On Friday, July 29th, Reuters quoted Turkey’s Prime Minister as responding to the US government’s admission that key CIA assets in Turkey are now in Turkish prisons and being charged with participating in the coup attempt: Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim echoed [President] Erdogan’s feisty tone: ‘This is a confession’.
This was said by Yildirim in response to:
“The director of US national intelligence, James Clapper, said on Thursday the purges were harming the fight against Islamic State in Syria and Iraq by sweeping away Turkish officers who had worked closely with the United States. The head of US Central Command, General Joseph Votel, said he believed some of the military figures whom the United States had worked with were in jail.”
The Reuters report also noted that, “Yildirim also said Turkey would shut down an air base near Ankara which served as a hub for the coup plotters as well as all military barracks used by them”. It failed to note that this air base is America’s Incirlik Air Base, but later in the story did note that, “Turkey hosts US troops and warplanes at Incirlik Air Base, from which the United States flies sorties against Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria”. The connection between that and “an air base near Ankara which served as a hub for the coup plotters as well as all military barracks used by them” wasn’t made, but the implications of this connection for the US-Turkey-Saudi-Qatari-UAE-Kuwaiti effort to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad are significant: That US-Saudi-led invasion of Syria will now have to end. Not only will the Western alliance’s pathway of access of jihadists into Syria now be terminated, but also US control of this NATO air base will end – unless the Turkish Prime Minister’s statement of Turkish government policy becomes reversed. The only person who could reverse it is President Tayyip Erdogan – the man whom the coup had especially targeted to capture and perhaps kill.
Turkey has been a vital ally of the US-Saudi-Qatari-Kuwaiti operation to replace the secular pro-Russian Bashar al-Assad in Syria, by a jihadist Sunni anti-Russian leader who will allow pipelines to be constructed through Syria into the European Union to replace Russian oil and gas there by Saudi oil and Qatari gas. Almost all of the tens of thousands of jihadists fighting in Syria have entered Syria through Turkey. Furthermore, the vital supply-lines of US and other Western weapons and medical supplies to these jihadists, have also been entering through Turkey.
Consequently, if the US and its Saudi, Qatari, UAE, and Kuwaiti, allies, were to lose Turkey as being an ally in this operation, then the entire Western effort to remove Assad would fail, because all polling that has been done in Syria, even by Western pollsters, shows that Assad’s public support there is well above 50%, and that no possible competitor against him in any free and fair election would come anywhere close to that percentage. (Indeed, polls show that overwhelming margins of the Syrian people loathe the jihadists – and loathe the US for backing them.) For this reason, too, UN Secretary General Ban ki-Moon has condemned the US government’s demand that Assad be removed from power and essentially replaced before any democratic process in Syria can be established. America’s demand for a dictatorship to be imposed that’s to America’s liking, as a prerequisite for ‘democracy’ to become established there, has been repeatedly rejected by the UN’s Secretary General.
On 25 February 2016, RFK Jr. bannered “Syria: Another Pipeline War”, and he documented, sometimes from Kennedy family archives, that the US CIA has been trying since 1949 to overthrow the secular Syrian government and replace it with a sectarian Sunni one, which would allow the West’s fundamentalist-Sunni allies to replace Soviet, subsequently Russian, oil and gas, by oil and gas from those fundamentalist-Sunni US allies, from which the big Western oil companies would then be taking a cut of the profits.
As I headlined on 10 November 2015, “Uprising against Assad was Engineered in Washington”, and I reported that ever since Barack Obama first entered the White House on 20 January 2009, he secretly harbored the hope that he would be able to oust Assad. This was before the ‘Arab Spring’ even started. I later headlined “Obama’s Invasion Plan of Syria Was Drawn Up by Kim Roosevelt in 1957”, but I didn’t know then that that plan, which was drawn up by the same CIA operative who had organized the replacement of democracy by dictatorship in Iran in 1954, wasn’t the first such CIA effort in Syria – that the first was actually in 1949.
So, it seems that the failure of Obama’s coup attempt in Turkey will make impossible, for him, his aspiration to be the US President who delivers Saudi oil and Qatari gas to the EU through Syria. If at first you don’t succeed, try try again, says an old adage. Under Obama, they did try again. And, yet again, it has (apparently) failed.
There is set to occur on August 9th in St. Petersburg a private meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan.
