[Centraal] Turkse strijd tegen IS & PKK #8

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Op vrijdag 9 oktober 2015 00:23 schreef Triggershot het volgende:
De MHP is de PVV van Turkije,

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Op vrijdag 9 oktober 2015 00:23 schreef Triggershot het volgende:
van Turkije, ze willen een sterk nationaal karakter waar het 'Turk' zijn een 'objectief' criterium is voor de burger, aanvullende zaken zien ze als ongewenst, maar ze zijn niet uit op een burgeroorlog, ze 'omarmen' de Koerden onder de 'Turkse' identiteit.

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Op vrijdag 9 oktober 2015 00:23 schreef Triggershot het volgende:
e strijd tegen de PKK zal verder nimmer uitlopen op een burgeroorlog, zo sterk is de PKK (aanhang) ook weer niet.

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Op vrijdag 9 oktober 2015 00:35 schreef Triggershot het volgende:
Cool, van officieel partijprogramma springen op speculatieve vermoedens. Op geen enkel manier heeft de PVV ooit voor een gewapende conflict / burgeroorlog gepleit met de 'niet-blanke'. Hoe erg ik de PVV en Wilders ook veracht, praat geen onzin.

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Op vrijdag 9 oktober 2015 00:35 schreef Triggershot het volgende:
Er is feitelijk nog altijd een groot verschil tussen assimileren en geen erg zien in een burgeroorlog.

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Op vrijdag 9 oktober 2015 00:35 schreef Triggershot het volgende:
Politieke partij haalde ik aan omdat zij het beste georganiseerd zijn op ideologische gronden om hun achterban, ( per partij toch weer miljoenen mensen) te sturen. Zelfs de HDP heeft maar een gemiddelde / wankelende steun van 13/14% en dat mede mogelijk gemaakt door de Alevieten en liberalen die er dit keer voor kozen om de HDP over de drempel te helpen en Erdogan te blokkeren, op ideologische gronden heeft de gemiddelde Aleviet verder ook vrij weinig met de PKK, hetzelfde met de liberaal of de conservatieve Koerd.

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Op vrijdag 9 oktober 2015 00:35 schreef Triggershot het volgende:
In Syrië was dat wel even compleet anders, niet alleen was er een complete isolatie van deelnemen in de politiek voor andere partijen, groepen en opvattingen, maar betreft het ook een land waar er sprake is van een totalitaire dictatuur van nabij de halve eeuw. De straat op gaan tegen Erdogan heeft vrij weinig zin als het gaat om een conflict met de PKK, na Erdogan zal de opvolger en de PKK ook heen en weer militant taal uitslaan en elkaar blijven bedreigen.

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Op donderdag 8 oktober 2015 22:20 schreef Triggershot het volgende:

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Wat voor scheuren dan, in de jaren '90 was het veel erger, had in Turkije in Oosterse provincies om de 50/100km een militaire checkpoint,

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Aantal aanslagen in Turkije groeit razendsnel

Na een jarenlange wapenstilstand laaide afgelopen zomer de strijd tussen Koerdische strijders en Turkse politie- en legereenheden ongemeen fel op. Sinds eind juli neemt het aantal aanslagen en aanvallen wederzijds snel toe.

Zaterdag verzamelden zich nabij het belangrijkste station van de hoofdstad Ankara mensen om te protesteren tegen het gewapende conflict tussen de Koerdische PKK en de Turkse overheid. De explosie die op dat ogenblik plaatsvond, kostte minstens dertig mensen het leven. Een overzicht sinds juli:

De strijd barstte los op 20 juli, toen PKK-strijders een Turkse soldaat doodden en twee verwondden. Vanaf dat ogenblik waren er vrijwel dagelijks slachtoffers te betreuren. Na iets meer dan twee weken waren al 21 Turkse soldaten en politiemensen om het leven gekomen.

Volgens de autoriteiten kwamen tussen 20 juli en 8 augustus ook elf burgers om door het geweld. Een week later was het aantal doden onder de veiligheidstroepen in het land al opgelopen tot 46.

Siirt
De grootste aanslag tot dat moment vond plaats op 19 augustus in de provincie Siirt, waar in een klap acht soldaten omkwamen toen hun voertuig werd opgeblazen. Op 6 september kwamen zestien soldaten om in de provincie Hakkari, waar het konvooi waarvan zij deel uitmaakten in een hinderlaag liep.

Twee dagen later was het weer raak. Vijftien politieofficieren stierven door twee bomaanslagen, in respectievelijk Igdir en Mardin.

De Koerdische strijders verklaren hun aanslagen telkens uit de aanvallen die het Turkse leger op hun stellingen uitvoert. Met name de luchtmacht wordt daarbij door de regering in Ankara ingeschakeld.

Vijftig aanslagen
De autoriteiten telden tot zaterdag al meer dan vijftig aanslagen die zij aan de PKK toeschrijven. Over het aantal slachtoffer onder de Koerden zijn minder cijfers beschikbaar. Ongeveer twintig van hen kwam om bij de aanslagen die zij sinds medio juli pleegden. De aanvallen van het Turkse leger zouden aan zeker tientallen PKK'ers het leven hebben gekost.

Het aantal gewonden aan weerszijden bedraagt minstens enkele honderden.

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Conflicts twitterde op zondag 11-10-2015 om 11:56:44 BREAKING: Turkish military have restarted bombing campaign against #PKK in #Iraq despite unilateral PKK ceasefire. - @SkyNewsArabia_B reageer retweet

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Conflicts twitterde op zondag 11-10-2015 om 12:00:22 MORE: Sky News report airstrikes are targeting locations in South East Turkey, also. reageer retweet

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DailySabah twitterde op zondag 11-10-2015 om 11:49:45 BREAKING — Turkish Armed Forces: Syrian jets and missile systems harassed Turkish F-16's near border on Saturday http://t.co/gzXr8HDzXb reageer retweet

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Political prisoner Selman Gulbahce asked the judge for a translator in Turkish court on Sept. 1. Gulbahce wanted to speak in Kurdish, his mother tongue. However, the judge allegedly got very upset at the request. Based on Gulbahce’s writings after the court session, the judge said, “There is no Kurd. You have been educated in this country’s schools. You are impudent, insolent. Leave my courtroom.”

And according to the reports, it did not end there. Justice Sevval Akkas then turned to the gendarmerie soldiers in the courtroom and said, “They are killing your comrades every day. They are killing the police. As a woman, I am battling them, and you guys are just standing there and watching. They are like the Armenians. If they are not stopped in time, God knows what will happen.”

The alleged statement of Judge Akkas can be seen as part of a spine-chilling trend in Turkey.

During the presidential election campaign of August 2014, then-Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, now president, said, “Let the Turk say he is a Turk, and the Kurd say he is a Kurd in Turkey. What is wrong with that? In the past, they spread rumors about me. They said I am a Georgian. Excuse me, but they have said even uglier things. They have called me Armenian.”

Erdogan’s words caused an uproar, as Al-Monitor columnist Cengiz Candar explained at the time. However, now we must ask why one would be offended to be called an Armenian.

When the Kurdish-majority southern town of Cizre was under curfew in September, the police taunted over loud speakers: “Armenians are proud of you. You are all Armenians.”

In the Sur district of Diyarbakir, an Armenian Catholic Church was targeted during another curfew in mid-September. The doors of the church were broken and the signboard showing its establishment date removed. Arat Karagozyan, chairman of the Mesopotamia Armenian Association, told the media, “On the centennial of the Armenian genocide, this is reminding us of the events of 1915 all over again. These words, ‘You are all Armenians,’ are also proof of the 1915 genocide. They are trying to portray Armenian as a bad thing. We are quite distraught.”

In a rather mind-boggling tweet Sept. 7, presidential senior adviser Burhan Kuzu wrote, referring to Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) members, “The killed terrorists’ bodies must be examined. It would be seen that most of them are not circumcised. Wake up my Kurdish brother, wake up already.” The pundits' and public’s reaction to Kuzu’s comments are noteworthy. Most of them were sarcastic and below the belt. Yet, the underlying idea was to differentiate the non-Muslims (as uncircumcised) and identify them as terrorists. The tweet was suggesting that PKK members are not Muslim, therefore, they are not our brothers. But Kurds are Muslims, hence our brothers. Kuzu was implying that Armenians, not Kurds, are the ones rebelling. And once again, "Armenian" becomes a derogatory term to justify hatred and enmity.

Al-Monitor interviewed more than 10 Armenian and Kurdish politicians, pundits and activists to understand how this trend of branding the Kurds as Armenians is affecting society and what kind of repercussions it may have in the near term. Why do Justice and Development Party members and government employees employ such a hatred-filled rhetoric during the heated election campaign?

Fethiye Cetin, a lawyer and friend of slain Armenian intellectual Hrant Dink, who has also discovered her own hidden Armenian roots, told Al-Monitor, “Ogun Samast [the convicted murderer of Hrant Dink] shot Hrant, he screamed 'Die Armenian!' Yet he had never known another Armenian in his life or met one before. In the court, Samast said, 'Had I known Dink had a family, had kids, I would not have killed him.' That explains how the political system is producing disposable lives. Armenian is one of those worthless lives on the list. The new generations are being taught to see Armenians not as human, but [as] an entity to be despised and destroyed, the worst enemy. And the school curriculum adds fuel to the existing fires.”

Cetin’s explanation matches the real-life experience of Hatice Altinisik, a Kurdish Alevi, who is a member of the Central Executive Council of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP). She told Al-Monitor, “For decades, the governments in Turkey tried to wipe Anatolia of any traces of Armenian identity. Murders and forced immigration were not sufficient. Names of towns, streets, even recipes were altered. Their churches became mosques. They attempted to rewrite history. Now, [they are] telling the people of Cizre, under curfew for nine days, 'You are all Armenians.' This shows us the fabricated 'one nation, one belief’ has collapsed. They have failed to destroy the Armenian ghosts of history.”

Indeed, Altinisik has experienced firsthand verbal attacks by Veil Kucuk, a retired brigadier general, who is allegedly the founder of Gendarmerie Intelligence and Counterterrorism (JITEM), a secret anti-terror military unit. Kurds attribute several cruel acts of the 1990s to JITEM. Kucuk confronted Altinisik, calling her an “Armenian whore, Armenian bitch.” Altinisik explained to Al-Monitor that she would not let that get under her skin. She told him, “Better to be a whore of any ethnicity, than a murderer like you.”

HDP Deputy Chairman Alp Altinors told Al-Monitor, “Since the 1990s, the official rhetoric has attempted to distance the PKK from the public by branding it as Armenian." It was common to hear slogans such as “They are not circumcised,” “Armenian seed” and “ASALA [Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia] finished as the PKK started."

"What is new is, they used to say PKK members are Armenian, not Kurdish, but now they are calling all Kurds in the region with a blanket 'accusation' as Armenian,” Altinors said.

Aline Ozinian is a regional analyst for the Armenian Assembly of America and an Armenian correspondent for AGOS, an Armenian daily published in Turkey. She told Al-Monitor, “HDP’s success showed that efforts to brand the HDP just as the Kurdish party failed. So to curse it now they had to find another label, and Armenian is the worse label they found. But if we think about it, do Kurds have some Armenian blood? Possibly. Just like the Turks. We know that many young Armenians were left behind, and today we hear some of their stories as secret Armenians.” Ozinian blames Turkey's dwindling Armenian population on public reaction to officials' statements. It's bad enough, she said, that the word Armenian is used as a slur, but it is not even a crime to kill an Armenian in Turkey.

"That is why Armenian children are struggling so hard to hide their identity,” she said.

Bedo Gesaratsi, an Armenian from Turkey, views the issue from an interesting perspective. He told Al-Monitor, “Calling one an Armenian is killing two birds with one stone nowadays. Anyone opposing the state deserves the treatment Armenians once received. Also, equating the Armenian identity with that of the PKK helps the government, since they cannot punish all Kurds for being Kurdish, simply because they cannot afford to alienate all Kurds.”

We see that the “They are Armenian” labeling is aimed at the pious Kurds, to distance them from those who might be sympathizing with the HDP and to attract ultranationalist (Nationalist Action Party) voters by igniting fires of patriotism. That said, the longer-term effects of these populist policies are rather scary. As tensions increase in Turkey, identifying with any minority group (be it Kurd, Alevi, LGBT, Shiite, non-Muslim, Greek, Armenian or another) becomes a source of fear again, and people try to hide who they are.

As Mari Esgici, an Armenian from Diyarbakir who owns a tavern in Istanbul, once said, “We were Armenians by birth, Kurdish while growing up and Turkish as adults.” That sentence on its own should be a source of deep concern for anyone living in Turkey.

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A frame grab taken from footage released by Russia's Defence Ministry October 9, 2015, shows a Russian Su-34 fighter-bomber dropping a bomb in the air over Syria. REUTERS/Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation/Handout via Reuters
A frame grab taken from footage released by Russia's Defence Ministry October 9, 2015, shows a Russian Su-34 fighter-bomber dropping a bomb in the air over Syria.
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Turkey has warned the United States and Russia it will not tolerate Kurdish territorial gains by Kurdish militia close to its frontiers in north-western Syria, two senior officials said.

"This is clear cut for us and there is no joking about it," one official said of the possibility of Syrian Kurdish militia crossing the Euphrates to extend control along Turkish borders from Iraq's Kurdistan region towards the Mediterranean coast.

Turkey fears advances by Kurdish YPG militia, backed by its PYD political wing, on the Syrian side of its 900 km (560-mile) border will fuel separatist ambitions among Kurds in its own southeastern territories. But Washington has supported YPG fighters as an effective force in combating Islamic State.

"The PYD has been getting closer with both the United States and Russia of late. We view the PYD as a terrorist group and we want all countries to consider the consequences of their cooperation," one of the Turkish officials said.

Turkey suspects Russia, which launched air strikes in Syria two weeks ago, has also been lending support to the YPG and PYD.

"With support from Russia, the PYD is trying to capture land between Jarablus and Azaz, going west of the Euphrates. We will never accept this," the official said.

IRAQI STRIKES

The officials did not say what action, if any, Turkey might take if YPG forces crossed the Euphrates. Ankara has carried out air strikes against Turkish Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) rebels based in the mountains of northern Iraq; but attacks on Kurds in Syria would be far riskier, bringing Ankara into possible conflict both with U.S. and Russian air forces.

The YPG said on Monday it had joined forces with Arab rebels and that their new alliance has been promised fresh weapon supplies by the United States for an assault on Islamic State forces in what is effectively their capital, Raqqa.

Turkey has accused the Kurdish militia of pursuing "demographic change" in northern Syria by forcibly displacing Turkmen and Arab communities. Ankara fears ultimately the creation of an independent Kurdish state occupying contiguous territories currently belonging to Iraq, Syria and Turkey.

Amnesty International on Tuesday accused the YPG, which has seized swathes of northern Syria from Islamic State this year, of committing war crimes by driving out thousands of non-Kurdish civilians and destroying their homes.

The Kurds, who have emerged as the U.S.-led coalition's most capable partner in Syria against Islamic State on the ground, deny such accusations. They say those who left areas they seized did so to escape fighting and are welcome to return.

Over 40,000 people have been killed in a Kurdish insurgency in Turkey since 1984. The collapse of a ceasefire in July has brought a sharp increase in conflict between security forces and Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) fighters.

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Op donderdag 29 oktober 2015 21:10 schreef HSG het volgende:
Maar Turkije werkt toch samen met de IS?

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Op donderdag 29 oktober 2015 21:10 schreef HSG het volgende:
Maar Turkije werkt toch samen met de IS?

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Op zaterdag 31 oktober 2015 06:22 schreef Slayage het volgende:

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so we are made to believe...

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Op dinsdag 1 december 2015 00:34 schreef ClapClapYourHands het volgende:

Diyarbakırda Teröristlerin Vurulma Anı 30.11.2015

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Op donderdag 3 december 2015 22:22 schreef ClapClapYourHands het volgende:

Hakkari'de kepçeyle hendek kazan teröristler öldürüldü

Achtervolging van PKK-er die in een graafmachine zit om z'n vriendjes te helpen.

Gewoon helemaal gesloopt