Savy Saracen salad posted:

The YPG and the PKK have a long history of cooperating with tyrants in the region and in the past acted as informers for the Mukhabarat of the baath regimes. early during the initial protests they were basically hired thugs, infiltrating protests in civilian cloth and arresting prominent activists and handing them to the airforce intelligence. It is not surprising for me that westerners in this forum would engage in the most extreme mental gymnastics to defend the PKK and th YPG. Westerners have a tendency of supporting or feeling kinship with collectivist ethno nationalistic movementS and since they are fighting Sunni Syrian Arabs ( whom westerners automatically label as terrorists with a broad brush, 100% alt right mentality) they get bonus points for fighting those terrorist Sunni Arabs. I have worked with the UNHCR and various organisations on Syria trying to save and resettle Syrian activists and one if the most common terrors they recounted to me was the YPG grabbing activists from their bed and stuffing them in microbusses in the middle of the night, never to be seen or heard from again. And all of this happens after they promised those activists safety after fleeing regime territory. The bulk of all those stories was way before the battle of Kobane and the rise of daesh when colonel Riad Al Assad still had a say in the FSA.

In short a thousand " gently caress you" to anyone whom supports the YPG or PKK

Savy Saracen salad posted:

The YPG and the PKK have a long history of cooperating with tyrants in the region and in the past acted as informers for the Mukhabarat of the baath regimes. early during the initial protests they were basically hired thugs, infiltrating protests in civilian cloth and arresting prominent activists and handing them to the airforce intelligence. It is not surprising for me that westerners in this forum would engage in the most extreme mental gymnastics to defend the PKK and th YPG. Westerners have a tendency of supporting or feeling kinship with collectivist ethno nationalistic movementS and since they are fighting Sunni Syrian Arabs ( whom westerners automatically label as terrorists with a broad brush, 100% alt right mentality) they get bonus points for fighting those terrorist Sunni Arabs. I have worked with the UNHCR and various organisations on Syria trying to save and resettle Syrian activists and one if the most common terrors they recounted to me was the YPG grabbing activists from their bed and stuffing them in microbusses in the middle of the night, never to be seen or heard from again. And all of this happens after they promised those activists safety after fleeing regime territory. The bulk of all those stories was way before the battle of Kobane and the rise of daesh when colonel Riad Al Assad still had a say in the FSA.

In short a thousand " gently caress you" to anyone whom supports the YPG or PKK

Savy Saracen salad posted:

The YPG and the PKK have a long history of cooperating with tyrants in the region and in the past acted as informers for the Mukhabarat of the baath regimes. early during the initial protests they were basically hired thugs, infiltrating protests in civilian cloth and arresting prominent activists and handing them to the airforce intelligence. It is not surprising for me that westerners in this forum would engage in the most extreme mental gymnastics to defend the PKK and th YPG. Westerners have a tendency of supporting or feeling kinship with collectivist ethno nationalistic movementS and since they are fighting Sunni Syrian Arabs ( whom westerners automatically label as terrorists with a broad brush, 100% alt right mentality) they get bonus points for fighting those terrorist Sunni Arabs. I have worked with the UNHCR and various organisations on Syria trying to save and resettle Syrian activists and one if the most common terrors they recounted to me was the YPG grabbing activists from their bed and stuffing them in microbusses in the middle of the night, never to be seen or heard from again. And all of this happens after they promised those activists safety after fleeing regime territory. The bulk of all those stories was way before the battle of Kobane and the rise of daesh when colonel Riad Al Assad still had a say in the FSA.

In short a thousand " gently caress you" to anyone whom supports the YPG or PKK

enraged_camel posted:

Okay, so over the past few weeks I had many conversations with friends, relatives and acquaintances about the whole Syria situation. Some "stream of consciousness" formed by my unofficial and non-scientific polling of public opinion:

• According to polls, the vast majority of Turks today (about 80%) strongly dislike America vis a vis its foreign policy. The negative sentiment seems to have started around the Obama years, when Obama and his generals provided substantial support to Kurds in an effort to use them as pawns against ISIS. This was obviously against Turkey's interests. (I was generally surprised by the anti-American sentiment though because it was the opposite when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s).
  
• Trump's recent decision to pull out of Syria is regarded with deep skepticism.
  
• Several of my friends (from across the political spectrum, which is much wider in Turkey than it is in the US) described Turkey's goals in Syria as "give the arabs and syrians their lands back in northern syria". The consensus is that the Kurds kicked them out of the region during the fight with ISIS and settled their own people there (in an effort to improve their bid for an autonomous, independent Kurdistan), which Turkey will obviously have none of.
  
• It is widely believed that Turkey has no interest in a permanent occupation (i.e. "land grab/capture") of any lands in Northern Syria, as there is almost nothing of value there.
  
• Speaking of Kurdistan, the consensus is that it will basically never happen, and Turkey will - and should - do anything to make sure it doesn't. Makes sense to me: nobody wants a hostile nation-state forming right at its border.
  
• About 20% of Turkey's population speaks Kurdish ("Kurds" as an ethnic group is actually quite fluid). About half of those live in big cities in the West, and they mostly vote for Erdogan's party (AKP).
  
• The Western media blames Erdogan for re-kindling Turkey's conflict with PKK/YPG to consolidate his own power. It turns out this is not actually true (or at least only half-true).
  

Grape posted:

You seem to be taking a lot of nationalist and racist propaganda at face value in here, or I'm reading your wording wrong.
But I'm pretty confident that you're 100% supportive of the "this ethnic minority doesn't deserve a country because one of their oppressors would be scared" notion. So lmfao are you loving kidding. That's some Likudnik stuff.

Also:

LeoMarr posted:

Source please. Turkish militias paraded through border towns announcing mosul would be a new territory. Also turkry occupies afrin. So this sounds like bullshit "we promise not to permaccupy a territory" while we permaccupy territory nonsense.

Dawncloack posted:

Why is Turkey afraid of a neighboring, ethnically based state being hostile? Have they treated that ethnia like poo poo, expelled it from the territories where they lived or something like that?

Kurnugia posted:

Oh rigt, they did a genocide as well

Coldwar timewarp posted:

You see, the people having their towns and homes bulldozed are morally equivalent to the state perpetrating it. I don't see any reason to defend Turkey, and added context is nice, but you are blending the treatment of an ethnic group with the actions of a separatist/terrorist group in your explanation.

They are actively ethnically cleansing and resettling people in Afrin, and there is no reason they won't do it elsewhere in Syria. Its a lovely situation indeed, and you ascribed the majority of the blame in the equation to the Turkish government, true. That doesn't address the people who have to live through it, and the Turkification of the Kurds has been an ongoing process. What they are doing is wrong, right? You would say it is in Homs, and certainly wouldn't try to carry water for the Assad regime in a way to provide "context".

While that is great context, we would be right to address the problems with the narratives being presented.

Panzeh posted:

The PKK is the only remaining left-wing faction in the ME with much power and it's important to see it succeed if you're any kind of leftist at all.

Coldwar timewarp posted:

PKK, if you want to lump them in with YPG, as the Turks do, have maneuvered into controlling a third of Syria, and having the backing of two major powers, one of which being the only one that matters . Even with Trumps threatened pullout, the defence blob has managed to slow roll it to not before the end of 2019, already. That could extend longer.

steinrokkan posted:

Your friends "across the spectrum (lol)"have bought wholesale into Erdogan's propaganda, or are outright liars, so congrats I guess.

For starters the majority of the SDF, the instiution dominant in the quasi-state in Northern Syria, is Arab.

Cat Mattress posted:

Turkey had outlawed the letters Q, W and X and you could be tried for "using illegal letters" if you defied the ban.

They are not outlawed, but under any official context you have to use their transliteration into Turkish latin alphabet. This is why the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs calls Washington D.C. as Vaşington. This has nothing to do with Kurdish either, the decision to forfeit these letters were made during the 1920s when Turkish script was literally changed from Arabic to Latin by Ataturk. To best of my knowledge, back during the 1920s, no dialect of Kurdish was using Latin alphabet, so it's silly to regard that as a racist thing against the Kurds.

[quote="Sinteres" post="491322015"]
An irony of Turkey's oppression of the Kurds is that keeping them in poverty seems to result in their birth rates being substantially higher than the rest of the country, which is actually below replacement level.

Sinteres posted:

...because they knew they were going to be instantly banned if they provided any reason whatsoever, and also because the military dictatorship was even worse to the Kurds than Erdogan after his heel turn. It's true that not all ethnic Kurds share the goals of Kurdish nationalists, but I assume the least assimilated Kurds would be the ones with the highest birth rates, whereas the more assimilated Kurds would have a birth rate closer to the national baseline.

Randarkman posted:

And they got banned anyway. Anyway does anyone have any insight on why Erdogan turned to decidedly anti-Kurd, I guess part of it may have been that the existence of explicitly Kurdish parties like the HDP meant he couldn't really count on Kurdish votes for his party anymore and had to swing more towards Turkish nationalism, though I suspect the reasons are more mulitfaceted than just that, and also probably a more impulsive, considering Erdogan. The kind of interesting thing is that parties such as the AKP actually kind, for a while, did portray a way for Kurds to become a more natural part of Turkey without assimilation and cultural repression, with their focus on Islamic identity, which other Turkish parties largely downplay or ignore in favor of an overhwelming focus on Turkish ethno-nationanalism. And for a while it kind of seemed to work, both in the case of AKP receiving a good portion of their votes from Kurds and in them introducing legislation that made stuff a little bit easier for Kurdish language and culture (or doing away with some legislation that suppressed this) and Turkey's Kurds who despite the PKK and other Kurdish separatist parties generally being socialist or even communist, typically are among the more socially conservative in Turkey, particularly for those living in the southeast.

almighty posted:

Only if your idea of power involves committing suicide bombing and SVBIED attacks that incur mass civilian casualties. In that case, rest in power comrade.

Grape posted:

I'm pretty sure the ultra fascist Turkish dream would be to cleanse both Greek and Turkish Cypriots, because the TC's are secular democrats.
Then you repopulate it with poorly educated uber-religious deep Anatolian Turkish settlers to sing the praises of mustache sultan for all time.

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Savy Saracen salad posted:

The YPG and the PKK have a long history of cooperating with tyrants in the region and in the past acted as informers for the Mukhabarat of the baath regimes. early during the initial protests they were basically hired thugs, infiltrating protests in civilian cloth and arresting prominent activists and handing them to the airforce intelligence. It is not surprising for me that westerners in this forum would engage in the most extreme mental gymnastics to defend the PKK and th YPG. Westerners have a tendency of supporting or feeling kinship with collectivist ethno nationalistic movementS and since they are fighting Sunni Syrian Arabs ( whom westerners automatically label as terrorists with a broad brush, 100% alt right mentality) they get bonus points for fighting those terrorist Sunni Arabs. I have worked with the UNHCR and various organisations on Syria trying to save and resettle Syrian activists and one if the most common terrors they recounted to me was the YPG grabbing activists from their bed and stuffing them in microbusses in the middle of the night, never to be seen or heard from again. And all of this happens after they promised those activists safety after fleeing regime territory. The bulk of all those stories was way before the battle of Kobane and the rise of daesh when colonel Riad Al Assad still had a say in the FSA.

In short a thousand " gently caress you" to anyone whom supports the YPG or PKK

Frond posted:

Lol, still bitter about Aleppo?

Retarded Goatee posted:

source your quotes

Flavahbeast posted:

How do you feel about Turkey's handling of Afrin? Do you think that's a good model to follow for northern Syria?

If YPG elements were helping Assad's forces disappear people that should def be acknowledged but a Turkish invasion and renewed war would still be a very bad thing

almighty posted:

almighty posted:

Nah, Turkey moved in back in the day under the auspices of the Treaty of London as a guarantor state because actual ultra-fascist Greeks wanted to unify the entire Cyprus with Greece to attain their dream of Enosis through a military coup against the legitimate Cypriot government.

quote:

The 1974 coup d'état in Cyprus was a military coup d'état by the Greek Army in Cyprus, the Cypriot National Guard and the Greek military junta of 1967–1974. On 15 July 1974 the coup plotters ousted President Makarios III and replaced him with pro-Enosis (Greek irridentist) nationalist Nikos Sampson as dictator.[1][2][3] The Sampson regime was described as a puppet state, whose ultimate aim was the annexation of the island by Greece;[4][5][6] in the short term, the coupists proclaimed the establishment of the "Hellenic Republic of Cyprus".[7][8] The coup was viewed as illegal by the United Nations and violated human rights laws.

Panzeh posted:

Ah, the good ol, aerial bombing cool, suicide bombing bad stuff.

almighty posted:

In sharp contrast, Turkish Armed Forces do not have a history of systematically and deliberately targeting civilians. Throughout the forty years of conflict between the PKK and the Turkish Forces, there are only a few fuckups in which the civilians were either harmed through collateral damage, or were mistakenly targeted by aerial assets due to getting mixed up with legitimate PKK targets.

almighty posted:

That would be the Ottoman Empire, not Turkey.

enraged_camel posted:

Yeah, basically. To be clear, Turkey's hands aren't exactly clean, but as I keep saying, the issue in general is an enormously complex one. Attempting to reduce things to "Turkey is committing genocide lol" is just a lovely, lovely take (the opposite is also true, I recognize that Kurds have historically been treated extremely poorly, and things have started to improve only recently, relatively speaking, at least with regards to the ones who peacefully participate in Turkish society).

almighty posted:

In sharp contrast, Turkish Armed Forces do not have a history of systematically and deliberately targeting civilians. Throughout the forty years of conflict between the PKK and the Turkish Forces, there are only a few fuckups in which the civilians were either harmed through collateral damage, or were mistakenly targeted by aerial assets due to getting mixed up with legitimate PKK targets.

almighty posted:

The chain of events often referred to as the Armenian Genocide took place before the modern day Turkey was established in 1923, and Turks weren't the only party that were involved in inter-communal violence and brigand activity; e.g. Kurdish Hamidiye Battalions are responsible for many Armanian civilian casualties and there've also been quite a lot of non-Armenian casualties inflicted by Armenian brigands and insurgents cooperating with Imperial Russian invasion efforts.

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Sinteres posted:

This is insanely false propaganda.

Wikipedia's obviously not the most authoritative source, but this gives the gist of how full of poo poo you are at least:

The European Court of Human Rights has condemned Turkey for thousands of human rights abuses.[90][91] Many judgments are related to systematic executions of Kurdish civilians,[92] torturing,[93] forced displacements,[94] destroyed villages,[95][96][97] arbitrary arrests,[98] murdered and disappeared Kurdish journalists, activists and politicians.[99][100][101]

almighty posted:

As a native-speaker Goon who has spent a decade studying Turkish politics as an undergraduate, graduate and postgrad, I would like to say enraged_camel is quite accurate.

Nope, this is as blatant as it gets. No racist or nationalist (either Kurdish or Turkish) propaganda there.

That would be the Ottoman Empire, not Turkey.

This sounds extremely condescending and ignorant. Reductio ad Erdoganum is stupid. You come off as someone who really doesn't know a lot about Turkey or Turkish politics.

Frond posted:

almighty posted:

The chain of events often referred to as the Armenian Genocide took place before the modern day Turkey was established in 1923, and Turks weren't the only party that were involved in inter-communal violence and brigand activity; e.g. Kurdish Hamidiye Battalions are responsible for many Armanian civilian casualties and there've also been quite a lot of non-Armenian casualties inflicted by Armenian brigands and insurgents cooperating with Imperial Russian invasion efforts.

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almighty posted:

Nope, this is as blatant as it gets. No racist or nationalist propaganda here.

Panzeh posted:

Uh huh. I mean, you can say those words, I suppose, but that hardly makes it true.

I mean your posting is basically the Ottoman propaganda line.

Frond posted:

almighty posted:

This might come off as a surprise to you, but the Ottoman Empire crumbled and ceased to exist at the beginning of the 20th century.
We are now living in the 21st century, but please do tell us more about Ottoman propaganda!

Frond posted:

In any case, the YPG/PYD is not the PKK.

Cat Mattress posted:

What a meaningless transformation, you've changed your regime, so what?



Pictured: a government that wants to make it very clear that there's no historical continuity at all between the modern republic and the previous regimes that have historically exerted power in the same general area. Turkish history started October 29, 1923; and nothing anterior to that date should be in any way associated with the modern country.

almighty posted:

lol

almighty posted:

I'm firmly in the opinion that if mass deportations and killings of the Armenians by the elements of the Ottoman Empire took place in present time, it would have been lauded as genocide by the entire world.

Frond posted:

In any case, the YPG/PYD is not the PKK.

quote:

According to U.S. Special Forces Commander General Raymond A. Thomas at the Aspen Security Forum in July 2017, the SDF is a PR-friendly name for the YPG, which Thomas personally suggested because the YPG is considered an arm of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which is designated as a terrorist group by the U.S. government.[9][10] American Defense Secretary Ashton Carter confirmed "substantial ties" between the PYD/YPG and the PKK.[11] Testifying to the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee Congress, Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats, the top U.S. intelligence official, explicitly defined the YPG as the terrorist "PKK's militia force in Syria”.[12][13]

Enjoy posted:

The Turkish nationalists who created the republic were veterans of the Ottoman Empire.

Ataturk was morally equivalent to Rommel or Dönitz, he just managed to defeat the attempted post-war occupation. The latter weren't on the Eastern Front gunning down Jews and Ukrainians, and the former wasn't ethnically cleansing Greeks and Armenians. They were just defending their respective regimes which were doing those things.

mlmp08 posted:

I assume you just don’t know what “lauded” means.

Otherwise

almighty posted:

Arab nationalists who went on to create several Arab states, several prominent Zionists who went on to create Israel, and even certain Greek nationalists who were influential in creating the modern Greek national identity were also Ottoman veterans. Being an Ottoman veteran doesn't mean a whole lot.

Ataturk was not defending the Ottoman regime.

almighty posted:

If that was the case, there wouldn't be a Turkish Republic to begin with. He had enough of the Ottomans, and he was a wanted man (by the Ottoman regime) at the time he declared the Turkish Republic. Ataturk was not on good terms with either the members of the Committee of Union and Progress (the movement behind the ruling Ottoman government at the time) or the Ottoman Sultan.

Frond posted:

In any case, the YPG/PYD is not the PKK.

Sinteres posted:

Man HTS is really tearing the rear end out of everyone in Idlib. If Turkey's been thinking about trading away a green light for the regime there for some freedom of action in the northern part of the area east of the Euphrates, HTS is giving them plenty of incentive, since the truce is just providing cover for HTS to kill all their enemies and take over the entire region. There was some speculation that Turkey might help the TFSA step in and take on HTS themselves, but so far every indication is that Turkey's not offering them any help at all.

almighty posted:

It is, according to the CIA and the U.S. Director of National Intelligence.

Enjoy posted:

Oh of course, and the Wehrmacht were just patriots defending their Fatherland.


And Rommel was forced to commit suicide by Hitler

almighty posted:

That photograph is an indication of tradition that spans far more than Ottoman Empire. These are military uniforms from not just the Ottoman Period, but also Seljuk Empire and a bunch of other pre-Anatolian Turkic states.

almighty posted:

History of the Turkish Republic did indeed start on October 29, 1923. While Turkey is the primary successor state of the Ottoman Empire, it is childish to ignore that Turkey as a republic was founded despite the Ottoman Empire. The first government of Turkey basically consisted of former Ottoman officers or politicians who were actually sought by the throne in Istanbul for being traitors and contesting Ottoman rule.

Kurnugia posted:

I honestly wish we got to enjoy your kind of posters more often. mostly to remind us all that yes, there really often is an ideological connection between the positions that the class enemy tends to argue for