"As of last week, the Turkish Air Force had conducted more than 300 strikes against Kurdish targets versus only three against ISIS. Turkey’s war against ISIS was quickly and by design directed against the Kurds, including the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units YPG militia which, together with the Iraqi Kurds, is supported by the United States and has been the most effective force in opposing ISIS. So Turkey, pretending to oppose ISIS, is actually attacking ISIS’s enemies and even placing in danger the American advisers known to be working with the Kurds.
All of which means that the United States is again looking on in astonishment over having been bamboozled, recalling Rudyard Kipling’s famous epitaph “A Fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.” One angry American general calls the development a “bait and switch,” while another commented that Erdogan “needed a hook” to go after the Kurds and lied to Washington to accomplish that. I might even suggest that the original suicide bombing that sparked the whole chain of events, which was carried out by a 20-year-old ethnic Kurd, might itself have been a false flag operation by MIT, designed to ease Turkish entry into a hot war ostensibly against ISIS but which would really be directed at the Kurds." Geraldi
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/how-turkey-plays-the-war-on-terror/
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Phil was so kind as to write to me approvingly of my recent scribblings on Turkey and Syria. Here we have his much better comment on the same phenomenon.
At the same time we have this linked McClatchy story in which it is made clear that the Syrian unicorns think the Turkish government betrayed them to Erdogan's Nusra friends. pl
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/world/middle-east/article32206167.html