Perhaps the most intransigent comment came from Omer Celik, a Turkish cabinet minister, who dismissed US demands that the country fight ISIS but not the Kurdish YPG. "No one has the right to tell Turkey to 'fight this terror organization but don't fight that terror organization,'" he said.
The Turkish government brands all Kurdish separatist forces as "terrorists," whether located in Syria, Iraq or Turkey itself. The Erdogan regime regards the advance of the YPG in Syria as a deadly threat, when combined with the existence of a Kurdish Regional Authority in northern Iraq, and the renewed attacks by the PKK in southeastern Turkey itself. While the Kurdish forces are divided politically, Ankara fears efforts to link up Kurdish speakers in southeastern Turkey, northern Syria and northern Iraq in a future independent Kurdistan.
The complex political situation is made even more complicated by the fact that the Syrian Arab forces allied with the Turks and with the Syrian Kurds respectively each have a US government sponsor. The CIA arms and trains the Sunni Islamist militias that are loosely referred to as the "Free Syrian Army," while the Pentagon has helped create the SDF. The result is that separate US-backed Syrian militias are fighting each other.
According to press reports, Jaysh al Tahrir, an Islamist militia described by Washington as a "moderate rebel group," has received several TOW anti-tank missiles from the US and is presumably now using them against the SDF, which has Pentagon Special Forces operators embedded within it, who could now find themselves targeted by missiles supplied by their own government.
This possibility only demonstrates the increasing recklessness and irrationality of the policy of US imperialism in Syria and throughout the Middle East. After 13 years of warfare, beginning in Iraq and now extending into the civil wars in Syria, Yemen and Libya, the United States has devastated a vast region. Washington bears the main responsibility for the deaths of several million people, the creation of tens of millions of refugees, and destruction on a scale not seen since World War II.
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