We’re America’s most loyal ally in Syria. Don’t forget us. (Opinion)

Washington Post ^ | December 3, 2022 | Mazloum Abdi

[Texas Fossil]

In 2014, the world learned about my hometown, Kobane, and my people, the Syrian Kurds, when we dealt the Islamic State its first major defeat in partnership with the United States and the Global Coalition. The alliances we forged there led to the end of the ISIS caliphate in 2019.

Today, Kobane is again under threat — and all the gains of those partnerships are also in danger.

This time, the threat comes not from Islamic State terror, but from a U.S. ally and a member of NATO. For more than a week, the government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has rained bombs down on our cities, killing civilians, destroying critical civilian infrastructure and targeting the Syrian Democratic Forces working to keep ISIS down.

For the people of our region, the military defeat of the Islamic State was never our only goal. At every step of our fight against the terror group on the battlefield, we took steps to crush the ideology behind it by building a system based on inclusion, pluralism and equality. In Raqqa, for example, where Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi once ruled over ISIS territory, Syrian women are now prominent leaders.

[Texas Fossil]

Many of you know that I spent 7 years following the struggle of the North Syrian Kurds (and allies) for freedom in Northern Syria.

We have had a standoff between the US and Russia protecting the Kurds in the region.

The conflict in the Ukraine and the bombing of the Russian pipeline have unbalanced that region now.

A terrorist bombed in Istanbul and it was being blamed upon Syrian Kurds. But people in the region understand it was ISIS supporters in the Efrin (Afrin) conclave.

For a long time I had a reliable contact there who worked with this Kurd Commander. They were both near Kobane. That source went silent 2 years ago. Some have told me that she had cancer, but I've not been able to verify that.

The Commander has done what he described in the article. He is a solid leader. He has survived more than one assassination attempt. Was seriously wounded in Manbij but the Coalition quickly got him to facilities where he recovered.

I like him.

[steel_resolve]

So what? We’re tired of fighting the world’s battles, many of which go back eons. Let them figure it out.

[NeverCheney]

Why do we need Allie’s in Syria? We need Allie’s in Chicago, Philly, Oakland, and a dozen other US cities where hundreds of Americans are murdered. Let Syria see to Syria, America has problems of our own

[Texas Fossil]

We’re America’s most loyal ally in Syria. Don’t forget us.

https://www.syriandemocraticcouncil.us/2022/12/03/were-americas-most-loyal-ally-in-syria-dont-forget-us/

Mazloum Abdi is the commander of the Syrian Democratic Forces.

In 2014, the world learned about my hometown, Kobane, and my people, the Syrian Kurds, when we dealt the Islamic State its first major defeat in partnership with the United States and the Global Coalition. The alliances we forged there led to the end of the ISIS caliphate in 2019.

Today, Kobane is again under threat — and all the gains of those partnerships are also in danger.

This time, the threat comes not from Islamic State terror, but from a U.S. ally and a member of NATO. For more than a week, the government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has rained bombs down on our cities, killing civilians, destroying critical civilian infrastructure and targeting the Syrian Democratic Forces working to keep ISIS down.

For the people of our region, the military defeat of the Islamic State was never our only goal. At every step of our fight against the terror group on the battlefield, we took steps to crush the ideology behind it by building a system based on inclusion, pluralism and equality. In Raqqa, for example, where Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi once ruled over ISIS territory, Syrian women are now prominent leaders.

In 2015, we established the Syrian Democratic Forces, a coalition of Kurds, Arabs and Assyrians committed to defeating the Islamic State. In every city we liberated, our people built local administrations that, for the first time in Syria, represented all ethnicities and religions and gave women equal power.

We’ve been criticized at times for falling short of the West’s democratic standards. Our system is not perfect: We had to build it while at war for our existence and under a crushing economic blockade.

But in terms of the quality of governance and security we have been able to provide, we have outdone every other authority in Syria — and none of it would have been possible without the victory at Kobane and the international support for our resistance that it brought.

Now the Turkish offensive against our region is putting all of that under renewed threat.

One strike in the border city of Derik, home to Kurds, Yazidis and Christians, killed more than 10 civilians. Another targeted the base near the city of Hasakah, where I work with the United States to plan operations against ISIS, striking just hundreds of meters from U.S. forces. I believe it was an attempt on my life: Turkey has assassinated several of my colleagues in the SDF and our administration this year.

Adding to the terror and chaos of the bombing campaign, Erdogan continues to threaten a ground invasion of our territory. We know what the consequences of such an attack will be, because Turkey has done this twice before.

The Turkish invasions of Afrin in 2018 and Ras al-Ayn and Tal Abyad in 2019 displaced hundreds of thousands of people and disrupted the global fight against the Islamic State. After years of Turkish rule, these regions are now infamous for chaos, instability, infighting and the presence of extremists.

Where our administration once protected ethnic coexistence, religious freedom and women’s rights, Turkish forces and Turkey-backed militias commit unspeakable abuses against ethnic and religious minorities and women with impunity.

Under our administration, Afrin was the only part of northwest Syria untouched by radical Islamists. Since the area has come under Turkish control, groups affiliated with al-Qaeda operate freely on its territory. This summer, a U.S. drone strike killed Maher al-Agal, a top ISIS leader, there.

Turkey is not threatening our people and the security and stability for which we have sacrificed so much because of anything we have done. As a pretext for war, Erdogan has accused our forces of involvement in a deadly bombing in Istanbul. Let me make it clear: We deplore and condemn this act of terror, reject all accusations of involvement and again offer our condolences to the victims. We reiterate our call for an investigation and are ready to assist if one takes place.

We ask no one to fight for us. My people are still here because we have resisted alone countless times before. If we must, we will resist again. What we ask is for the world to be with us in a more difficult task: peace.

We believe that the roots of the conflicts that have brought so much pain and suffering to our region are political. There is no inherent hatred between Kurds and Turks: Turkish leaders have made the political choice to see Kurds as a security threat and deny us our fundamental democratic rights. In the past, Erdogan has negotiated with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) to end the armed conflict between the group and the Turkish state and resolve the Kurdish question by peaceful means.

When those talks were taking place, we lived in peace with our Turkish neighbors. If they were to restart, we would be able to do so again.

And when our region was under threat in 2019, the PKK offered, in this very newspaper, to sit down and seek a political solution. The call went unanswered, and Turkey invaded and occupied two of our cities just months later.

Had the international community stood firmly against a Turkish invasion and spoken up for peace, things may have gone very differently. Though no one can turn back time, we can learn from the tragedies of the past.

We declare that we are ready to play a helpful role in restarting these talks and reaching the peace that we seek. We call on the international community to immediately take concrete steps to prevent a Turkish invasion and to promote a political solution to the Kurdish conflict based on democracy, coexistence and equal rights. The existence of our people and the security of the region depend on it.

[Texas Fossil]

You are new here. Many here understand why.

[nickcarraway]

Since when has the U.S. ever been loyal to allies?

[NeverCheney]

“ You are new here. Many here understand why.”

I’m not new as a Trump supporter. America First. Trump wanted the US out of Syria. He gave the order, but Lindsey and Liz blocked him. Looks like you’re on their side along with the rest of the neocons/neolibs.

[Haddit]

https://www.syriahr.com/en/122008/

War Monitor: Over 570,000 killed in Syria Since 2011
On Mar 25, 2019

Marking eight years of bloodshed, the Syrian civil war has logged over 371,000 in Syrians killed since its outbreak in 2011, a United Kingdom-based war monitor said in a report released Friday, March 15th, which documented the death of 371,222 Syrians so far, and predicted that the overall death toll may exceed 570,000.

Over half a million have been killed in Syria, after accounting for foreign fighters involved in the conflict, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) said.

Of the officially 371,222 dead, around 112,623 were civilians, 21,065 were minors and 13,173 were women, the Observatory said in its report. It added that 65,187, out of which are an estimated 50,484 Syrians, have died to date whilst fighting on behalf of the Assad regime.

An estimated 65,726 foreigners have died in the fighting. The report said that although they were predominantly Arab, they included Afghans and Iranians belonging to radical armed groups, such as Isis and the former al-Qaeda affiliate, al-Nusra Front.

The observatory’s report, however, did not include the estimated 4,500 abductees, who are believed to have been taken by Isis, or the estimated 4,700 hostages sitting in detention centres run by the Assad regime. Subject to torture and harsh conditions, the fate of many missing Syrians taken by parties involved in violence in Syria remains unknown.

Syria’s civil war erupted in 2011, after the government clamped down on popular protests sweeping the region with unexpected ferocity. It has claimed the lives of roughly half a million people, according to the Syrian Centre for Policy and Research.

But the Syrian civil war also witnessed a massive terror outbreak, with Isis self-proclaiming a caliphate that stretched across northern and central Iraq and Syria, swallowing up the ancient and densely populated cities of Mosul and Raqqa.

Today, however, Isis is on the brink of territorial defeat with the last of its hardliners holed up in the eastern village of Baghouz, in the Deir Ezzor province and facing an offensive staged by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces.

The SDF launched a final battle last Sunday, March 10th, for the tiny Syrian village, the last remaining sliver of land that Isis once called its “caliphate.” Together with coalition warplanes, the SDF has rained fire on Isis positions, forcing more than 4,000 fighters and family members into surrender.

[Haddit]

Google helps the Obama administration in creating regime change wars

https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/12166#efmAMoAbj

WikiLeaks tying Jared Cohen, Syria and al Jazeera to the Obama administration
(No Date)
Deputy Secretary Burns, Jake, Alec,

Please keep close hold, but my team is planning to launch a tool on Sunday that will publicly track and map the defections in Syria and which parts of the government they are coming from. Our logic behind this is that while many people are tracking the atrocities, nobody is visually representing and mapping the defections, which we believe are important in encouraging more to defect and giving confidence to the opposition. Given how hard it is to get information into Syria right now, we are partnering with Al-Jazeera who will take primary ownership over the tool we have built, track the data, verify it, and broadcast it back into Syria. I’ve attached a few visuals that show what the tool will look like. Please keep this very close hold and let me know if there is anything eke you think we need to account for or think about before we launch. We believe this can have an important impact.

Thanks, Jared Jared Cohen I Director of r’t “

[Haddit]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npd4OSPJrt0

Biden knew we were supporting the terrorists in Syria.

Biden Syria @ Harvard JFK October 2, 2014
…, the fact of the matter is the ability to identify a moderate middle in in Syria was, there was no moderate middle because the moderate middle are made up of shopkeepers not soldiers. They’re made up of people who in fact have ordinary elements of the middle class of that country.
…
They were so determined to take down Assad and essentially have a proxy Sunni-Shia war, what did they do? They poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad except that the people who were being, who were being supplied, were al-Nusra and al-Qaida. And the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world.

…and by the way, now it’s public, we have been training moderate forces. But we’ve been very selective making sure who they were embedding them. And now there are, the numbers is classified, but there are more than several thousand in country now and there will be more…

[allendale]

The Kurds have been shortchanged so often by the US, one would think that no Kurd would make such a statement. Nations only have interests, not friends. The Kurds fought magnificently against ISIS and while themselves are Muslims, they saved many Christian lives and institutions. Nevertheless when Woodrow Wilson became ill at Versailles in 1919 and was unable to carve out an independent Kurdistan from the old Ottoman empire, the dream of a Kurdistan died right there

[Haddit]

https://off-guardian.org/2017/01/06/leaked-john-kerry-audio-white-house-wanted-isis-to-rise-in-syria/?fbclid=IwAR0sLi2mJE_x7i5NmZb0AznftUFVrWazGWNgrV03VCdKi950-cybaXteHOw

Leaked John Kerry audio: White House wanted ISIS to rise in Syria
Investigations into Obama era crimes have been stifled by the Mueller Investigation,,, We have catching up to do...

South Front reports:
On Wednesday, Wikileaks released new evidence of US President-elect Donald Trump’s assertion that Barack Obama was the founder of ISIS – a leaked audio of US Secretary of State John Kerry’s meeting with members of the Syrian opposition at the Dutch Mission of the UN on September 22. The audio also is an evidence of the fact that mainstream media colluded with the Obama’s administration in order to push the narrative for regime change in Syria, hiding the truth about arming and funding ISIS by the US, as it exposed a 35 minute conversation that was omitted by CNN.

Kerry admits that the primary goal of the Obama’s administration in Syria was regime change and the removal of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, as well as that Washington didn’t calculate that Assad would turn to Russia for help.

In order to achieve this goal, the White House allowed the Islamic State (IS) terrorist group to rise. The Obama’s administration hoped that growing power of the IS in Syria would force Assad to search for a diplomatic solution on US terms, forcing him to cede power. In its turn, in order to achieve these two goals, Washington intentionally armed members of the terrorist group and even attacked a Syrian government military convoy, trying to stop a strategic attack on the IS, killing 80 Syrian soldiers.

“And we know that this was growing, we were watching, we saw that DAESH [the IS] was growing in strength, and we thought Assad was threatened,” Kerry said during the meeting.

“(We) thought, however,” he continued to say, “We could probably manage that Assad might then negotiate, but instead of negotiating he got Putin to support him.”

“I lost the argument for use of force in Syria,” Kerry concluded.

According to Wikileaks, “the audio gives a glimpse into what goes on outside official meetings. Note that it represents the US narrative and not necessarily the entire true narrative.”

Earlier the audio was published by the New York Times and CNN, however, the both outlets chose only some its part, reporting on certain aspects, and omitted the most damning comments made by Kerry. In fact, they tried to hide the statements that would allow public to understand what has actually taken place in Syria.

The full audio has never been published by the New York Times; the outlet released only selected snippets. CNN deleted the audio at all, explaining this with the request of some of the participants out of concern for their personal safety.

Youtube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=125&v=e4phB-_pXDM

[Texas Fossil]

These people are not like the Iraq groups we fought alongside. They are not just Kurds.

11,000 Kurds (and allies) were killed ending ISIS in Syria. We had no combat loses there. We were not alone, but we did the heavy lifting and the SDF fought and died.

When ISIS was defeated in Syria, the Coalition lingered in Syria. There are thousands of ISIS men and women in camps, some in prisons in Syria. If Turkey comes and opens the prison doors they will again go Jihad. It will affect the region.

Like you, I don’t want our soldiers to die abroad for no good cause.

Like ISIS itself, it affects the region and the world.

I have many friends in the Middle East. My Egyptian friends are watching in horror about what is happening inside the USA. They understand that if the USA falls, so does freedom in the world.

The Great Evil still stalks mankind. We will soon see if we can live up what our founding fathers charged us with.

[Texas Fossil]

John Fn Kerry has been a traitor to this nation since he spoke before the Senate Committee and lied about what we did in Vietnam. That was in 1971.

---

John Kerry testifies against U.S. involvement in Vietnam, April 22nd, 1971.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4351577/user-clip-john-kerry-vietnam-hearing-1971

[Haddit]

2017
Obama had been supporting the rebels in Syria since 2011. Killing 600,000 people and making 6 million refugees that forever changed the demographics of Europe.
This is a long article full of information.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/09/a-saudi-princes-quest-to-remake-the-middle-east?mbid=social_facebook

The summit, in May, 2017, was Trump’s first overseas trip as President. The Saudis treated him as a fellow-monarch, spending an estimated sixty-eight million dollars on festivities, including a ceremony in which Trump and a group of royals danced, with swords in hand, to a traditional chant. In meetings, Bannon told me, Trump was blunt about American aims: “No. 1, Trump said to them, Stop funding Islamic terrorism. No more fucking games.” At the summit, the Saudis, the Qataris, and others promised to fight extremism, and the Saudis agreed to pay for a jointly run counterterrorism center. The United States announced that it would sell the Saudis some hundred and ten billion dollars’ worth of arms. A Pentagon official later said, “When completed, it will be the largest single arms deal in American history.” Like the pledge to fight terrorism, these agreements were nonbinding, but Bannon maintained that Trump had produced a decisive change in Saudi policy.

[Texas Fossil]

Syria Kurd Ping List

[Texas Fossil]

I’m familiar with your source.

[Haddit]

My Gab page
John Kerry from Winter Warrior
https://gab.com/Agitators/posts/109254166169975244

[NeverCheney]

Trump wanted US to get out of Syria and spend our resources on our problems at home. It was called his America First,, MAGA agenda

But the neoliberal, neocons and military industrial complex blocked him

[Texas Fossil]

People in the SDF told me how many soldiers they lost.

Kurds are great fighters.

Some here have told me they believe the Kurds are actually the Medes. And that at Armageddon they will do the slaughter.