What foreign my policy. I don't know.
I don't know, Guys, I don't know. I got like trapped into this like pattern of doing introductions a certain way, and I don't really I don't really feel good about it. But how do you? How does one break their patterns? Speaking of patterns, let's talk about Syria.
Beautiful.
Yeah, I understand what that meant.
I feel like one of the basketball guys when someone lays him up and then he just does a dunk.
That's what I feel like. I don't know about Green Green Bay Packers swish mm.
Hmmm, yep, go Tom Brady, okay, uh okay, sports sports talk aside. I'm wearing my Rwanda football shirt today. We were gathered here today and to talk about Turkey strone strikes on their stye.
Y yay, not funny, not funny, yeah, the sday funny.
We're talking about like Turkish the continued Turkish military operations across their border in northeast Syria, the area commonly known as ro Java, and also in southern Turkey as well.
Yeah.
Yeah, So just to give some numbers around this to start off right, and you're twenty twenty two, which there wasn't a territorial offensive, so like you're not seeing like troops on the ground. Turkey carried out one hundred and
thirty drone strikes in the Autonomous Administration of North East Syria. Yeah, that's the place is more commonly known as Rojova, and they killed at least eight WYPPJ members and sort of WIPJ would be the Women's Protection Forces who are a unit within the Syrian Democratic Forces, which is the armed forces of the an E s Autonomous Area Northeast Aria. I will come at you really hard with acronyms in this.
I think if people haven't listened to Roberts series Women's War, maybe the Women's War, that would be a good place to start, because like we only have half an hour of forty five minutes or whatever, and we can't explain an extremely complicated conflict which has been going on for twelve years in that time. So I think some grounding in who is who and what is what you can find it there, I guess. But it's that a fair summary of who those people are. Robert.
Yeah, basically, so you had kind of the gist of the story is that for a very long time, starting in southern Turkey, there's been a Kurdish militant group called the PKK. They were way back in the day, originally Maoist. They had a bunch of internal power struggles within their own organization and then wound up taking a pretty wide turn away from Maoism towards a kind of political theory heavily influenced by the work of an American anarchist thinker
named Murray Bukchin. This was largely due to the fact that their leader, a guy named abdolah Ajalon, got while he was in Turkish prison kind of pilled on a lot of these this kind of like fringe American libertarian
ish sort of political philosophy. Yeah, with this basically the gist of it is this this kind of this kind of synthetic, this kind of synthesis of a lot of Bukchen's ideas with some of the stuff that Agelog had been had been thinking about for years, kind of culminated in uh political philosophy called libertarian municipalism, which is more or less the governing philosophy that these different armed militant organizations kind of clustered around the PKK in Northeast Syria
because the PKK for years were just kind of like crossed the border in the northeast Syria when they were fighting with the Turk and they had to get away, and they had a bunch of inroads with local Kurdish
organizations in northeast Syria. And when the Asad regime pulled out of the area in the early stages of the Syrian Civil War, a lot of these groups that were affiliated with the p PKK were kind of the best organized organizations in the area, and so they took over a lot of civil administration and basing a lot of their their plans and you know, functional activities around these ideas that Ajalon had been you know, writing about for years and years, and so you kind of have this
mix of all these armed organizations that are to some extent descended from the PKK, but are now much broader than just sort of a Kurdish liberatory organization. These are the folks who fought and defeated ISIS in northeast Syria. Yeah, that's I don't know, there's there's so much to get into, but I guess that's kind of the the broad strokes and all of these different because there's a bunch of different militias. You know, there's there's militias that are kind
of more traditionalist Arab militias. There's there's Armenian militias in the area. There's obviously these Kurdish militias, the YPG and the YPG primarily Kurdish militias, but they all fight under the banner of the SDF and to the Turks, they're all the PKK.
Yes, I'm glad you mentioned all the different militias and stuff, because it gets really confusing, like even I mean, I'm Syrian and I'm just like, I cannot keep up. I talked to my parents about it too, and they're just like, that's it's it's complicated. So I think you did a good job breaking that down. I also want to mention they were the only people fighting ISIS in Syria. Yeah, so I think it's pretty notable to mention. Yeah.
Yeah, I got a list of the found in groups of the SDF. So this happens in twenty fifteen, right, sort of earlier in the fight against ISIS, and some of these groups had this sended. Latrin said, not from the YPJ or the YPG. And Robbie said this to you that they come from the FSA, the Free Syrian Army, Like there's specifically the f s A around the Kabani area contributing elements. There's a Syriac Military Council, so that's a distinct ethnic group. There is the jayash or al if I said.
That, right, uh no, but I can say, if you are.
Please do magical thank yoush.
Means army or like army Jish. It's it's annoying because the English is spelled jish, but it's just a Jewish.
Yeah.
Yeah, the Revolutionary Army, army of revolutionaries, I guess more accurately, who are another mixed ethnicity group. They like Robertsent, include Turkmen, Armenians, all kinds of different ethnic groups. So at this point there the entity that is the SDF is a majority Arab entity. And it's not like an ethnic Kurdish thing, and and and the Autonomous Administration is not like a kurdishth no state, which I think is something that people
can sometimes either confuse or conflate. But like that that's not the case, right that That's not what this sort of democratic confederalism is about, nor is it what's represented in terms of the composition of the people that people doing the fighting, right, So sometimes these groups will be referred to on massos quote unquote the kurd.
You should by how kind of messy. My explanation was, it is hard to walk people through this. Folks eyes tend to glaze over, for one thing, when you mention a certain number of acronyms. But this leads to a situation whereby the US news is just like the Kurds defeated Isis in northeast Syria. It was like, no, there was, there were a whole lot of other people who did a lot of dying.
When involved, and some Kurds who were not involved.
So also just so much infighting. I think that it gets I don't know, it's it's a lot.
It is.
It is a lot like saying the Americans defeated the Nazis and it's like, well, there are.
Some other people who involved in the world.
Yeah, yeah, well yeah, I've seen some films from it. And let me tell you, yes, I think I think Ruben's right, like it collapses two things, right, like the heterogeneity of Kurdish people, right, different Kurdish areas, of different Kurdish movements, and the heterogeneity of the SDF, so yeah, mainstream use sometimes yeah, because it's shocking.
It is also worth noting like Kurds are not certainly not a like a monolithic group. For examine North the Assyria is like flat lands lowlands, and there's a big difference between the mountain Kurds and the Kurds who live in these like lowlands, and traditionally even like a lot of like bad blood and stuff between different groups, because you know, that's just the way human beings are.
Like, yeah, yeah, it's really easy, I think for when we're consuming news, especially news about the part of the world that the populace here hasn't been spectacularly well informed on to break things down into easy groups, right, Like you'll see a lot as well, like Sunni and shi'ah as, like the two categories that can exist within like and then people get.
Very confused when there are categories within that when when they're where there are Sunni groups fighting each other, and the same with like Kurds or Turkmen or whatever, like none of these groups are homogeneous. And sometimes yeah, if you do, I get it. If you're doing a five minute piece for TV, that's what you do. But here we are not doing a five minute piece for TV. So this is this has not been like Kurdish history. One O one, please read some more books about that.
I'll put some in the sources. But what I want to talk about today is some of these bairaktar attacks on specifically YPG. Right, so the YPJ would be the Women's Defense Forces, So that's a women's militia within the SDF that, as Roberts said, it's based heavily. I guess on the outlook of Abdulah Oscelin, who's sometimes called Appo. Might use that for brevity here. So in one attack in April twenty twenty two, three YPGA fighters were killed. De la Jaleb, who had participated in the resistance of
the Sheik Masoud district of Aleppo. In twenty twelve, she become a leading YPGA commander and participate in the fight against ISIS, playing a leading role in the liberation of the city of Mimbic Rahani Kabani. It's worth noting, I guess, sorry, I stop every fifteen seconds to explain context that you'll
hear sometimes place names in people's names. That's because they're like Norm de Geer, rather than that this is not their legal name necessarily, but it's it's standard practice for these people to take like a movement name or a nom de gueer, much like Robert and I explained in the episodes on Miamma, A lot of people do this a lot of places.
Is that fair, Robert, Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's a lot of Like oftentimes people just like take a name based on their city that they came from, like Kobani or whatever. But yeah, it's pretty much the norm that most people, most fighters will introduce themselves by some sort of nobdaguere.
Yeah, and even some of the I know people who are like British or American who have been over there, who are over there, and they also have.
These Yeah, and there's a lot in that. One thing you have to keep in mind is that, like a lot of these people who are revolutionaries who consider themselves revolutionaries have family in regime controlled parts of town or parts of Syria or in you know, in Idlip, which is largely controlled by these like more Turkish backed Islamist groups. And so part of why you do this is like I don't want my family like getting caught up in this shit, like if they live somewhere else, like I
don't want to like bring that down on them. It's just safer.
Yeah, just like when we did our episodes, right, we had Miaok and Andy and Sarah. Another woman, as I said, Rohani Kabane joined the YPGA in twenty fourteen. She fought against ISIS. She was wounded. She participated after recovering and that in the liberation of Rakka and she was the co chair of the defense committee in Kabani. And then there was the youngest, the youngest woman she just joined. I guess or her joined at a young age and she was called Kabani and she uh like she joined
after the fight against ISIS. She she was very young. There are pictures I'll include the report. It's very sad to see someone, Yeah, I think so.
Yeah, they look they look like there's a couple of them that look like babies. Like it's it's really devastating because it's I don't know, their lives are taken from them and they joined to it's it's it's it's empowering, and then it's devastating because it's just like they fought so hard and then they they were assassinated, literally they were murdered.
Yeah, it's when especially when you consider that so many of these, like the women who fought against ISIS right like and I think we could probably understand why women would would want to do that, like wanted to create a place where young girls could grow up and be who they wanted to be and then do what they wanted to do and.
Not have to.
Obviously like kaw Tao. So that's extremely violent misogynist organization like ISIS, but also not necessarily have to fight either, and you know, could be self realized and whatever way they wanted to. And so to see these people having achieved their goal largely of I guess I still exists, right, and I still continues to kill people. It killed ten people yesterday, but that's the eighth of August, because you
won't hear this today. But to see these people who have like successfully at least liberated the territory, and then the young women are still dying but not finding ISIS, but find Turkey, I can go on and give like there are dozens of examples of this report. Another one I'll just give in July twenty twenty two, there's a YPJ commander called j Kabur and a fighter called barin Botan, so one of them had been and then another one called another YPG commander called Jian Tall Hidden Tall Hidden.
So these two women have been involved in the fight against isis like from the beginning, having like liberated cities, liberated territory. And then they were with this young woman who was nineteen years old and had relatively recently joined the YPG right and was killed by a drone strike.
It's like it's particularly galling, I think for me at least two so that the YPG Information Office is someone that I communicate with, like for work stuff, and it's particularly galling to like wake up Brent and see that on your phone, like to get a message and look at a report, see a picture of a car like blown to pieces. At the same time as like the Birectori is a drone that Turkey has sold to Ukraine in large numbers, right, which has been hugely effective in
destroying Russian armor. And like it's currently.
At least was it's it's it seems to not really work. I mean a lot of stuff has changed obviously, like new technology is extremely effective early on before there's countermeasure anyway, whatever, we don't need to get nerdy about this.
Yeah, yeah, it's certainly. Like in the first months of their war, the war in Ukraine became like a meme. You you can buy a stuffed birector on et ceo eBay, like like a soft toy, like a Teddy Bear. There are songs about it.
It's not it's not great.
Yeah it was, and it was one of those things where like, obviously I was happy to see effective tools being used by the Ukrainians to like defend their home, yes, of course, but I'm not ever going to get up and stand the Turkish defense industry or yeah, defense like industry for the for the record, I feel the same way about like the people standing standing you know, different US defense contractors making stuff like you know, long range
missile systems. Like no, I'm not, I'm not really a fan of that.
Like I get it.
Sometimes, you know, when you're being invaded, you use the tools available, But that doesn't mean we need to celebrate that.
Yeah, exactly. I think the tools are largely kind of agnostic, and anyone who's sort of is making things to kill people purely for profit, it's not necessarily a good a good thing to do with your life, I guess and like, it's just troubling to me to see people like cheering this on without like it highlights one like the way that people engage with conflict, especially online, especially in the US, which yeah, it's not a computer game, it's someone's nineteen
year old fucking daughter. It's someone's mum or sister or brother or uncle or dad or non binary relative.
The fact that you can buy like a stuffed fucking weapon, like little drone thing on ebays. It's it's just so disturbing. I really just don't like humans when I think about that.
Yeah, I understand why it happens this way, and I understand why if your country is being invaded and you can get more support from the international community by leaning
into this shit, you lean into this shit. But I don't like the idea of like some I don't know fucking accountant in Iowa watching hundreds of videos of like Russian soldiers being killed and then like getting a fucking Lockheed Martin tattoo, like the like the like like turning turning your support for people you know in a deadly military conflict into like fandom, treating it the way you treat like a Marvel movie or whatever.
I find not great.
Yeah, it's just not like I understand why. Like I wouldn't blame anyone in Ukraine for being super excited about having bairagtos because it stops people burning their homes and killing their children. Yeah, I would want that too.
No, just like if you're if you're like I have a friend who I went like, we were in fucking of Divka together, like sheltering with people from Russian shells and stuff, who then went on to join the Ukrainian military and has been fighting since the expanded invasion. If he wants to share videos or watch videos of like, you know, dead Russian soldiers from telegram, like that's war.
It's unpleasant, but I get it. Like again, if you're some dude in fucking Wisconsin doing the same thing, I find that pretty unsettling, Like yeah, because you don't need to, Yeah.
No, you don't need to.
You don't need to dehumanize those people so you can kill them because you're not killing them. Yeah, but you seem to have engaged in that same dehumanization which is necessary for people fighting, because I don't know, maybe you think you're helping.
It's hard to shoot people otherwise, Like Yeah, there's a reason that's war hard to fucking banonet.
People, right, there's a reason that bannet training is one of these things that's particularly just kind of it has to be Ziland. You have to be horrible, you know, like it's there's no nice way to stab someone. But the yeah, it doesn't mean that you need to tweet about it, especially folks who maybe aren't peracptice on the ground familiar. That's what this looks like. So I wanted to maybe get into a little bit. And there are,
as I said, dozens of these corone attacks. They're really ramped up in early twenty twenty three, along with like a kind of a larger air offensive. Right, they continue to happen like almost weekly. If people want to, I guess keep tabs. YPG Info is the YPJ's kind of public facing press website. Roger Information Center is a good English language resource. Both of those you can.
Find on.
X or if you you can also search of them website. Can we just say X, No, we should say wink and the ludge.
Yeah, X is not in fact gonna give it to.
Us only like I will understand that way that I like that.
Yeah, there's a narrow overlap there, buddy, Yeah, you shut the get there. Yeah, you know what is going to give it? And by it I mean the money that pays our wages to us. What is it, James, It's it's combination of products and services.
Wow, man, I love a good product.
Me too.
I don't love services. Actually, I'm very anti service. But you know, we'll see, yeah.
We'll see it.
Might it might change your opinion, it might be something amazing unlikely, probably gold. But yeah, let's hear from the advertisers. All right, we're back. We hope you enjoyed those adverts as much as we do. So I want to talk about in the second half of the episode why Turkey is using these drones to bomb people who, like we said, have fought and largely defeated the territorial Caliphate of ISIS. I did want to bring up one more drone instant actually,
which is particularly bad. So one of the things that you often to see the SDF and specifically the YPG and the YPG kind of accused of is having child soldiers, are having recruiting people who are under the aged to fight, part of a program they've implemented to stop this with consultation with the United Nations is building education centers, right. I'm not going to comment morally on who should be fighting at what age, because I think it's one judgment for us to make when we.
Met isis in the fucking streets?
Yeah, I look, I think there's a degree to which people are being unreasonable about this. I met a number of seventeen year olds. It's generally when people talk about child soldiers, they are talking about seventeen year olds. I have friends who's in the US Army when they were seventeen years old. Like I have friends who were learning how to drive a tank for the US military at
age seventeen. And quite frankly, if you look at where like wars in history, sixteen to twenty years old, that's most of the people who have fought most of the wars in most of history.
That's like the way that it is.
It's not pleasant, but like when we are talking like I certainly I would be very supportive of laws put in place in our country to raise the age at which people can join the military so that they are not young and not getting taken advantage of to as much of a degree. But we are not fighting in any conflicts for our survival.
Yeah, I think people that point the finger and like talk about child soldiers whatever the shit and they're in they are referencing like, yeah, basic teens. They have the privilege of doing that. They don't have to even think about protecting themselves or their family or whatever. I think when you are and in like a situation of violence,
like Palastine's a great example of that. You see like boys like trying to defend their their country, it's like the same situation where there's you don't have the privilege of waiting until you're fucking twenty one or whatever. It's just like you have to you have to like protect yourself.
Yeah, it's not the it's not a situation you are not being It's not like again, it's not like it is often when we talk about child soldiers, like in the Liberian Civil War, right where you've got kids being pulled in, you know, for the advantage of some warlord. Nor is it like in the United States where you have seventeen and eight year old eighteen year olds being recruited in a predatory way off and by military recruiters
and sent overseas in conflicts that are not necessary. We are talking about like isis is five blocks away, and like god knows what they'll do to my mom and my sister if they take over, Like I'm going to pick up a fucking gun. You know what else? What else are you gonna do? That's that's the world. Like they're living in a different set of realities than we are.
Yeah, and anyone that places judgment on that is just ignorant and non understanding of the reality of the world. They're just like in their little bubble.
Yeah. So on August the eighteenth, twenty twenty two, Turkish drone targeted one of these un affiliated education centers.
Right.
It was two kilometers from the US coalition base and targeted group of teenage girls playing volleyball. It's very hard to see these education centers as like anywhere in military target Right. They're literally designed to divert young people from becoming fighters, and to you know, they're set up with the consultation United Nations, with the you know, like with as much of oversight as one can expect in an area which is in the middle of a civil war, and
to be drone striking schools, it is pretty callous. It's also worth noting that, like, it's a contantly gets thrown around a lot in discussion about the Middle East. Right, it's the only democracy in the Middle East, and it's let me tell you, it's not normally referring to this part of the world. It's referring to Israel and a I don't think that's true Israel project, Yeah it does
it what fucking definitely? Well, democracy is an extremely nebulous concept, right, yeah, So like this is this anaria where people's votes have a substantive impact on how their lives lives, certainly more so than people who are Arabs in Israel.
Yeah, so Kurds in southern Turkey, Syrians in Syria, like.
Yeah, Yepyria, Yeah yeah, yes exactly, people in parts of Iran like.
Iraq, I think people in northern or in the in the Baghdad government controlled junks of Iraq for that matter.
Yes, yeah, like all over. Right, Like, so, this isn't just an attack on like individual women, It's an attack on a state which is genuinely at least attempting to establish a new form of democracy, right, like a more participatory, more horizontally organized democracy. It's an attack on a state in the Middle East, which is like anti patriarchal, which
is something that we don't have here in the United States. Right, Like it's it's like we have still failed to have a woman being president, Like it's it's an attack on these things which most decent human beings should be able
to get behind. These attacks also don't just affect the people who are killed, right, They continue to displace families, They contribute to fuel shortages, they create power cuts, they suspend schools, they stop aid ach organizations working in the area because it's too high risk or they perceive it to be too high risk, and they stop the SDF continuing their operations against ISIS, right Like ISIS, as I said, continue to exist. They have sleeper cells. There was an
attempted prison break last year. Two of the women from the YPG who had fought to stop those ISIS prisoners breaking out of their prison were later killed in the drone strike. It's very hard to see this as not helping that like that ISIS insurgency that they're fighting and hindering their operations. And I'm not just saying this based on sources that are the Roger Information Center are people in their anes, but this is the policy of the
United States. Right before we started this, I looked up some of the Inspector General's reports from Operation Inherent Resolve, which is the United States operation to lead a coalition which includes SDF against ISIS, and they were talking about how the sdf's operations are hindered because they keep getting shot by drunts, right, and that there's not much that they can do about it, right, Unlike like Ukraine were not sending a ton of surface to air missiles or
like things that you could use to defend yourself against drones, right, not that it's very easy to defend yourself against the drone. So why is Turkey doing this? I think firstly because, as Robert said, it sees SDF and the PKK is the same thing, right. And so the PKK mostly operates like Roberts in the mountains of southeastern Turkey, and it's been fighting this asymmetrical war against the Turkish state since
nineteen eighty four. So Urdigans Urigan is the president of Turkey, right, he entered off his in two thousand and three, and he's sort of pivoted on Turkish issues and Kurdish issues. Sorry, he continues to be Turkish, but he was initially in favor of like a negotiated peace with the PKK. In his early years included like proposals for linguistic autonomy, the right to a Kurdish press, and even like the return
of Kurdish place names, which is a big deal still. Yeah, right, Yeah, you'll see like Commichlo or al Chemishli, like one being Arab the latter being Arabic, that the form of being Kurdish.
Right, Yeah, I mean it's just it's a huge deal because you're not just killing like people, you're killing a culture that's like in like it's not it's still like a different word to say extinct, like it's in danger of like not being there if it's off for the people protecting it, right, And I think it's like a classic tactic to stop people from using their language or customs or whatever, to just like try to erase them and like make them Turk or whatever they want them
to be. And so the proposal of that I think is significant. But then obviously the follow through is a different story.
Yeah, the follow through is not there, right, So after twenty fifteen, he's really pivoted and he's pursued like a really violent anti Kurdish policy. And it's worth noting, as you said, that for much of a twentieth century Turky state denied the existence of Kurdish people together. They called them mountain Turks in even in March twenty twenty one, the Turkish Military of Education released a book in the Kurdish minority. It's a province called Diabakir Diabaquir. I guess
it's Turkish, which it doesn't mention Kurds. It's a Kurlish majority province. It doesn't mention the Kurdish language. It claims that it's a Turkish dialect that's spoken there. They changed the name in August twenty twenty one of seventeenth century mosque from the words translating from the Turkish to the
Kurds Mosque, and they call it the Turks Mosque. In twenty twenty three, Turkey dropped its objection so subjection is an effective vito right to Finland and Sweden joining NATO when the latter pled to devote more attention to the PKK and effectively end its decades old tradition as giving protection an asylum to Kurdish refugees. So if people aren't familiar.
Sweden has been a country that's offered asylum to a a lot of different groups of people, Like I have a lot of friends from various stories I've done all over the world who have ended up living in Sweden, and Kurdish people are among those people, right who have found a home and a safe place in Sweden. So encouraging Sweden to not do that gives people one less safe place to go, right, Yeah, and this was kind
of Turkey's like cost of entry for those people into NATO. Now, obviously there's a reason that Sweden and Finland want to join NATO, right, and that's the Russia is like right there and has been doing some invasion recently, and so they want that as kind of mutual aid, that mutual defense, and so they're being forced to give up this very reasonable policy of offering people are silent. Hi, everyone, it's me James, and I am back after what I hope
was a fruitful and enjoyable advertising break for you. It is just me, and the reason for that is that someone outside is currently severing my telephone cable. Judging by what I can hear, and the fact that I no longer have the Internet so the second part of this episode will be me reading my script by myself without the interesting and often entertaining input of my colleagues. So sorry about that, but you will just have to make do.
Turkey's been involved in a Syrian civil war since the beginning. Initially, it armed and equipped the Anti Assad FSA, but in August twenty sixteen it began a direct occupation of parts of northern Syria under Operation Euphrates Shield. In twenty seventeen, it facilitated the establishment of the Syrian National Army and the Syrian Entering Government.
Which it finances.
Turkey has accused of Syrian Democratic forces, to which the YPG and YPGA belong, of quote seizing and ethnically cleansing territories which don't belong to Kurds. It isn't really any credible evidence for this, and the UN has refuted these claims. Some people have moved right, like as happens in many conflicts,
but the SMI saw was like twenty five families. Earligan has openly expressed a sentiment that Kurdish people don't belong in North and East Syria, saying these areas are not suitable for the lifestyle of Kurds because these areas have virtually desert deportations of Syrians who have been who have sought refuge in Turkey. Right, So, people from Syria who have fled the civil war. At three and just over three and a half million people are living in Turkey. Right.
Turkey has declared its intention to move one million of these people back to Syria, and it has already begun moving these people back to northwest Syria in the area as it occupies.
Right.
The US State Department, in a press conference on the fourth of August deny that this constituted a demographic change. But I think that that's very heavily disputed by people on the ground. Certainly the YPGA and the YPG would do dispute that right, that the Kurdish people who have been driven out of some of the areas that Turkey occupies are being replaced by these people that are being moved back in by Turkey. Turkey was, of course the entry point for much of the weaponry and many of
the people who joined ISIS in Syria. Foreign Policy the Publication has estimated that more than thirty thousand people across Turkey along the so called Jihadi Highway. Later Turkey clamped down on this a bit, but certainly in my coverage of the smuggling of weapons and equipment to ISIS, they were going through Turkey. Turkey was also directly engaged with the defeat of ISIS right Turk Turkey's troops for ISIS
in parts of northern Syria. Meanwhile, Turkey is also enforced an economic blockade of the Autonomous Area of North East Syria. And it's even restricted water flowing into the region. Right, So at some point weapons and humans have flowed through Turkey to ISIS, and at this point water is not flowing in sufficient quantities through Turkey to the Autonomous Area of North and East Syria. And twenty eighteen, Turkey started
what's called Operation Olive Branch. It's a military operation in which Turkish and Syrian National Army forces to control a city of Afrin. The assault included the alleged use of chemical gas, shelling of civilian areas, and shooting of fleeing refugees. Kurdish shrines, flags, cultural and historical sites were targeted destroyed
by Turkish military forces. A hospital was bombed. Reporters Without Borders noted that reporting on the conflict had been handstrung by the Turkish government and more than thirty thousand Kurdish people have been displaced and their homes have been taken by those relocated refugees who we spoke about. Olive farms in the area have been seized and then leased to fund the operation of the pro Turkish Syrian National Army. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has documented these forces
threatening to behead Kurds. And The Independent, that's the newspaper, has noted that some of the people fighting along I had the SNA are themselves former cards of ISIS, and it's reporting The Independent reported that and I quote video posted it online shows three uniformed jahadi's singing a song in praise of their past battles, and it says, quote how we were steadfast in Grossny that's in Chezhnia, Dakistan, and we took the Tora Bora that's Tora Bora's cave complex,
formerly the headquarters of Osama bin Laden, and now Afrien is calling to us. There's the song they were singing, right that, suggesting that they're sort of a fight. There's casting this in in a long line of these battles that have been fought by these various I guess Islamist groups, just to be super clear on Islamist versus Islamic, because I don't want people to confuse the two things. One
is a political outlook, right. Being an Islamist is a political outlook in it it focuses on, It uses an interpretation of Islam, which is certainly not the mainstream one. It's not my place to say whether or not it's a correct one, but it's certainly not the one that most Muslims in the world agree with. And it's the interpretation of that faith that you'll have seen with groups like ISIS and al Qaida. Right, But that is not to say by any means that all Muslim people agree
with this, because they don't. There are Muslim people, many thousand, hundred of thousands of them who have been targeted killed by these people, right, And just wanting to be super clear on that distinction. This Hereian Observatory for Human Rights has also noted members of the Turkish fascist group the Gray Walls, fighting alongside the sna SO standing in the
United States. It is easy to see this Turkish operation as a consequence of Trump's choice to abandon the SDF and the people who defeated isis, and to a large degree it is, but it also represents a long term goal of Verdigan to Turkey, which is tried without success to get support for its plans to build a buffer zone thirty kilometers is deep on his border with Syria and to fill that buffer zone with Syrian refugees who
increasingly end up in Turkey. In particular, Turkey has objected to plans by the United States train and equip a thirty thousand person strong border force. This went through several different naming iterations that don't really matter. It's a border force. Right before the attack, Russian military officials propose handing over a free to a SAD as a compromise. So we haven't talked about Russia much. Robert talks about this in
his series. But Russia is in Syria as an ally of the Aside regime and it has sort of acted as a go between between the SDF and the Side regime, and it has proposed in this instance right that the SDF withdraw from a Frien which is the area that Turkey invaded in operation out of Branch of twenty eighteen, and it said if you guys put out and you hand us over to ASAD, the Turks won't invade. They were directly take on a SAD like that. The SDF refused.
Right.
The authorities are in a very tense relationship with Damascus, which is where Sad's government is based. Right, they've both received aid from them and been attacked by them after they were abandoned by the US and Russia. And they knew that Turkey Russia. Russia was aware that Turkey had plans to invade, right, and obviously didn't do anything to stop it. So they these SDF felt that they were abandoned by the US and Russia, with very very good
reason to feel that way. The A and E s scrambled to find new ally to protect them, and they found one in the side government. This wasn't like, I don't think a choice that they wanted to make, But I think the rest of the world didn't leave with many options. So I'm quoting here from Muslumabidi, the sdf's commander in chief. He wrote an op ed and foreign policy it'll be linked in our sources at the end of the month. If we have to choose compromise in
genocide shoes our people, he said. Numerous fighters who for ISIS and foreign volunteers have died in a free so in that initial operation, right when the SDF opposed Turkish invasion, numerous people died. One of them was a Britain named Anna Campbell. As she went by Helene Kera coox, I might have fucked that pronunciation of not my attempt to be disrespectful who I have? She was killed by Turkish Michelle and Lafren. Her father, Dirk Campbell, has been campaigning
ever since Toda his daughter's remains returned. His case remains with the courts and has been entirely crowd funded. He submitted a claim to the European Court of Human Rights after hearing nothing from the Turkish courts, and when he did that, the Turkish course picked up the case that he'd submitted there. You can also find a link to this in the sources, But it's crowdjustice dot com slash
case slash help Hyphen bring Hyphen Anna Hyphen home. They've raised all the money they need her at the moment, but doubtless they will need more in the future. So where does all this leave the people of North and East Syria. Right, these are people who have been impacted by the territorial caliphate of the Islamic State and all the horrific things that people will be aware happened there. They're people who have successfully fought for and achieved their freedom,
only to be attacked by another state. And they are people who have suffered the same earthquake that Turkey suffered. In February of this year twenty twenty three, four thousand people died in a freed right, which is the city which is now occupied by Turkish and SNA troops, and Turkey pushed a little bit further east in Operation quote unquote Peace Spring, a year after Olive Branch, and currently Turkey is cutting water flow to pumping stations it controls
that feed water to the area. It combines with the impact of the earthquake and the ongoing burden of controlling one of the largest prisons in Earth, which is the ol Whole Prison, which holds the majority of the ISIS fighters and their families who were not either killed or returned to the states from which they came. And we'll have more on that Olhole prison next week. There's infighting between militias in the Turkish areas, which obviously impact Turkish
controlled areas. Obviously that impacts civilians as arbitrary arrests. There's the increasing Turkification of areas like a freem right, including instruction in the Turkish language. Like Shurin said earlier, one of the things that's integral to maintain in national identity is education. Right in my experience studying Catalan identity, getting education in Catalan was vital to fermenting and continuing Catalan identity.
Kurdish identity is not national in the same way the identity in the A and S I guess is not national. But this Turcification, right, the flying of Turkish flags above buildings which are not military buildings, right like above hospitals, and that kind of thing again is a marginalization of the people who already live there, who lived there for
a long time. SDF guerrilla units like Wrath of Olives and a Free Liberation Front are involved in fighting with a Syrian national army, and that fighting kills civilians right throughout a free and there have been things like car bombs. The a Free Liberation Front goes by HRI from the Kurdish initials right, and they've carried out some attacks on SNA militias in the last few days. You can often see videos of those online. It's the sort of thing
you'd like to see. There are still land mines that kill civilians in the area, and there are still ISIS sleeper cells bombing and killing people. Last week, the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria responded to turkeys ongoing aggression, bashing a statement claiming Turkey's operations are forcing the SDF to divert personnel away from countering ISIS and threatening the
stability of the area. Obviously, this is all after an earthquake which killed four thousand people in a free people that have access as many hospitals there, for instance lots and still have a try able to Turkey to get
cancer treatment, right and so is. This leaves the people of northern Eastyria in a very precarious situation right in which there are and they're now left largely without the solidarity that they experienced when they were fighting ISIS, right, and it's very difficult, just like in so many cases,
I feel this way about Memar two. To see the US and Europe expressing solidarity and solidarity in the form of lethal aid, right solidarity in the form of surface to webissiles and tanks and rifles and bullet proofests and medical aid and all the things that you need to sustain a fight to Ukraine.
And they should they should do that.
I'm not saying for a moment that they shouldn't. Right. Ukraine has been invaded by a much bigger and more powerful military and it has every right to defend itself, and I'm glad that we're helping, but I wish that we would help other people too, especially people who we have sort of made promises to that we've not kept, or people who we've encouraged to believe, in the case of Mema right that they have a right to a better life, and then when they decide to defend that,
we don't stand behind them. So yeah, that's my episode. I'm sorry for a weird juxtaposition of me doing the last part scripted, but somebody outside is drilling through my phone cable. So yeah, thank you for joining me.
It could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zonemedia dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts, you can find sources for It could happen here, Updated monthly at cool zonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.