Three Amigos
Posted on 10/25/2018 2:09:41 PM PDT by Texas Fossil
This November will mark 40 years since the founding of an organization that has gained greater geopolitical prominence than most non-state actors ever will. Millions of Kurds— the world’s largest nation without a state, oppressed by the autocratic states that occupy their lands— support it and consider it their political representation on the world stage. In the struggle against occupation and denial of Kurdish identity, it has evolved an ideology based on direct democracy, ecology, pluralism, and women’s liberation that poses answers to questions asked by political movements around the world for generations.
This is the PKK— Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan in Kurdish, or the Kurdistan Workers’ Party in English. Established on November 27th, 1978 by a small group of revolutionaries who felt that Turkish left movements did not adequately address the Kurdish national question, it grew into a movement comprised of armed groups and civil political organizations in the Kurdish regions of Iraq, Turkey, Iran, and Syria. Its war against the Turkish state began on August 15th, 1984, a date still celebrated by Kurds around the world. The conflict grew throughout the 1980s and 1990s, as the Turkish state intensified its systemic oppression. In the name of “fighting terrorism,” Turkish forces razed villages, displaced hundreds of thousands of civilians, suffocated civil opposition and preserved bans on the Kurdish language and culture.
In 1999, PKK founder and leader Abdullah Ocalan was abducted from Nairobi, Kenya and forcibly returned to Turkey. His arrest and trial sparked international outrage from Kurdish communities— and continues to do so to this day. For ten years of his sentence, he was the sole prisoner on Imrali Island, and he has not been allowed to meet with his family or his lawyers since 2011.
(Excerpt) Read more at theregion.org ...
It's time for the US to delist the PKK — here's why | Part I
It's time for the US to delist the PKK— here's why | Part II
It is a long article and takes some time to actually comprehend what has happened and exactly what the West faces concerning this. I believe it is a worthwhile read.
My mind has been made up for quite a while (Since Sept/Oct 2014, following the Siege of Kobani) about what the answer to the question is. I will not try to persuade anyone here how to view this.
The PKK is what Antifa types would go join when they went to Syria to fight ISIS. I honestly am not a fan of them, but nor am I a fan of trying to partition Syria and inflame conflict in the Middle East yet again.
Outside of Turkey, what have they terrorized?
And between the total lack of support for the US in Iraq(A northern front might have assisted the Kurds?)
and this gem:
Erdogan recordings appear real, analyst says, as Turkey scandal grows
https://www.miamiherald.com/latest-news/article1960810.html
Difficult to believe anything coming out of Turkey.
YPG/YPJ never advocated partition of Syria. They avoided conflict with SAA, only incidents were caused by Iranian forces. In those case US support did fire on them and Kurds protected themselves.
PKK is NOT the same a JPG/YPJ or the SDF.
I know about them all, have followed this for over 4 years. I hold Syrian Kurds in high respect. Their Arab allies were also good allies in the battle against ISIS.
Since liberation from ISIS the cities the SDF liberated are back in local control with representation proportionally along ethnic lines. They have been a resounding success in stability since ISIS is gone. But are a long way from total recovery of what was destroyed by ISIS.
The Antifa types joined the SDF too. They made the Syrian troops roll their eyes. Needles to say, they were not leaders in the battles against ISIS.
Won’t go into detail about that here, but will be glad to discuss it with you.
I don’t believe the CIA will make public releases about whatever evidence Turkey actually has. And anything Turkey says is certainly subject to credibility issues.
Turkey already said that Pompeo listened to the tapes, but Pompeo said that was not true.
Iran's President Hassan Rouhani, Russia's Vladimir Putin and Turkey's Tayyip Erdogan meet in Sochi, Russia November 22, 2017. (photo credit: SPUTNIK/MIKHAIL METZEL/KREMLIN VIA REUTERS) The Three Amigos
The US Must Stop Turkey Now [Afrin]
By Meghan Bodette
https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2018/02/us-must-stop-turkey-now/145891/
https://ahvalnews.com/us-turkey/activist-calls-us-sanctions-arms-embargo-turkey
Ignoring Afrin
Meghan Bodette is the Director of Outreach at Kurdistan Aid. She studies international politics at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service.
09.26.2018
Turkey’s assault on Afrin crushed a beacon of democracy in Syria. But even when Western media did mention what was happening, it presented the victims as “terrorists.”
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/09/afrin-turkey-syria-repression-media-violence
If you’d like to be on or off, please FR mail me.
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