Turkey’s Crimes
As Turkey has been waging a brutal and murderous campaign
against its Kurdish population in the south of the country it has also
illegally shelled Kurdish factions inside Syria that are threatening the
remaining supply lines used by Turkey to arm various jihadi groups. Increasingly Erdogan has become more
irrational, bent on consolidating power domestically and increasing his
imperial presence over his neighbors abroad.
The actions are part of a desire to reinvigorate Turkish power in the
spirit of the former Ottoman Empire, and have been used in accordance with US
imperial designs for the region.
Domestically Erdogan and his ruling AK Party have been
pushing for constitutional amendments that would grant President Erdogan
de-facto dictatorial power over policy formation, allowing him to dictate
policy and bypass most congressional roadblocks. Yet in absence of achieving this Erdogan has
consolidated his rule through a plethora of actions, including litigation
against any opposition, usage of the courts to stifle dissent, unprecedented
attacks against journalism, and unilateral covert operations, all of which add
up to a ruthless consolidation of power into the hands of the executive,
allowing Erdogan to function as a unilateral actor in absence of constitutional
authority to do so.
During the beginning of the uprisings in Syria Turkey was
essentially contracted to carry out the US policy of regime-change by
proxy. The plans drawn up by NATO high command
envisioned Turkey acting as the conduit whereby rebel fighters from across the
Middle East, recruited and trained by Western intelligence agencies, would be
smuggled into Syria and where their supply lines and training camps would be
protected. In December of 2011, former
CIA officer Philip
Giraldi reports, citing contacts within the US intelligence community, that
“NATO is already clandestinely engaged in the Syrian conflict, with Turkey
taking the lead as U.S. proxy… Unmarked NATO warplanes are arriving at Turkish
military bases close to Iskenderum [sic] on the Syrian border, delivering
weapons from the late Muammar Gaddafi’s arsenals as well as volunteers from the
Libyan Transitional National Council... French and British special forces
trainers are on the ground, assisting the Syrian rebels while the CIA and U.S.
Spec Ops are providing communications equipment and intelligence to assist the
rebel cause.”
While former Libyan rebels were funneled in, “thousands of
Muslim fighters” from across the region were also to be enlisted, yet most of
these turned out to be ISIS and al-Qaeda-linked terrorists. According to a US State Department
2014 report on terrorism, “the rate of foreign terrorist fighter travel to
Syria [during 2014]- totaling more than 16,000 foreign terrorist fighters from
more than 90 countries as of late December – exceeded the rate of foreign
terrorist fighters who traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, or
Somalia at any point in the last 20 years.”
State Department officials later
would admit that of the foreign fighters entering Syria, “almost all” of
them cross through the Turkish border.
Though a myriad of evidence exists documenting Turkey's support for al-Qaeda and ISIS, including former Turkish
intelligence (MIT) officer testimony and former
ISIS member
testimony, a mere look on a map is enough to reveal how the ISIS and
al-Qaeda supply lines that guarantee these groups existence run directly
through the Turkish border. The lid was
really blown off the operation however when it was revealed that trucks
belonging to Turkish intelligence were caught supplying weapons and ammunition
for al-Qaeda rebels in Syria. The
findings were corroborated by official
Turkish military documents, court
testimonies, and photographic and video evidence. Further, following a US special forces raid on
the compound of an Islamic State leader in May of 2015, a senior western
official with access to the intelligence caches confirmed that the recovered
evidence proved direct dealings between Turkish officials and ranking ISIS
members was now “undeniable.”
Also undeniable is Turkey’s connections to the ISIS oil
trade. It is known that ISIS smuggles
its oil through Turkey to the global market, and given Turkish intelligence’s
intimate relations with the leaders of the group it would be naïve to think the
authorities don’t have a hand in the operation.
According to Ali Ediboglu, a Turkish parliamentarian, $800 million worth
of oil is being smuggled and sold by ISIS inside
Turkey. Yet, as pointed out by Dr.
Nafeez Ahmed, “that was over a year ago.
By now, this implies that Turkey has facilitated over $1 billion worth of black market ISIS
oil sales to date.” (emphasis added)
This represents just one of a myriad of instances of
high-level Turkish officials accusing
Turkey of complicity in the buying and smuggling of ISIS oil, many of which
also report that Erdogan’s son-in-law is heavily involved.
Martin Chulov of the Guardian, who reported on ISIS’
“undeniable” links to Turkish officials, is quoted in the Turkish paper Birgun
as saying that Turkish
security forces are responsible for protecting the illicit trade.
Thus Turkish intelligence, acting as the proxy of the US and
NATO, has been clandestinely supporting the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, and now
is even openly
supporting al-Nusra, al-Qaeda’s Syria affiliate. In addition to this it has also lent its
support to a myriad of other jihadis, including al-Qaeda linked “Turkmen” and
Uighur terrorists.
The
Telegraph would report that “Around a dozen Turkmen militias have formed,
some directly supported by the Turkish government,” which have been “fighting
alongside other rebel groups, including the al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra.”
According to a
2015 report by Christina Lin, Fellow at the Center for Transatlantic
Relations at SAIS-Johns Hopkins University, “A new article reported
that 3,500 Uyghurs are settling in a village near Jisr-al Shagour that was just
taken from Assad, close to the stronghold of Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP) that
is in the Turkey-backed Army of Conquest. They are allegedly under the
supervision of Turkish intelligence that has been accused of supplying fake passports to recruit Chinese Uyghurs to wage jihad in Syria.”
These claims were corroborated by veteran journalist Seymour
Hersh.
In a recent
piece Hersh quotes Imad Moustapha, Syria’s ambassador to China, as saying in
regards to the Chinese position on Syria that “Many Uighur fighters now in
Syria are known to be members of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement – an often
violent separatist organisation that seeks to establish an Islamist Uighur
state in Xinjiang. ‘The fact that they have been aided by Turkish intelligence
to move from China into Syria through Turkey has caused a tremendous amount of
tension between the Chinese and Turkish intelligence.’” Hersh goes on to say that “Moustapha’s
concerns were echoed by a Washington foreign affairs analyst who has closely
followed the passage of jihadists through Turkey and into Syria. The analyst,
whose views are routinely sought by senior government officials, told me that
‘Erdoğan has been bringing Uighurs into Syria by special transport while his
government has been agitating in favour of their struggle in China.”
Erdogan Cracks Down
The Turkish newspaper Cumhuriyet, which broke the story of
the MIT trucks smuggling arms to al-Qaeda, faced a heavy backlash. As a result of litigation based upon
accusations of “exposing state secrets” and “trying to topple the government”
the paper’s editor Can Dundar and its Ankara bureau chief Erdem Gul now face
life-sentences for reporting on the crimes of the state. Furthermore, any news organization in the
country that holds to its journalistic duty of holding a light up to power has
been targeted, suppressed, vilified, and jailed. Press freedoms in Turkey, virtually
non-existent, are some of the most abysmal in the world: the recent Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom
Index ranks Turkey 149th out of a total of 180 countries.
As Noam Chomsky and Christophe Deloire report,
“journalism is being murdered” in Turkey.
“Four days before the Nov. 1 parliamentary elections, the
police stormed Ipek
Media Group headquarters and shut down its two opposition dailies and two
opposition TV stations. After control of management had been secured and 71 journalists fired, these outlets resumed
operations with a new editorial line verging on caricature. The
dailies, Bugun and Millet, ran Erdogan’s photo on the front page along with the
headlines “The president among the people” and “Turkey united.””
Yet after the ruling AK Party recovered an absolute
parliamentary majority, the journalistic oppression only
intensified: “Two days after the elections, two journalists were jailed on charges of “inciting an armed revolt
against the state” in a story. Since then, some 30 other journalists have been
placed under investigation for “terrorist propaganda” or “insulting the president”
— the two most common charges.”
Later Turkey launched a crackdown on a total of 14 TV
channels and removed them from the state-owned Turksat Communications
infrastructure. One of those that was
shut down was a television station broadcasting in Kurdish which regularly
featured rational Kurdish voices promoting
peace between Kurds and Turks.
Turkey as well is no stranger to censoring the internet, it
is responsible for more than
half of all government requests to Twitter to remove content, far in the
lead of any other nation, and it consistently
bans
its
citizens from accessing the entire YouTube platform.
However, one of the most important cases, one that is hardly
every reported on, is that of the journalist Serena Shim, who very likely was
murdered at the hands of Turkish intelligence or one of their rebel
proxies.
Serena was an American journalist of Lebanese descent
working for PressTV (Iranian media) who had been extensively covering the war
in Syria, and more importantly, the connections between Turkish intelligence
and extremist rebel factions fighting against Assad. Later confirmed through court proceedings and
official documentation, Serena, from first-hand experience on the ground, was
one of the first to report on evidence that ISIS and al-Qaeda militants were
being smuggled into Syria through Turkey in trucks disguised as humanitarian
aid vehicles bearing the symbols of NGO’s and the World Food Organization. The reports had drawn attention to the notion
that Turkish intelligence were involved in the smuggling operation.
On October 14th, 2014, Serena was killed in a car
crash in Turkey that can only be described, in the very mildest of terms, as
“suspicious.” Days before her death,
Serena had very publicly
expressed deep concerns that she was being targeted by Turkish
intelligence. Turkey had branded her as
a “spy” and sent agents to places she had been working, asking residents about
her whereabouts and telling them to turn her in if they saw her. Serena said “I’m very surprised at this
accusation – I even thought of approaching Turkish intelligence because I have
nothing to hide.” She said that she was
“a bit worried, because...Turkey has been labeled by Reporters Without Borders
as the largest prison for journalists…so I am frightened about what they might use
against me.” She suspected the
reason they were targeting her was because of her reports: “We were some of
the first people on the ground –if not the first people – to get that story of
those takfiri militants going in through the Turkish border…being sent in, I’ve got images of them in World Food
Organization trucks. It was very apparent that they were takfiri militants
by their beards and by the clothes they wore, and they were going in there with
NGO trucks.” (emphasis added)
She also made it clear that she thought she was being
targeted as a means to scare other journalists from reporting on these issues:
“I’ve been stopped by them before, but not necessarily to this level, just by
police basically. But for the intelligence to actually look for me, that's rather odd, so I think that they're definitely trying
to get the word out to journalists to be careful so much as to what they
say...”
Days later she was killed when her car collided with another
vehicle.
Turkey quickly labelled the incident as a tragic “accident”,
yet Serena’s family was not as satisfied with that account. Her sister Fatmeh expressed
no doubts that Turkey had in some way been involved in her sister’s
death. “I think it was planned and
plotted,” she said. The story just
didn’t add up.
Given the accuracy of her reports, later confirmed, and the
extraordinarily damning evidence that they contained about crimes committed by
the Turkish state, it is very likely that she struck a nerve close to the heart
of Turkish power and that her sister was indeed right about the extremely
suspicious circumstances in which her death occurred.
When you are involved in substantially supporting
international terrorism, committing what the Nuremburg Tribunal labelled as the
“supreme international crime” of aggression against another state, while as
well engaging in massive human rights violations against your own population,
it follows that you will seek to rule absent the annoyance of criticism and
being held accountable for your crimes.
Erdogan and the AKP have shown that they seek to unilaterally rule the
Turkish state, and to silence any dissent against them.
In recent months however Turkish journalists and
parliamentarians have bravely continued to expose state crimes, in a climate of
dissent that in spite of overwhelming government oppression continues to be one
of the most intrepid and honorable throughout the world. Turkish MP Eren Erden recently cited evidence
from a court investigation that, with the help of Turkish authorities, sarin gas
precursors were smuggled through Turkey into ISIS camps in Syria where the
sarin agent was then compounded, building on a
body of evidence that shows Syrian rebels had access to sarin, and likely
carried out the 2013 attacks as
a false flag in order to get the Americans to invade.
He now faces charges of treason for exposing the
information.
The Cumhuriyet daily which first exposed the MIT truck
smuggling operation as well has recently published intercepted communications between
members of the Turkish Armed Forces and ISIS fighters, in which the
interlocutors continually refer to each other as “brother” as they coordinate
various operations.
Such commitment to honest journalism in the face of state
repression is as honorable as the repression against it is despicable. Yet the escalation of violence against the
Kurds in Turkey and the shelling of the Kurds in northern Syria must be seen
within this context; they are interwoven with Erdogan’s pursuit of power
consolidation domestically and with Turkey’s project to overthrow the Syrian
state through support to the most extremist factions fighting in Syria. It is the Kurds in Syria that are threatening
the Turkish project through their advances upon the border corridors through
which the Turkish supply lines to their terror proxies flow.
To be continued in Part 2...
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