This week of fighting in northeastern Syria saw a disturbing escalation, with Turkey bringing itself more directly into the war, and several other foreign powers at risk of being dragged in as well.
Turkey’s commitment to prevent Syria from winning the war has threatened to turn this into a border war, and there are a lot of regional interests that could be involved. Russia has warned Turkey away and almost certainly is going to limit how far Turkey can go before they directly intervene to stop them.
That’s already a substantial fight, and with Turkey trying to get the US directly involved in this part of Syria, it could kick off direct military confrontation between the US and Russia. The US has been publicly endorsing Turkey’s action, but it remains to be seen if they’ll get themselves drawn into a war over it.
Turkey seems to be betting that the US support implies military support would follow. Many in the US are still irked over Turkey’s invasion of Syrian Kurdistan a few months ago, and that’s probably going to impact how willing the US is to throw itself behind Turkey in a big war.
“Many in the US are still irked over Turkey’s invasion of Syrian Kurdistan a few months ago” Who? Kurdish immigrants? The all-powerful Kurdish lobby? The split with Turkey supposedly started with Operation Iraqi Freedom. BS then and BS now.
The Kurdish Lobby is just the Israel Lobby. The Kurds are a tool they hope to use against Iran.
Regional turmoil has global implications. Despite desperate efforts history tells us such conflicts inevitably spiral.
https://www.ghostsofhistory.wordpress.com/
Turkey should have a chat with Georgia re what assurances of support from the US are worth …
Turkey has an easy way out: “Let’s both make the US lose in Syria.”
It is basically a Putin-Erdogan confrontation. Erdogan is about to break an earlier understanding with Putin hence risks a serious slap down from Vladimir. Erdogan’s last stand: a sliver of Syrian territory at the Turkish border to ensure his continuation as Turkey’s Sultan. That is in Putin’s hands.
Why should we be involved other than stating that border changes are unacceptable?
P.S. neither Erdogan’s nor Putin’s armies are Turkish or Russian soldiers. They are almost totally heavily armed Syrian men. This will be another textbook proxy war if it flares.
Those M60 tanks are manned by Turks, not ISIS head-choppers. They’re elements of the Turkish military that Erdogan suspects were a part of the 2016 coup. Why waste time rooting out your opponents at home, when you can send them to Syria as cannon fodder for the Russians to dispatch with their air power. Eventually, Erdogan will make nice with Russia. He has to.
Not really a confrontation. They have differing goals, not exact opposite goals. Putin is concerned to create a unified Syrian secular state that crushes all jihadi terrorists. Erdogan is concerned to keep Kurds away from Turkey, jihadis outside Turkey, and that there not be a Kurdish state when Putin does not want any other state than Syria anyway.
They can work this out. The one big loser is the US and its neocon fantasies. Refusal to face that is what causes confusion in analysis.
One M60T costs over $4 Million. Erdogan might be able to slow the SAA down a bit by committing his military at great cost, but nothing decisive can come of it due to Russian air support. As far as the US is concerned, the recent example of just what “The Americans®” will do in response to Erdogan or even one of their own getting whacked, one has to look no further than Ayn Al Assad.
This article is BS.
its based on a link from the San Francisco Gate.
The Author is, Zeina Karam, Associated Press (MSM) sitting in Beirut, Lebanon.
How about using independent journalists who are in the field.
Syria: US dismayed at Aleppo liberation due to terrorist plot failure.
https://www.presstv.com/Detail/2020/02/23/619323/Syria-Aleppo-US-terrorists
What a sad waste of Turkey’s antique Patton tanks. Oh well.
Syria was ALWAYS centered around major foreign actors. It was not a civil war. It was an insurgency. It was the US with the usual suspects trying to run a version of what was done to the Soviets in Afghanistan. The difference was that Assad for all his faults had a real state with a solid domestic government, not a dependent foreign puppet.
The horrors of Syria were inflicted on those people by foreign policy decisions, made first of all in the US.
The present problems with Turkey and Russia and Iran stem from US actions, which both supported al Qaeda in Syria, and created an ambitious Kurdish political movement that was unrealistic about actual support when the crunch came.
The US was on both sides from the beginning, fighting in Iraq against its own allies in Syria, using and supporting in Syria its longstanding enemies across the border in Iraq. The US has now gotten itself into a multi-sided war, which is dysfunctional as a war, and entirely an outgrowth of the chaos the US pushed to Syria.