Posted on 02/17/2018 6:08:02 AM PST by Texas Fossil
Speaking about Turkey's invasion attack on Afrin, Syriac journalist Jacob Mirza said that the Ottoman Empire launched similar kind of attacks before its fall.
In an interview with ANF Turkish service, Jacob Mirza, a prominent Syriac journalist working for Suroyo TV, criticized Turkish attack on Afrin and said that the main reason behind the attack is Erdogan's loss of power.
"Despite all the oppression, the arrest of the opponents and critics of the regime, Erdogan cannot stand in front of the popular opposition. Even the polls of Erdogan show that he won't win the elections in 2019" Mirza said.
According to Mirza, Erdogan launched the attack on Afrin to get the votes of nationalists and compared the actions of Erdogan with the actions of Ottoman Empire at the time of its fall.
Mirza also defended that the attacks on Afrin will make the Syrian crisis worse and polarize the society in Turkey.
"Now Kurds are not Kurds of the past. Syriac people are not like old Syriacs and Arab people are not like old Arabs. Those people know that peace will come only if they reach an agreement. In the old times, Turkey did provoke those people against each other. People of the Middle East didn't forget about this" Mirza said.
Mirza also added that the Syriac people consider the attack on Afrin as an attack on them and they are showing reaction to Erdogan just as they showed reaction to the perpetrators of 1915 genocide.
But while so many others in Anatolia merged/subsumed their identity into the dominating Turks, the Kurds and the predominantly Armenians did not.
You won’t see many Armenians if any there nowadays.
The present-day population of Anatolia probably includes many descendants of people enslaved and brought to Anatolia during the Ottoman period (including the "blood tribute" of Christian boys from rural districts), along with Muslims who moved to the remaining Ottoman provinces as Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, and other areas threw off the Ottoman yoke.
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