US officials have confirmed that they have indefinitely suspended a drone program that was operating in conjunction with Turkey, in which US surveillance drones were gathering intelligence against the banned Kurdish PKK on behalf of the Turkish government.
The US stopped the program “late last year,” and said it was a direct response to Turkey’s invasion of Syrian Kurdistan in October. The US opposed the Turkish invasion, at least to some extent, while Turkey argued that the Syrian Kurdish YPG, like the Turkish PKK, are “terrorists.”
This drone program was not very high profile for the US, which sought not to emphasize its anti-Kurd operations. The program has been in place since 2007, however, and Pentagon officials say that they’ve supported Turkey “as a matter of policy” against the PKK for decades.
Turkish officials confirmed that the operation had been halted, and one insisted that Turkey could get the same information from its own drones. They did warn this was not good for ties between the US and Turkey.
The US is assisting longtime “ally” an chief jihadi erdogan. The al qaida and ISIL terrorists still thank trump for letting them go after kurdish civilians.
Maybe just transferring those assets to Turkish trump tower security.
Why do you write terrorists in quotation marks as if it wasn’t true? The “YPG” in Syria was founded by PKK leaders and is meant as a base of operations, and a way to finance the PKK by stealing Syria’s northern water reserves and the oil. The PKK smuggles drugs to Europe. It kidnaps businessmen and forces the families to pay ransom. It extorts money from stores, and those who refuse to pay are attacked with car bombs. The PKK kills Turks in a wide number of ways. They killed seven forest workers with a bomb a few months ago. They are terrorists, attacking in order to expand the territory they took when they helped carry out the Armenian genocide, and stole Armenian homes and gang raped Armenian women. So stop denying this obvious truth by putting the word terrorists in quotation marks.
Erdogan finds himself in a self-made trap in Syria. If he loses at Idlib that will have repercussions at home. The Syrian army, backed by Putin, is not afraid of Erdogan and will push on. This is a very dangerous confrontation brought about mostly by Erdogan but not by him alone. Since our government was involved with Erdogan’s entry into Syria this will also be a test of Trump’s statesmanship. Here he is between the wall of Putin and the hard rock of Erdogan.