I do not want history to record me as someone who has bequeathed to his nation the institution of despotism. ~ Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the first president of Turkey
by Jim W. Dean, VT Editor, …with New Eastern Outlook, Moscow, …and the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, a research institution for the study of the countries and cultures of Asia and North Africa.
[ Editor’s Note: Erdogan’s attack on the EU with refugees has backfired. His timing was horrible. With the Covid-19 train barreling down the tracks, the last thing the EU wanted now was a big surge in refugees when it is facing a crushing financial cost of the virus. Erdogan was doing his usual lunatic thing once again.
His punishment might come from the Covid19 monster hitting him while his government is broke, yet he is involved in wars in Libya and Syria. We have reports that he continues to establish more fortified positions in Idlib and reinforces those already deployed.
The Idlib ceasefire is dangling by a string, as both sides are reinforcing for the next round of fighting, and Erdogan is doing little to rein in the jihadis by cutting off their supplies. Qatar is there, financing the fighter replacement of what the jihadis lost in the last round of fighting.
Syrian news will not be able to compete with the Covid19 financial drubbing that the world will be taking this year. South America is out of the news, Africa, too.
Syrian news will not be able to compete with the Covid19 financial drubbing that the world will be taking this year. South America is out of the news, Africa, too.
There will be lots of screams for assistance, when even the wealthy countries will be swimming in red ink, and then the hangover will come when things have calmed, when the question becomes, “Who is going to pay for all of this?”, like there really is a Santa Claus… Jim W. Dean ]
– First published … March 21, 2020 –
Erdogan’s Idlib war has morphed into a new one with the EU, which he can’t win. Is there a method to his madness? I ask because as soon as things calm down in one place, he picks a fight somewhere else. While he advanced into Idlib with a traditional military invasion force minus the aircover to back up his proxy terrorist forces there, he sent a jihadi mercenary force into Libya.
The last story I saw was that these were people, an unbelievable number of 5000, tasked to guard Tripoli’s oil facilities. But then, within a week we were getting confirmed reports they were already getting killed in action with Haftar’s forces out of Benghazi.
This force is suspected of being part of Erdogan buying into a deal with Libya to share a Mediterranean economic zone that would block everyone else’s oil and undersea gas pipelines to Europe.
The Cyprus-Turkey standoff continues as President Nicos Anastasiades refuses to stop his own exploratory drilling despite Turkish threats. He wants to reunify Cyprus and share any petro resources, but Erdogan does not seem to be in a partnering, sharing mode right now. After all, this is the same man that wants Idlib to eventually be absorbed by Turkey, tagged onto its Hatay province courtesy of the French after WWI, which had been Syrian.
