Blame Iran and Turkey for the Mediterranean Refugee Crisis
14th September 2015
First, Iran must be held to answer for its support of Assad’s tyranny, which is also backed by Vladimir Putin’s Russia. At the same time, Barack Obama’s diplomatic courting of Iran has never addressed Iranian interference in Syria or Iraq. Treating Iran as a responsible and respectable power while Iranian military regulars and Hezbollah personnel have inflicted terror in Syria and Iraq contributed directly to the Syrian refugee horrors. Failing to connect Russian aggression in Ukraine with Moscow’s backing for Assad falls in a similar, if less obvious, pattern.
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In the specific case of the unfortunate Kurdi family, now reduced to the father, Abdullah, Turkey also bears some culpability. As a Syrian Kurd from the embattled Turkish-Syrian border town of Kobani, attacked by ISIS in 2014 and successfully liberated by Syrian Kurdish militia at the beginning of this year, Abdullah Kurdi must understandably have wished to get his family out of harm’s way. Turkey is no friend of the Kurds; during the fight for Kobani the Turkish army lined its tanks up at the border, pointed against the Kurdish peshmerga fighters rather than against ISIS.
Turkey has recently carried out air strikes that, we are told, are aimed against ISIS. It has also struck Iraqi Kurdistan, reflecting the insistent resentment of Kurdish nationalism on the part of the Turkish state. The air campaign, conducted from the Turkish airbase at Diyarbak?r in Turkish Kurdistan, was advertised as another outstanding achievement of the Obama administration. Since the battle of Kobani, President Erdo?an has pursued a clear policy of using his forces as a hammer against the Kurds, with ISIS as an anvil. The outcome? The Kurds, long allied with the United States, now wonder if they, too, will be abandoned by President Obama.