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Everybody thought we had to keep our troops around so the Turks wouldn't invade Northern Syria and kill off all the Kurds. Everybody wanted them to negotiate with the Kurds and figured the only way to do that was little by little, by getting allies to reason with Turkey and hem and haw and maybe buy her off as in times past. Meanwhile, we had to keep the two ancient enemies, Kurds and Turks, apart. Negotiations would ever happen only if our troops stayed. Trump saw the situation differently. As beautifully laid out by Sundance at Conservative Treehouse, removing our...

Russia has stationed troops between the Syrian army and Turkish forces in an attempt to prevent fresh clashes in northern Syria. Moscow said its soldiers are now patrolling land outside the flashpoint city of Manbij, which was taken over by Syrian government forces on Tuesday, to prevent an anticipated Turkish attack. Russia, which backs the Syrian government, said 'no one is interested' in fighting between Syrian government troops and Turkish forces and that Moscow 'is not going to allow it.'

Earlier today, the President told @SkyNews that he won’t receive a U.S. delegation that is visiting Ankara today. He does plan to meet the U.S. delegation led by @VP tomorrow — as confirmed in the below statement to the Turkish press.

Uninformed savants across the political spectrum have pilloried President Trump for his eminently rational decision to draw down the U.S. troop commitment (initially, only 25, as it turns out!) to the Syrian morass (whose “dynamic” has remained largely unchanged since the late 1940s). Most of the ire directed at Mr. Trump has to do with hand-wringing over our “Kurdish allies,” even after the President warned Turkey not to engage in its habitual behaviors — since Ataturk created his ethno-racst state — towards the Kurds. Regardless, here are a few salient points one should bear in mind about the Kurds which the hand-wringers conveniently ignore in their hagiographies:Kurdish predatory mass killings of Christians...

ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkey’s offensive into northeast Syria will end if Kurdish fighters in the region drop their weapons and withdraw from a planned “safe zone”, President Tayyip Erdogan said on Wednesday, but warned that no power could stop it until then. Erdogan said the quickest solution was for militants to drop their weapons and pull back from the area by Wednesday evening. The operation will end when the “safe zone” is established, he said, and Turkey was not open to negotiating this.

The political drama in Washington and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi saying that the "impeachment inquiry" will continue and rejecting the notion of a House floor vote to authorize it..... Tonight Russia is agreeing with the United States that the Turkish military operation in northeastern Syria is "unacceptable"...... Vice-President Mike Pence headed to Turkey Wednesday..... Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan says Turkish forces have "liberated" a thousand square kilometer area of northeastern Syria..... Opposition lawmakers shouted and jeered as the Beijing appointed leader of Hong Kong, Carrie Lam, made her annual address to the legislature where it is now Wednesday..... In...

Department of Justice Office of Public Affairs FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Tuesday, October 15, 2019 Turkish Bank Charged in Manhattan Federal Court for Its Participation in a Multibillion-Dollar Iranian Sanctions Evasion Scheme The Department of Justice announced that TÜRKİYE HALK BANKASI A.S., aka “Halkbank,” was charged today in a six-count indictment with fraud, money laundering, and sanctions offenses related to the bank’s participation in a multibillion-dollar scheme to evade U.S. sanctions on Iran.  The case is assigned to United States District Judge Richard M. Berman. “Halkbank, a Turkish state-owned bank, allegedly conspired to undermine the United States Iran sanctions regime by...

"Should we Throw the Kurds to the Turkish Wolves? NO!" Podcast: https://twitter.com/ASavageNation/status/1181686522371854336

The Kurds should thank the short-sighted strategists of the DNC for Turkish aggression. Hong Kong residents are also paying for the short-sighted policies of the American Left, who, for the past three years, have been trying to expel the legally elected president from the White House. Their (untrue) signal that Trump is about to be overthrown has been heard both in Beijing and in Ankara. But Turkey made a serious mistake – they attacked civilians. Of course, television footage of these crimes and further bullying of civilians by Turkish troops in Northern Syria cannot be compared with what the Russian...

On Monday, ABC News got caught lying about having a video allegedly showing Turkish troops slaughtering Kurdish civilians in northern Syria, when, in fact, it was video from a gun range in Kentucky. Seemingly thinking a pair of weak apologies on Twitter were enough, the liberal broadcast network refused to correct the record and inform viewers on their journalistic malpractice during that evening’s World News Tonight. As NewsBusters’s Kristine Marsh reported, Sunday’s World News Tonight teed up the contents of the video as being a product of President Trump’s foreign policy, declaring, “This video right here appearing to be showing...

The UK will not join other European countries such as France, Germany, the Netherlands and Finland in halting selling arms to Turkey after its invasion in Syria, the Independent reports. The UK was initially also against an EU condemnation of Turkey's military attack, but later agreed to the EU's unanimous position. Because of the UK's refusal to a European arms ban, the EU agreed on stopping arms sales unilaterally.

FULL TITLE: 'I think we're very close': Freed pastor Andrew Brunson urges young American Christians to prepare for persecution The American pastor whose two-year imprisonment plunged Turkey into a diplomatic feud with the United States urged young Christians in his home country to prepare for the persecution he sees gathering for them on the horizon. Pastor Andrew Brunson, 51, told the Washington Examiner how troubled he has been by the ominous trends he has observed in American culture during the year since his dramatic, high-stakes release from a Turkish prison. Drawing on the ordeal he recounts in God's Hostage, his...

...snip... And over the weekend, State and Energy Department officials were quietly reviewing plans for evacuating roughly 50 tactical nuclear weapons that the United States had long stored, under American control, at Incirlik Air Base in Turkey, about 250 miles from the Syrian border, according to two American officials. Those weapons, one senior official said, were now essentially Erdogan’s hostages. To fly them out of Incirlik would be to mark the de facto end of the Turkish-American alliance. To keep them there, though, is to perpetuate a nuclear vulnerability that should have been eliminated years ago. “I think this is...

I have researched and published considerably on the question of genocide. The current nonsense in the media about President Trump abandoning the Kurds is nonsense. It is more than evident that the media's interest in the Kurds is purely a cynical attempt to gain more adherents for a continually failing Never Trump movement. Here are several key reasons the Kurds have not been abandoned by President Trump and no one should draw a negative implication to the Trump decision to reduce our troop presence in Syria: 1. The Media Elite abandoned the Kurds when they Annihilated President Bush on the...

"Vice President Mike Pence says he’s being dispatched to the Middle East by President Donald Trump as U.S. troops pull out of northeast Syria and Turkish forces invade. Pence says Trump spoke with Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan earlier Monday and called for an immediate end to Turkey’s moves against the Kurds in Syria. Pence says the president is “very concerned about instability in the region” and is denying that Trump gave Turkey the green light to launch the invasion when he announced a troop pullout. Pence says the U.S. is “simply not going to tolerate Turkey’s invasion of Syria...

President Trump has played this out perfectly. By isolating Turkish President Recep Erdogan, and effectively leaving him naked to an alliance of his enemies, Erdogan is now urgently asking for the U.S. to mediate peace negotiations with Kurdish forces. This request happens immediately after President Trump signed an executive order [See Here] triggering the sanction authority of Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. Erdogan called the White House requesting an urgent phone call with President Trump. After President Trump talked to Kurdish General Mazloum Kobani Abdi, the commander of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, President Trump then discussed the options available to...

President Trump’s acquiescence to Turkey’s move to send troops deep inside Syrian territory has in only one week’s time turned into a bloody carnage, forced the abandonment of a successful five-year-long American project to keep the peace on a volatile border, and given an unanticipated victory to four American adversaries: Russia, Iran, the Syrian government and the Islamic State. Rarely has a presidential decision resulted so immediately in what his own party leaders have described as disastrous consequences for American allies and interests. How this decision happened — springing from an “off-script moment” with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey,...

Why risk it? Even if NATO wants the nukes in Europe, Erdogan’s unstable regime is 68 miles from Syria, the hottest conflict zone on earth. When President Donald Trump and other heads of state meet at this week’s NATO Summit it might be a good time to discuss the wisdom of keeping 50 U.S. thermonuclear weapons in Turkey, just 70 miles from Syria, the most intense combat zone on the planet. Each of the B61 gravity bombs stored at Incirlik Air Base, 68 miles from the Syrian border have a maximum yield of 170 kilotons, or 10 times more powerful...

Statement from President Donald J. Trump Regarding Turkey’s Actions in Northeast Syria

Donald Trump, an ongoing eruption of self-refuting statements (“I’m a very stable genius” with “a very good brain”), is adding self-impeachment to his repertoire. Spiraling downward in a tightening gyre, his increasingly unhinged public performances (Google the one with Finland’s dumbfounded president looking on) are as alarming as they are embarrassing. His decision regarding Syria and the Kurds was made so flippantly that it has stirred faint flickers of thinking among Congress’ vegetative Republicans.