Ln November 20, in violation of all international laws, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the raïs of Turkey, attacked the Kurds of Syria with a massive attack by his air force, drones and artillery. Objective: to put an end to these “terrorists” to which he attributes – since a pretext is necessary – the attack that took place a few days earlier in Istanbul. Magnificent falsification of reality. The Kurds have always been careful not to provoke their powerful neighbour, all the chancelleries know this. The truth is that they have been blocking Turkish expansionism in the region for years by fighting the Islamist groups instrumentalized by Ankara. For Erdogan, the Kurdish lock must break.
So we let it be. Result: more than six hundred strikes along the 800 kilometers of border separating Syria from Turkey. Like the Russians in Ukraine – the parallel should strike everyone’s mind – Erdogan mainly attacks Kurdish civil infrastructure: grain silos, power plants, schools, hospitals, everything goes.
A brief historical reminder to underline how much this attack of unprecedented violence directly concerns our security: from 2015, the support provided by the international coalition to the Kurds and their Christian and Arab allies to defeat Daesh [acronyme arabe de l’organisation Etat islamique], responsible for the attacks that we know, had allowed, at the end of a victorious war, the establishment in 2019 of a veritable anti-Islamist shield in northern Syria, over an area four times the size of Lebanon – which is not nothing. We were for a long time protected from a resurgence of terrorist groups in the region.
Erdogan could not tolerate it. Especially since the Kurds, despite heavy losses – thirty-six thousand killed and wounded for having been our “ground troops” –, had established a de facto state where a political revolution emerged from the matrix of Western thought: democracy, equality between men and women, secularism, respect for minorities. Equally unacceptable for Erdogan – and all Middle Eastern regimes, for that matter. All fear an extension of this model in their countries.
Final ethnic cleansing
In October 2019, by one of his incomprehensible whims, Donald Trump, the President of the United States, had agreed to see the Turks seize the central part of Syrian Kurdistan. It was the third time that the Western allies of the Kurds gave in to Turkish pressure and “allowed” Erdogan to invade their country militarily. In 2016, they had granted him the region of Shahba and in 2018 the canton of Afrin, where a terrible ethnic cleansing is still taking place which hardly moves anyone.
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